- We'll talk to Stuart Liebman about the Majdanek Trial, which
- was hardly a trial by our standards.
- Stuart Liebman?
- Liebman, L-I-E-B-M-A-N, he's a scholar on the Majdanek trial,
- Poland, conducted by the Soviets.
- I mean, it was like a non-court.
- Where is he?
- He's here.
- He teaches at CUNY.
- Oh, at CUNY?
- OK.
- He's great.
- I'll send you his contact information.
- Great, great.
- Yeah.
- And as I said, the extrajudicial stuff that Jonathan Silvers
- talks about in Elusive Justice and the extrajudicial, really
- brutal types of forensic witness.
- So I have to figure it out.
- And this is sort of the ugly underbelly of all this
- because in later years, after Nuremberg, after Eichmann,
- [CROSS TALK].
- Of course, he was in a very judicial and vicious manner.
- Right.
- Oh, yeah, well, I mean just the reprisals
- that happened on a daily basis that, as especially
- the Soviet troops were moving in, and then as you say,
- the pretense of trials in some cases, but often not
- even a pretense.
- But the Majdanek, I'd be interested in.
- Yeah, I [INAUDIBLE].
- And then the Auschwitz-- for all those files,
- the ones that didn't happen in Nuremberg.
- The big Nuremberg trials are fascinating in themselves.
- Which took place in--
- Very few people left who were active participants only.
- You mean like Ben in trial.
- Yeah
- Yeah.
- Which was still in Nuremberg, right?
- Or was it--
- When those were-- there were 13 Nuremberg trials.
- The first one, which is what this film is about,
- was the International Military Tribunal.
- And the next 12 were conducted solely by the Americans
- under Telford Taylor.
- And they're called the NMTs, the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.
- And then he was involved with all of them.
- But they were somewhere in Dachau or somewhere in--
- No, no, they were all in Nuremberg--
- --or was it all in Nuremberg?
- Yeah, yeah.
- --in the same courtroom.
- And Ben was involved in all of them.
- But he was the chief prosecutor in one of them.
- Yeah.
- He was involved in all of them too?
- All of them.
- Yeah, he was one of Taylor's right-hand men.
- He was one of the few who stayed through all of them.
- So he has an extraordinary--
- I mean, he played a role in the Krupp trial.
- He played a role in that ministers--
- I mean, he played a role in many of those subsequent 12 trials.
- Right, right, right.
- Yeah.
- But just to get--
- And his memory is still really quite remarkable.
- And thank god he's done those Benny stories, too,
- which are very good.
- Right.
- But I'm not well and convinced--
- and one of the things I don't know,
- for instance, is how much footage--
- film footage exists for any of those trials.
- We know there's some of them because the clip of him
- making his opening statement has been--
- but I don't know how much--
- He preserved, yeah.
- --how much was shot at all.
- Yeah, right.
- So little was shot at the main trial, only about 40 hours.
- And at the subsequent trials, I don't know.
- But speaking of footage, I went on your website
- last night where you have the trailers.
- At least on my computer, it's sounds
- like the sound wasn't working.
- Oh, really?
- Yeah.
- I mean, you might check.
- Because I checked.
- I thought it might be just my laptop.
- But I went on another and just try some other video.
- And it worked.
- So you might check if something needs adjusting.
- [INAUDIBLE]
- Yeah.
- But anyway--
- Thank you.
- --just since we-- I know you have your 12 o'clock.
- I wonder if you--
- first of all, I hope that this will not
- be the only time we'll have.
- But let me just sort of March through the plot
- of this story a little bit, and the film,
- and how you created it.
- And I saw the interview in, I guess, Arts Mania.
- Or was it on your website, I think?
- What is it called?
- Yeah, Arts Mania.
- But I always like to double-check.
- I don't remember Arts Mania.
- Arts Mania?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, there was an interview with you
- about the film a while ago.
- I don't know how far back.
- Anyway, that's very neither here or there.
- There have been-- if you go to the Press page,
- I mean, there's so much.
- The one I would maybe point you to
- is the ABA journal article because most
- of the press that--
- and there's one.
- I mean, it's a good article.
- There's a good article in there.
- Yes.
- Yes, well, do you know this guy, by the way,
- he credits with giving him the letters from--
- John Barrett?
- --John Barrett.
- Oh, I know him extremely well.
- I've lived at his home.
- OK.
- Can you send me his contact information as well?
- Sure.
- Yeah.
