My Country, Right or Wrong. My Children, Right or Wrong.
Understanding War Responsibility in Judgment at Nuremberg and Copenhagen
Imagine that there are two children drowning, one of whom is your own, and that you can only save one. The moral question is of course, who to save; yet the answer is so very clear—you save your own. In making this decision, you do not appeal to logic or ethics, but simply emotion, personal attachment. While some may criticize you for letting the other child drown without any hesitation, far more will understand your decision, as many would do the same. In Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and Copenhagen (2002), the highly regarded judge Ernst Janning and Nobel Prize winning German physicist Werner Heisenberg both more or less claim to have made the same decision when choosing to save their country at the cost of innocent lives. However, the stakes are even higher as both are exceptional intellectuals in their respective fields, which is a crucial detail because as such, they are expected to be far more objective. Yet despite these higher moral and intellectual standards, both characters remain fiercely loyal to their German countrymen. As a result, both films present a strikingly similar rationalization—they remained in their high posts in the Third Reich as a form of discreet damage control, believing that should they have resigned, Adolf Hitler could have done far more damage than he already had. Therefore, despite the wide gap in release years and the difference in professions, this theme of moral duty ultimately compromised by a strong emotional love for their country links the two films.
In Copenhagen, Niels Bohr already shows contempt for Heisenberg’s rationalization within the first twenty minutes of the film, before he can even hear Heisenberg say it himself. While discussing Heisenberg’s recent visit with his wife Margrethe, Bohr says with a sigh, “he wants to be there to rebuild German science once Hitler goes.” Here, it is clear that Bohr understands Heisenberg, but only in a scientific sense. He does not understand with compassion, but through an equation—he calculates Heisenberg’s love for his country to come to the most probable explanation given the variables. Therefore, it is the emotional part of himself, the father figure within him that hopes Heisenberg, his prodigal son, will prove his calculations wrong. Bohr wishes Heisenberg to eschew Germany in its entirety, ashamed at his own people for succumbing to Hitler’s charismatic dictatorship. But he knows his equation is correct, as he often is, and Heisenberg is indeed unwavering in his devotion to his fellow Germans, allowing it to cloud his moral judgment.
Heisenberg explicitly confirms this when he explains why he needs to know if Bohr has any information about the Allies’ intentions with atomic research:
“Bohr, I have to know. I’m the one who has to decide. If the Allies are building a bomb, what am I choosing for my country? Germany is where I was born. Germany is where I became what I am. Germany is all the faces of my childhood, all the hands that picked me up when I fell, all the voices that encouraged me, that set me on my way, all the hearts that speak to my heart. Germany is my widowed mother, my impossible brother, my wife. Germany is our children. I have to know what I’m deciding for them. Another defeat? Another nightmare, another nightmare like the nightmare I grew up in? My childhood ended in anarchy and civil war. Are my children to starve as we did?”
And thus, Heisenberg’s first assumption in his conversation with Margrethe is at last fully colored in. Even someone who is so brilliant in the field of physics, a field that knows no national boundaries, is swayed by his emotional attachment and fierce loyalty to the fellow Germans that raised him. His intelligence is marred by the memory of fear and hunger he felt so painfully as a child, memories he shares with so many of his countrymen. And these memories are what make him proud of Germany’s military achievements and its current role as the occupier. He is too busy saving his own drowning child, looking away from the faceless other flailing helplessly in the water.
However, it is absolutely important to note that while Heisenberg is flawed, he is not at all sympathetic or loyal to the Nazi cause and their beliefs regarding racial and religious genocide. This is evident when he says nothing in anger or defense of Hitler, especially after Bohr snaps that working on an atomic bomb with Heisenberg and his team would be like “supplying a homicidal maniac with an improved instrument of mass murder.” Instead, he explains that he is on the Nazi atomic research team because his “one hope is to remain in control…in the end, the decision will be in our hands whether we like it or not.” Here, it is clear Heisenberg believes that, as the world’s best physicists who pioneered the theories now taught in textbooks, he and Bohr are the ones who are ultimately in control of their respective governments’ military potential. Furthermore, as Heisenberg is acting on behalf of German welfare—not Hitler and his mass murders—he believes that he is responsible for covertly guiding the Nazi’s research team in the right direction, namely a nuclear reactor that is powerful enough to provide sustainable reactions, yet too weak for an atomic bomb. As a physicist, he knows the potential of nuclear energy, and the prestige it would bring to Germany as a nation for being the first to successfully harness it. He further points out that he purposefully asked for very little funding, as the plutonium required to build an atomic bomb requires much more money and resources than a reactor. He repeats over and over, “I keep that program going, I keep it under my control until the bitter end. Under my control, yes that’s the point. Under my control.”
