ABSTRACT
One interesting treatment of a novel form of justice was essayed in None Shall Escape (1944). The film was both made and released during wartime and presages the legal and moral dilemmas facing the victors and vanquished in peacetime. The key issue is how to deal with those responsible for the practice of barbaric acts of cruelty. Although this is set in the future this is a clear, recognisable and near future. It was located after the end of the 1939-1945 World War and involved a new method of bringing those responsible for crimes against humanity to justice. The novel factor here is the forum and the issue. In place of national courts we have an International Commission with judges from a whole range of nations. The camera pans around a semi-circular bench and the panel is seen to comprise some 18 judges. Interestingly the question of being forced to act against one’s own conscience is not the issue here. Rather, the accused, local Gauleiter or Reich’s Commissioner for Western Poland, William Grimm, is portrayed as a fanatical Nazi whose views about the lightness of his personal involvement in genocide is unmodified. He does not seek to hide behind others and warns that Nazism will not die. The film ends with the stern question to the jury from the Chair of the Bench firmly locating the responsibility for action with those whom he addresses:
You are the jury. What do you want to happen? It is your choice. As he utters these words the camera closes in on the Judge for the final shot and it becomes clear that the jury is not a small group of men and women in the courtroom, but those watching the film. The issue is a contemporary debate about what should happen after the War to the perpetrators of death in the camps, although the term ‘extermination camp’ or ‘concentration camp’ is not actually used. Scenes from actual camps are included in the evidence against Grimm. This is a vision of an altered kind of justice, one into which a new set of criteria have been introduced, albeit obliquely-how should one deal with the defence of ‘superior orders’? The film was scripted by Lester Cole, who was to come to public attention as one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ under Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in the 1940s and 1950s.