- Because I would love to get the full letters that I assume
- he has.
- Yeah.
- I'll explain it.
- I don't think I'm competing with his biography of Jackson
- et all.
- I hope you're not competing with my book.
- Don't beat me into print.
- That would be terrible.
- No, no, I mean, first of all, there's always so
- many different angles on this.
- And of course, I'd fully credit everybody I talk to
- or get anything from.
- But that's great.
- I would like to get in touch with Barrett too.
- You may be interested in his-- he
- has something called the Jackson list.
- It's a letter he sends out every couple months with his added--
- sometimes, it's a new finding.
- And sometimes, it's just a--
- I wouldn't say just, it's a--
- Did you just email that to me?
- Or you just--
- I'm going to.
- Oh, OK.
- OK.
- OK.
- I just wanted to make sure.
- I'm putting this all--
- Well, with the notes there.
- Great.
- --who you need.
- But I just remembered some more.
- Oh, Stuart Liebman, that's who.
- Oh, Stuart Liebman, yes, that would be great.
- My own family background is Polish.
- My father was in the Polish Army in '39 and escaped.
- So I speak Polish.
- I go back--
- Oh, well, that's a terrific help.
- --which is a terrific help.
- Yeah, I've looked at some of the documents
- from the Holocaust Museum from the Polish archives
- and talked to people there.
- And I tracked down a member of the family
- of this investigative judge.
- It's an interesting case in and of itself
- because I don't know if you know Fritz Bauer, the German judge,
- on the German Auschwitz trial, which a German Jew led.
- The Polish judge who really worked with Bauer
- there was from an ethnic German family, which
- makes it really interesting.
- In Poland?
- In Poland.
- So it's a totally different background.
- Psychologically, it's really interesting these contrasts.
- What-- maybe you can understand what--
- there are different motives, clearly.
- But anyway, let's go through.
- First of all, they mention that you--
- the film was completed in--
- the original film-- would it be in '49?
- '48.
- '48, OK.
- OK.
- And sorry to ask this, but because one of the clips
- said you were born two years after?
- So you were born in 1950, right?
- Yeah, OK.
- And you're younger than I am.
- Clear that on Facebook.
- Yeah, I get that.
- Yeah.
- It's like my wife says, never tell anybody
- how long we've been married or how--
- they'll figure it out.
- I was born in '47.
- So and you were born in '50 here, right?
- In Paris.
- In Paris, huh?
- Wow.
- Yeah.
- My father was-- after Nuremberg, he was recruited.
- Well, then he made a number of de-nazification films
- during the way after.
- And this work in film series.
- And then he was recruited to be chief of the Marshall
- Plan, motion picture section.
- And he supervised the making of--
- he personally made the first Marshall Plan film.
- But he did that when he was still in Berlin.
- And I think that's probably what brought him to their attention.
- Anyway, he then spent two years with the Marshall Plan.
- And Garrett.
- Yeah.
- Great.
- That's right.
- And then we moved back to Germany.
- And then we moved back to France.
- And so we came to the US, I mean, really,
- because my uncle wanted for these a movie that part
- of Britain.
- And when we crossed--
- so we came back at the end of 1956.
- Oh, not till '56?
- Yeah, so that was when he--
- So you've also got that international background?
- I was born in Edinburgh.
- My father was in the British forces,
- with the Polish forces under British command later,
- after he escaped.
- And then I was born in '47 in Edinburgh.
- Well, now, all of that changed.
- When did you guys come to the States?
- '48.
- Oh, I was less than a year.
- Yeah.
- And he became an American citizen?
- He became American citizen.
- Eventually, actually, he became a US diplomat,
- including in Paris for a while.
- Yeah, I mean, that was-- well, he bounced around various jobs.
- But then he began doing executive seminars on ethics
- and that sort of thing.
- So he did a variety of things.
- But you never lived abroad again?
- Oh, I did a lot.
- I mean, I lived as a kid when we were in--
- Paris.
- --Seoul, and Paris, and Cairo.
- And then, as I was 20 years as a foreign correspondent
- for Newsweek, lived in Hong Kong, Moscow, Berlin, Bonn,
- Rome.
- Do you feel American?
- Yeah.
- I mean, but you always have that-- as you know,
- you sort of feel a little bit--
- you're always looking a little bit with a different angle.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- But I do consider this home, was the anchor.
- But still, it's certain things you don't--
- you look at with a little more detachment, maybe.