But Bohr quickly yet somewhat gently points out that when the Allied scientists looked at Heisenberg’s work for the Nazis, it was missing many crucial safety measures such as radiation protection. After reciting a long list of mistakes, Bohr exclaims, “Nothing was under anyone’s control by that time…You were no longer running that program, that program was running you!” Bohr’s insight is most apparent when Heisenberg wistfully recalls how they only needed two more weeks, two more blocks of uranium and “it would’ve been German physics that achieved the world’s first self-sustaining chain reaction”, only to have Bohr point out that it had already been done in Chicago two years earlier—he had simply not known about it as he was on the Nazi’s side. This shows how Heisenberg’s noble yet secret intentions had the potential to mutate into a twisted agenda with much darker consequences, especially under Nazi supervision.
We see this again in Judgment at Nuremberg not from Ernst Janning himself, but from his lawyer Hans Rolfe, who argues that the four German judges on trial were “men who stayed in power for one reason only: to prevent worse things from happening. Who is the braver man? The man who escapes, or resigns in times of peril, or the man who stays on his post at the risk of his own personal safety?” This is where Heisenberg would have leapt up in complete agreement, applauding Rolfe for his eloquent rhetoric as all he could reiterate was “under my control”. Rolfe then brings up the “religious and political refugees all over the world telling how Ernst Janning saved them from execution”, how Janning’s personal physician was Jewish all throughout the war. This evidence sounds quite similar to Heisenberg’s purposeful request for inadequate funding—yet it is also similarly dismissed and canceled out by the fact that Janning still approved countless immoral and illegal acts.
Interestingly, it seems that Janning’s deep and uncontrollable remorse for his involvement with the Nazi party is exactly what Bohr hoped to see in Heisenberg that day in 1941. In attempting to explain his reasons for this involvement, Janning states:
“There was a fever over the land, a fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all there was fear, fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us, because he said to us: ‘Lift your heads. Be proud to be German. There are devils among us, communists, liberals, Jews, gypsies. Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.’
This echoes Heisenberg’s monologue about his love and genuine concern for Germany. However, this is not to say that Janning in any way approved of Hitler, as confirmed by Mrs. Berthold’s memory of how he was quick to “cut him down” when Hitler openly hit on Janning’s wife. She emphasizes to Judge Haywood, “Men like Janning…my husband and I…we hated Hitler. I want you to know that. And he hated us…Hitler was in awe of the nobility but he hated it.” Yet despite this personal and moral disdain for Hitler, Janning explains his decision to remain as a judge for the Third Reich:
What about those of us who knew better, we who know the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded—sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows! We will go forward. Forward is the great password.”
This portion sounds very much like the correct assumption Bohr made of Heisenberg’s own noble intentions, which was to covertly build a better Germany by taking advantage of Hitler’s military success and charm over the German people, only to weed him out once he became useless. However, the key difference between the two characters is that Janning’s intentions actually did mutate to match the Third Reich’s agenda, whereas Heisenberg was fortunately unable to build a working reactor in time for them to build an atomic bomb. Therefore, it seems Heisenberg interestingly manages to rationalize his involvement because he did in some way keep the program “under [his] control”. In contrast, Janning was no longer running the program, and instead, it truly did begin to run him. He recounts in his statement, “one day we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger…What was going to be a ‘passing phase’ had become the way of life.” Consequently, Janning’s demise is the future that Heisenberg could have had for himself had he been able to build a strong enough nuclear reactor in time.
As evidenced by the two films, determining war responsibility was perhaps the most difficult and confusing postwar issue. Germany was indeed stricken with civil war and poverty prior to WWII, and Hitler became the strong breath of fresh air for the German people. While Heisenberg and Janning were two exceptional intellectuals who were internationally expected to know better, we can relate to the powerful notion asserted by Hans Rolfe in his opening argument: “My country, right or wrong.” For those of us who are not as patriotic, we can certainly relate to the desire to build a better future for our children, and in this way, borrowing from Heisenberg, America is our children. We can then amend Rolfe’s statement to “My children, right or wrong.” And indeed when it comes to choosing between saving your own child or the unknown other, our obvious answer to this hypothetical dilemma further complicates our judgment when determining German war responsibility.
Works Cited
Copenhagen. Dir. Howard Davies. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2002. Film.
Judgment at Nuremberg. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Roxlom Films Inc., 1961. Film.
