MovieChat Forums > Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) Discussion > Is the word 'Holocaust' ever used?

Is the word 'Holocaust' ever used?


Seeing that this movie was made in 1961, can anyone tell me if the word "Holocaust" is ever used? I've read that word didn't get popular till around the late 1960s.

"That Championship Season" (1982) - Most underrated movie of all time.

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No. It was never used in the movie or at the actual trials. You are correct that it came into common usage for this genocide in the '60s. This I know from studying the subject but Wikipaedia provides this:

Writing in Latin, Richard of Devizes, a 12th-century monk, was the first recorded chronicler to use the term "holocaustum" in Britain.[10] For centuries, the word "holocaust" was used generally in English to denote great massacres. Since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by scholars and popular writers to refer specifically to the Nazi genocide of Jews.[11] The television mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance after 1978.[12]

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I just saw this film for the first time and am in no way an expert. Having said that, I do not recall the word being used at all. Perhaps in multiple viewings I may come to notice it, but I honestly don't believe they did.

In fact, I don't even recall them bringing up Hitler by name. The only Hitler moment I remember was when Spencer Tracy was walking down the street, comes across the balcony where Hitler delivered his speech.

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I'm watching it now and when Tracy is interrogating the servants the woman says that Hitler did some good things and she wouldn't say he didn't because he gave people work (and her husband about had a heart attack) but then she quickly says that what they said he did to the Jews was terrible and they knew nothing. And if they did they couldn't have stopped it but they totally didn't know.

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These men werent involved in nor charged with crimes connected to the Holocaust. They were German judges convicted of crimes against other Germans. The Holocaust was carried out by the SS outside of the legal system and only 500,000 of the estimated 6 million were German Jews.

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If that were so, then the footage of the death camps shown in the film would have been inadmissible as irrelevant to the proceeding. It would certainly have been horribly prejudicial to the defendants if their charges had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

But that's not the case. Here's a paragraph from the Wikipedia article about the Judge's trials, which are the basis for the film:

The defendants in this case were 16 German jurists and lawyers. Nine had been officials of the Reich Ministry of Justice, the others were prosecutors and judges of the Special Courts and People's Courts of Nazi Germany. They were—amongst other charges—held responsible for implementing and furthering the Nazi "racial purity" program through the eugenic and racial laws.


So I think we'll just have to go with the explanation offered that the term "holocaust" wasn't in common usage at the time of the trials, or even at the time the film was made.

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Re:Barth-4

"only 500,000"

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