- Yeah somewhat divided view of the whole world.
- It's what I have.
- Right.
- So all right.
- So you came in '56.
- And then?
- Yeah.
- I can put you out of your misery by giving you plenty to read.
- We don't have to play 20 questions.
- Yeah, but let's talk about the film.
- So one of the things that intrigued
- me was that you didn't see this film until 2004?
- That's my recollection.
- Yeah.
- My youngest brother did see it.
- He says that my father brought a 60-millimeter print to show
- in his sixth grade class.
- Oh, really?
- But that was when my father had a 16 print.
- The signal for-- the war department,
- as you'll see in this article I've written,
- which is kind of a pre-see of the book, the Signal Corps--
- the war department decided to strike up
- a limited number of 16 prints of the film
- that they put in what they call the Signal Corps Libraries
- kind of secretly.
- I mean, they didn't publicize this.
- But if you knew that this film existed and you
- were an educator, you were supposedly
- able to borrow a print.
- And so at some point, they did.
- This is in what period?
- This is in probably '50?
- I think it could've happened--
- I mean, this is one of the things
- that I still have to track down is when exactly that happened.
- But in the Washington Post articles
- that appeared in the fall of 1949,
- the reporter alludes to this.
- And he says that the war department
- is able to claim that it's not outright
- censoring the film because they have made
- these 16-millimeter prints.
- Do you have links to those articles?
- Not links, but--
- Or copies.
- --I have the originals that were at my father's trials.
- So the Washington Post wrote this in '49.
- And they claimed that they weren't censoring the film.
- Right.
- Yeah.
- You'll get a lot of this from my article.
- OK.
- Great.
- Great.
- You can email that to me?
- Oh, you were.
- It's going to be published.
- This is the draft.
- Oh, wonderful.
- It's going to be published as part of this digital edition.
- Oh, I see, OK, next month.
- Oh, wonderful.
- Wonderful.
- You're not writing the book tonight?
- No, no, no, no.
- I'm just signing the contract now.
- Oh, that's great.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, same publisher that signed my sister.
- That's great.
- Yeah.
- So the digital edition will be out in a month or so,
- with all of this, or a couple of months.
- No, we're officially releasing it
- at the national media markets the first week of November.
- But is it done yet?
- No.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, of course not.
- It never is.
- It's kind of the reason I got up at 2:30 this morning.
- Yeah.
- So you-- but how did it happen, say,
- that you first saw the film?
- Well, I know exactly.
- Well, I first saw the German version
- because I had become very interested,
- thanks to a broadcast history scholar
- who was writing about my father's television career.
- There's a new book out called Into the Fray,
- which is a study, really, into the documentary film that
- was headed by David Brinkley, my father, and Ted Yates.
- And produced this groundbreaking series,
- David Brinkley's journal.
- And Tom became convinced that my father's later work
- in the United States had been very much influenced
- by the Marshall Plan film that he'd made.
- And so he wanted to-- he contacted me.
- He asked if I knew about the films, had I seen the films?
- And I never had.
- Because, again, they were banned in the United States
- under Smith-Mundt.
- Under what?
- The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948.
- It was not a specific ban of Marshall Plan films per se.
- It was a ban--
- and I've written a whole before on the Marshall Plan film,
- which I can share with you.
- But it's a ban on showing to Americans--
- What we're seeing.
- --films, books, radio programs that
- were being made for a foreign audience.
- This is logical.
- My father worked for USIA.
- Well, then it's--
- It was the same thing.
- --you know all about that.
- He would have a film library that he would be part of.
- But he could not do anything aimed at the US audience.
- So yeah, it's the same, is probably the same.
- Have you read Nick Cull's book about the USIA?
- No, I haven't.
- I've heard of it.
- It's a masterpiece.
- He's a-- yeah.
- He's just a fabulous writer.
- I mean, he's the head of the public diplomacy.
- I've got to send you that link to that.
- But that I understand.
- Yeah.
- So the Marshall Plan films were--
- even though they weren't paid for by the US,
- a misunderstanding most people have,
- they were paid for by the Europeans,
- and they were actually made by the Europeans.
- My father made the first one.
- There's only one other Marshall Plan film
- that was made by an American.
- But they were deemed to come under the jurisdiction
- of [INAUDIBLE].
- Anyway, to make a long story short,
- I went to see these films with Kahn, the ones that
- are at the National Archives, in 2003,
- right after Bush had announced mission accomplished in Iraq.
- And I realized that these films, that they were all about
- human nature, reconstruction, the post-war, reconstruction
- and nation-building, and that everybody
- should see these films.
- But I wound up putting together a 40-film retrospective
- for the Berlin Film Festival that showed in February 2004
- in Berlin.
- And the head of the festival said,
- I want to start this series mentioning Nuremberg, which
- is in Germany, is very well-known film.
- The film is unknown here.
- And that's when I found.
- You saw it in Germany?
- In German.
- I saw the German version in Germany.
- And I argued against this.
- I thought it was a terrible idea because the Marshall Plan films
- are all about looking forward.
- And Nuremberg was really about looking back.
- He felt it was really important for a modern German audience
- to see what we felt that the other countries had made
- when they decided to embrace Germany as part of the Marshall
- Plan community of nations.
- So the leap from Nuremberg to the Marshall Plan was there.
- But I mean, surely, your father had talked about this Nuremberg
- film he had done.
- I knew that.
- Yes, I knew, in the back of my mind somewhere,
- that he had made this film.
- You never really knew.
- Yeah.
- When I was growing up--
- and my father's work was fascinating, was very much
- a part of his world.
- And I traveled with him on location-- well,
- we lived on location when he was working,
- lived across the Everglades.
- And there were other times when I traveled with him.
- But we always talked about the work he was doing.
- Children are very egotistical.
- They don't tend to--
- Oh, yeah, oh, I know.
- --look back.
- Until you become a professional historian
- or an amateur historian, you don't necessarily
- think to ask your--
- it's like, if you ask me to list all the movies
- that my grandfather made at Paramount,
- I couldn't even tell you.
- I've never seen them.
- I've never studied them.
- Well, I did.
- Yeah, I know that feeling well.
- There's so many things in my family history.
- And I wish I'd asked my grandfather so much more.
- He lived in Poland before the war.
- He was a very prominent lawyer, involved in some very
- controversial cases.
- At the time, you're growing up, you're--
- You're not focused on that history.
- So I have many regrets.
- And of course, in my father's case,
- it was exacerbated by the fact that he died so young.
- He was 56 when he died.
- So I just never had the chance to grow
- into that curiosity about what he'd done before I
- was born until it was too late.
- So yes, Nuremberg was sort of--
- I was vaguely-- but he never talked about Nuremberg.
- No, it was really ancient history
- at the time I was growing up.
- And the film had been suppressed here.
- Since then, I've found letter he wrote to the New York Times
- in 1960 stating, by the way, this film exists.
- It was never released.
- So it was never released in any way here, right?
- Before-- yeah, yeah.
- And you're convinced it was pretty much a straight Cold War
- mentality?
- Well, it's much more complicated than that.
- There are other factors, which I go into in this article.
- And you will see that it's not that simple.
- I'm indebted to John Barrett because he
- has uncovered the first proof we have
- that there was a conscious decision not to release it
- and that that decision was made by our Secretary of the Army
- at the time, Kenneth Royall.
- So until John found that letter, all I had
- was circumstantial evidence that this was a conscious decision.
- And now, in the '70s, this is another interesting piece
- of it, in the '70s, WGBH wanted to do a tribute
- to Pare Lorentz who, by the way, always took credit
- for having made the film.
- In his mind, I think he did feel that he had made it.
- And he was certainly responsible for getting it made.
- And he was a heroic figure in the battle over who
- would control the film, and what approach would be taken,
- and so on.
- But for, I think, six decades, he
- was, to the extent anyone was credited in the US
- with having directed this film that nobody would have seen,
- people tended to credit Pare.
- And so I've now been able to document
- that that is [INAUDIBLE].
- In any case, in 1979, WGBH apparently
- wanted to do a tribute to Pare.
- And they tried to get a copy of the film
- and were having enormous difficulty
- getting a copy of the film.
- The story is-- and this is really unsubstantiated,
- in my view--
- is that Jackie Kennedy was on the board of GBH at that time.
- And I haven't verified that either.
- This is not part of it.
- I mean, it will be part of the book.
- But because I can't document anything,
- I haven't chosen to write about it yet.
- But apparently, she called somebody.
- And the print arrived the next day.
- And so there was a version broadcast in the '70s.
- I believe in I want to say '77, but I'm not sure.
- And it's not--
- Of the original film?
- Of a version of the film.
- It's not-- what I chose to make my restoration negative based
- on what I consider to be the most complete and most original
- version, which was the version that was cut and presented
- first in Germany.
- So that's a whole other story.
- Yeah.
- And when did you finish this and have it ready,
- the original version?
- Was it two years ago?
- No, it was 2009.
- Oh, 2009.
- Yeah.
- And by the way, because we still also
- don't know what happened to the original negative,
- whether it's lost or whether it's destroyed.
- But the records at NARA, the National Archives,
- show that the army turned over whatever materials it had
- at that time in the early '70s.
- So they sat on it for a very long time.
- But as I say, they had made these 16 millstones
- that were supposedly stocked in the single.
- But you worked off the German version of the print
- to do that?
- We worked off the highest-quality 35 millimeter
- print in existence.
- Which was from Germany?
- Which is held with the Bundesarchiv in Berlin.
- The American-- these negatives were in such bad shape
- that we couldn't use them, the ones
- held by the National Archive.
- Anyway, this is all--
- you'll read more about this in her article that I've--
- Right.
- Right.
- Now, have you actually-- you've been showing this mostly where?
- It played in theaters from--
- it opened in New York at the Film Forum in September 19--
- or September 2010.
- So it played in theaters in through February 2012,
- in many, many theaters around the country.
- And now, it's really screening for law schools, universities.
- And they offer it to--
- I've since created 12 language versions and [CROSS TALK]
- around the world.
- The State Department is sending me to Russia in 10 days
- to show it in four cities there.
- You're going there now?
- Soon, yeah.
- Yeah.
- You have a Russian version?
- Yeah.
- And that's being shipped today.
- The State Department actually paid for 1,000 DVDs
- that they give away for free in Russia.
- Ambassador Rapp and I promoted this.
- And Ambassador Stephen Rapp is a--
- you know who Stephen is.
- I know who he is.
- I don't think I've met him.
- But I know him.
- Yeah.
- And he and I premiered the film in February in Moscow.
- And the reaction was intense.
- And they decided to bring me back
- and we tried to show it much more widely.
- But this is sort of I mean, these are just notes for you.
- These are notes for me.
- If you didn't hear in an article or--
- No, no, no, no.
- --blog.
- I mean, right now, I'm just sort of gathering.
- This is a level--
- I mean, I want to tell the story of the film.
- And how that exchange, I think, with the Secretary of the Army,
- and the fact that you've restored it,
- I wouldn't get into this level of detail.
- No, I just meant this for right now.
- I mean, are you writing for other outlets or anything
- like that?
- I mean, I occasionally write pieces.
- But I'm not going to be writing about this.
- No, I mean, this is all.
- The only reason I mention that is because the human rights
- situation in Russia is so tentative at the moment.
- To put it mildly.
- And so these things are a little bit of a subversive effort.
- Yeah, yeah.
- No, no, I'm not going to be writing anything about this
- now.
- And my book is a couple of years off, at a minimum.
- Right, right, right.
- And yeah, again, in the book, I doubt
- I'd get into this level of detail.
- No, no, no.
- It's not relevant to your--
- I don't know, world.
- Yeah, but that-- but you're--
- just to get back--
- I mean, you say in the article, you get into it,
- but you feel it was Cold War plus other factors
- that really stopped this?
- Well, the army's concerns were not
- really related to the Cold War.
- They were really related to the issue
- of who had been prosecuted at Nuremberg, the fact
- that German military officers had
- been prosecuted at Nuremberg.
- But they weren't happy with the whole Nuremberg process,
- apparently?
- They were uneasy.
- And then there were concerns about the atrocities committed
- as well.
- And whether Americans could really stand
- to see that in a movie theater.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But I mean the Cold War certainly already factored.
- The Cold War was a major factor, a major factor of it
- because we were investing in rebuilding Germany.
- Are you doing all right over here?
- Can I get you something else to drink?
- No, I think we'll just take the check, please.
- And it became really inconvenient to kind
- of rub people's noses in the--
- Thank you.
- --story of the Nuremberg trial and the Nazi
- atrocities when you were also trying to bring Germany back
- into the European community.
- I mean, it also goes back to the whole argument
- between the Morgenthau Plan versus the Marshall Plan.
- I mean, this was the opposition that,
- within the administration, both the Roosevelt and the Truman
- administrations, that really bedeviled them, on both sides,
- arguing vociferously.
- Oh, thank you very much.
- Morgenthau's plan was defeated internally.
- What was that-- I mean, that was defeated fairly early, I think.
- I can't remember if that had [INAUDIBLE]..
- It was all post-war.
- It was all in that--
- Yeah, it was all that period.
- --ten-year's period when they were trying to plan for what
- would come after.
- It was part of the same discussion.
- It was all connected with the same discussion
- about whether you-- how do you prosecute the Nazis.
- It was very much part of one that--
- Thank you so much.
- --what I found so interesting, and I am writing a little bit
- about this, although I'm really not qualified,
- but as an introduction to my article,
- "Filmmakers for the Prosecution,"
- I'm writing a little bit about the Spruchkammer,
- which you probably have been looking at,
- which was the German de-nazification court.
- And that's a whole fascinating, fascinating process,
- and the whole de-nazification effort,
- that certainly is part of your topic there.
- Yes.
- I haven't yet figured out--
- And you know, I don't-- not enough has been written about
- that.
- Yeah.
- I mean, I'm not sure how much I'm going to get into that.
- There's so many areas to get into.
- I'm trying to figure out because you
- can sort of stray into an area.
- Yeah, that's a huge area to say.
- Have you found anything particularly good that--
- Well, I just think it's absolutely integral to this
- greater account because the initial plan under
- de-nazification was that the Americans pretty quickly
- figured out that they--
- at first, they thought they were only going
- to hold one Nuremberg trial.
- Then they decided, they had the hold 12 more.
- But that was it.
- And then they turned over the prosecution to the Germans
- to come
- And meanwhile, they were also on their own.
- Some of these other countries were
- holding their own trials, some with alacrity,
- and some, like France, down to much younger.
- But the Spruchkammer was an attempt
- to really turn this process over to the Germans.
- And that is a--
- the five categories that they put in,
- that they divided what they were to use
- to divide the population, and it would decide
- who should absolutely be prosecuted,
- and what the punishment would be,
- who should be prosecuted and punished
- to a lesser extent, who should be just censored,
- like not be given a work permit, and who
- should not be featured at all.
- And the fact that they asked the American sergeant, when
- they turned over the process to the Germans,
- they were asking every person over the age of 18
- to fill out a questionnaire, essentially, to divulge--
- How their level of involvement-- yeah, yeah.
- Exactly.
- And that created a huge bottleneck.
- And I think that people who talked about hunting the Nazis,
- and who'd tear out their hair about how few prosecutors
- we had, really, [INAUDIBLE] miss how challenging it was.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- And Ben talks about this, as well,
- when he talks in my interview that I had with him,
- part of which is on the [? key. ?]
- I mean, not the one you have.
- But he says, they were only planning for a 6 [INAUDIBLE]..
- I happened to notice, even though I
- know very little about the other 12 trials, that in every case,
- 24 people were indicted.
- I mean, how would you pick that number, 24?
- Yeah, right, right, there's 24 seats.
- There were only-- we only had two benches in the dock.
- Yeah.
- We couldn't seat more than 24 people.
- He says, in mine, is that justice?
- It was no justice.
- It was just a sampling.
- And I mean, I can't tell you how many times--
- and I've spoken with his son all around the country,
- now, around the world, but especially in this country,
- people want to know, why weren't the Nazis prosecuted,
- as though it was--
- Yeah, it's difficult to do.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Unless you did.
- Yeah, you see this stuff about Churchill thing.
- Of course.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And these are the--
- I don't mean to say cliches because these
- were these were held positions, but oversimplifications.
- And I think the greatest service you could do with your book
- is to really--
- Put this in perspective.
- --shed light on this complexity and put this in perspective
- because there's also a lot of tendentious that characterizes
- the whole debate, with people mostly coming
- from the point of view, it's an outrage.
- There's very few people actually looking
- at what they tried to do, why it became impossible,
- and then why it also became politically problematic.
- So people tend to focus on the it
- became politically problematic.
- And they don't really look at the attempts that were made
- and why it was almost impossible.
- Right, yeah.
- So that's what I'd like to see.
- I'd like to see that.
- And I don't think you'd get a lot of competition
- as pertains to that part of the story.
- You never know.
- Yeah, yeah.
- I know somebody, I think, is doing
- a book on the Nazis coming into America or something like that.
- And I'll deal with that some later on.
- But I don't think anyone would have recently tried
- to do something like this.
- Have you gotten to know Eli Rosenbaum at the Justice
- Department?
- Yeah, I know him.
- I dealt with him some.
- I covered the Waldheim story in the '80s.
- And I knew he's involved quite well there.
- And they, of course, were at loggerheads on that.
- And actually, in fact, I was in touch with him recently.
- And we were going to meet.
- But the government shutdown and so forth, it would be a while.
- It's actually fine, that part.
- But yeah, I will.
- Well, he's an incredible resource.
- He's an incredible resource for your story.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Well, I'm going to be spending time with him.
- He told me that he's got to go--
- because he's still in the Justice Department,
- he still has to go through the Public Affairs Office
- and so forth.
- But he said, of course, we'll get together.
- And yeah, I'll be.
- Yeah.
- And David-- what's his name?
- Marwell.
- Marwell, yeah.
- Yeah, I know David.
- Yeah.
- David was on his staff.
- Yeah, David was on his staff in Berlin.
- I don't want to make you late here.
- But OK.
- OK, great.
- What time is it?
- According to my watch, although my watch is only--
- yeah, 11:53.
- OK.
- OK.
- The other person I wanted to ask you about--
- do you know Elizabeth Holston?
- I have not met her yet.
- I need to talk to her.
- If you've got her contacts there,
- yeah, I mean, she's sort of on my list of people
- I would eventually get to.
- Yeah.
- But Marwell's very interesting too.
- And he makes precisely the point about yeah, of course,
- you can't consider this justice in the sense of it
- would be impossible to do justice.
- Well, both he and Eli are really in a [INAUDIBLE] of justice.
- Yes.
- Yes, I did see that were [INAUDIBLE]..
- The other person who's interesting to talk to
- is Telford Taylor's widow, who was--
- Oh, really?
- --one of his students, his second wife, who's--
- Aha, I didn't know.
- --still a professor at Columbia.
- At Columbia?
- Oh, OK.
- She must have been quite a bit younger.
- Yeah.
- Great.
- Just because basically, he became chief prosecutor
- when Jackson left, right?
- Right.
- And he was prosecutor for all 12 trials.
- Yeah, right, right, right, right.
- Including Ben's, of course, where, which Ben,
- talked to him too.
- Yes.
- Yeah, which is a great story.
- Yeah, it is a good.
- I mean, there's so many great stories.
- I love them.
- I don't know if you ever heard his Marlene Dietrich story.
- I don't know that I have heard his Marlene Dietrich story.
- What is her name?
- Oh, god.
- It's just gone out of my head.
- It'll come back.
- OK.
- That's fine.
- I have her.
- I'll go to her.
- OK.
- That's great.
- Great.
- And have you talked to Jonathan Bush, who's
- a law professor at Columbia?
- No, Jonathan who?
- Bush.
- Bush?
- No.
- He's writing a new biography of Telford Taylor.
- Oh, is he?
- Yeah.
- He's a Taylor extra.
- OK, well, I've got a bunch of paper to send you on to.
- Well, that'd be great.
- I'm sure I may think about it.
- It's all early days.
- And as you start on a project like this,
- it's always one thing leads to the other.
- But that's great.
- That's precisely what I need.
- Let me ask you a personal question.
Overview
- Interviewee
- Sandra Schulberg
- Interviewer
- Andrew Nagorski
- Credit Line
- Permanent Collection. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Gift of Andrew Nagorski
Physical Details
- Language
- English
- Extent
-
1 digital file : MP3.
Rights & Restrictions
- Conditions on Access
- There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
- Conditions on Use
- No restrictions on use
Keywords & Subjects
- Personal Name
- Schulberg, Sandra.
Administrative Notes
- Legal Status
- Permanent Collection
- Provenance
- Andrew Nagorski donated the interview with Sandra Schulberg to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016.
- Special Collection
-
The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive
- Record last modified:
- 2023-11-16 09:40:18
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn562458
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Also in Andrew Nagorski collection
Materials related to research conducted by Nagorski into topics related to the history of the Holocaust and World War II. Includes the extended draft of an article about Auschwitz written by Nagorski, 1995, and published version of same as it appeared in Newsweek, 16 January 1995, sound recordings of interviews of historical eyewitnesses, historians, and others interviewed by Nagorski during his career at Newsweek, and while writing his books “Hitlerland” and “The Nazi Hunters,” transcripts of interviews, and other related research (and other) materials.
Andrew Nagorski papers
Document
Collection consists of transcripts of interviews conducted by Nagorski, primarily in preparation for a cover story on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, written for publication in Newsweek magazine in January 1995. The collection consists of a typescript of the full version of the article; the shortened, public version as it appeared in Newsweek; and transcripts of related interviews that Nagorski conducted in the years following this article. In addition to interviews with Polish and Russian former prisoners of Auschwitz, mostly conducted in the early 1990s, the collection of transcripts also includes interviews with German president Richard von Weizsäcker; Manfred Rommel, the son of General Erwin Rommel; and Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, the Nazi administrator of occupied Poland who was tried and executed by the Allies at the International Criminal Tribunal in Nuremberg.
Oral history interview with Richard Hottelet
Oral History
Oral history interview with Angus Thuermer
Oral History
Oral history interview with Richard Staar
Oral History
Oral history interview with Władysław Bartoszewski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Henryk Mandelbaum
Oral History
Oral history interview with Chaya Kroin
Oral History
Oral history interview with Zygmunt Zins
Oral History
Oral history interview with Rafal Molski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Stella Madej
Oral History
Oral history interview with Adam Dobrzanski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Yisrael Gutman
Oral History
Oral history interview with Albert Grinholtz
Oral History
Albert Grinholtz, born on December 4, 1920 in Opoczno, Poland, discusses his family’s move to Paris, France in 1922 (he went with his father first and then his mother and little brother arrived later); being summoned along with his younger brother to register at the commissariat de police on May 14, 1941; being taken to the Gare d’Austerlitz and sent to Pithiviers, where he stayed for 13 months; being deported on June 25, 1942 to Auschwitz-Birkenau by cattle car, while his parents remained behind in Paris; the conditions of deportation and arrival in Birkenau; how the camp was not yet completed and the men were housed in the women’s barracks; the daily routine, brutality, and construction work brigade; being selected as one of 22 barbers to shave daily both the Germans and prisoners, about 450 men a day, and this work providing him with a bit more food; working on the construction of an Olympic pool in Birkenau, which was used for Nazi propaganda; his work cutting fuelwood for the mines nearby; the situation in January 1945 as the Germans began their retreat and the evacuation and murder of Jewish prisoners; hiding in the kitchen, unseen in the chaos, and being liberated later; being evacuated to Marseille, France on June 18, 1945; going to Budapest, Hungary and Bucharest, Romania, where he was taken care of by the Joint; and returning to Paris.
Oral history interview with Helena Wrona
Oral History
Oral history interview with Kazimierz Smolen
Oral History
Oral history interview with Jerzy Tabeau
Oral History
Oral history interview with Marek Edelman
Oral History
Marek Edelman discusses his participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Oral history interview with Manfred Rommel
Oral History
Manfred Rommel discusses his father Erwin Rommel's plot against Hitler.
Oral history interview with Martin Walser
Oral History
Oral history interview with Jan Karski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Helena Slezynska
Oral History
Oral history interview with Gabriel Bach
Oral History
Oral history interview with Deidre Berger
Oral History
Oral history interview with Peter Black
Oral History
Oral history interview with Monika Boll
Oral History
Oral history interview with Harold Burson
Oral History
Oral history interview with Allan Ryan
Oral History
Oral history interview with Piotr Cywinski
Oral History
Oral history interview with Sam Donaldson
Oral History
Oral history interview with Rafi Eitan
Oral History
Oral history interview with Benjamin Ferencz
Oral History
Oral history interview with Peter Heidenberger
Oral History
Oral history interview with Marvin Hier
Oral History
Oral history interview with Elizabeth Holtzman
Oral History
Oral history interview with Joseph Lelyveld
Oral History
Oral history interview with David Marwell
Oral History
Oral history interview with Martin Mendelsohn
Oral History
Oral history interview with Herman Obermayer
Oral History
Oral history interview with Krzysztof Persak
Oral History
Oral history interview with Harry Phillips
Oral History
Oral history interview with Eli Rosenbaum
Oral History
Oral history interview with Avraham Shalom
Oral History
Oral history interview with Bernhard Schlink
Oral History
Oral history interview with Efraim Zuroff
Oral History
Oral history interview with Elizabeth White
Oral History
Genocide panel
Oral History
Oral history interview with Gerald Schwab
Oral History
Oral history interview with Ilona Ziok
Oral History
Oral history interview with Irmtrud Wojak
Oral History
Oral history interview with Peter Schneider
Oral History
Oral history interview with Peter Sichel
Oral History
Sehn Institute
Oral History
Oral history interview with Thomas Will
Oral History