America pioneered war crime justice at Nuremberg. Then we ran away.

The Nuremberg war crimes trials — a first-of-its-kind effort by America and its allies to hold World War II’s surviving Nazi leaders to account for invading Europe and the mass slaughter of civilians, including the Holocaust — took place in 1945-1946. But the moral imperative of that moment rang most loudly on the night of March 7, 1965 — “Bloody Sunday” for the U.S. civil rights movement in Selma, Ala.

That night, millions of Americans were on their living room couches watching ABC’s heavily promoted TV premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, the acclaimed 1961 film which stars that most all-American of Hollywood stars, Spencer Tracy, as a judge tasked with the trial of four former Nazi jurists over their role in the genocide of Jews. The film, centered on the profound debate over moral culpability for war atrocities, was suddenly interrupted at 9:30 p.m. by ABC news anchor Frank Reynolds and a special report. The network broadcast exclusive footage of civil rights marchers getting clubbed, beaten, and tear gassed by Alabama troopers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The stark moral contrast — U.S. heroes seeking justice for a minority group that had been brutalized by the Nazis, suddenly interrupted by a segregationist attack that bloodied and battered peaceful African American marchers — stunned the nation. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote former Inquirer editor Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in The Race Beat. Even in Selma, a white shopkeeper told the Washington Post: “Everybody knows it’s going on, but they try to pretend they don’t see it. I saw Judgment at Nuremberg on the ‘Late Show’ the other night and I thought it fits right in. It’s just like Selma.” The widespread outrage over the TV images from “Bloody Sunday” is credited for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

That was a very different America.

Today, the stunning extent to which the United States has rejected the global effort to bring justice against war criminals has been driven home by President Joe Biden’s condemnation of an “outrageous” International Criminal Court — a body recognized by much of the world but not the American government. The president was reacting to prosecutors seeking arrest warrants not only for the Hamas leaders behind the Oct. 7 attack but also for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another top official in Israel, a close U.S. ally.

Many members of Congress — from both parties — want to go even further and impose sanctions on the ICC and its leaders, in a bizarro world where American policy is not to go after people who take hostages or bomb refugee camps, but rather the public servants who prosecute them.

The ICC’s prosecutor Karim Khan says he’s been told by a senior official that the 22-year-old ICC was “built for Africans and thugs like [Russia’s Vladimir] Putin,” not Westernized nations like Israel. One of the harshest critics of the ICC arrest warrants, South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham — a former military prosecutor — said the action triggers his fear that war crime prosecutors will eventually target the United States. “They will come after our soldiers … just a[s] sure as I’m standing here,” Graham told a Tel Aviv, Israel, news conference. “The model used against Israel will eventually be used against American forces to come after our [former] troops in Afghanistan.”

Yet, this is the same Graham who had nothing but praise for the ICC when it issued an arrest warrant for Putin last year. “To forgive and forget Putin’s war crimes — that are occurring on an industrial scale — would irrevocably damage the Rule of Law-based world order established at the end of World War II,” he said in a statement then.

This only highlights the hypocrisy of U.S. leaders, including Biden, who from the start of his presidency has claimed a rules-based international order as a centerpiece of his foreign policy, only to shun the bodies like the ICC and the International Court of Justice tasked with enforcing these supposed rules.

America’s cultural and political schizophrenia will be on full display yet again with the June 5 launch on Netflix of Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, a six-part docuseries that essentially updates Judgment at Nuremberg, using the war crimes tribunal as the moral framework for explaining the rise of German fascism and the horrors of the Holocaust. Much like in 1965, one fears the film’s framing of right and wrong will collide with viewers seeing videos on TikTok or Instagram of dead and mutilated Palestinian children, struck by Israeli jets firing U.S.-made bombs.

How did we get to this place? How could the United States pioneer the system for seeking justice for unspeakable war crimes, and then run away from it?

Michael Bryant, the Bryant University historian who is a leading authority on war crime law, compared American attitudes on the fraught topic to Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “You have this kind of split personality,” Bryant told me, citing a fundamental distrust of international authority over U.S. affairs that peaked with the 1919-1920 Senate rejections of the League of Nations, and continued through John F. Kennedy’s 1960 election, when voters feared that a Catholic president might be subservient to the pope.

Of course, Hollywood movies tend to obscure the fact that in the smoldering ashes of World War II, there was a serious debate between America and its European allies — which still at least nominally included the USSR — about the best way to punish the leading Nazis who survived the conflict, and whether the very concept of a war crimes prosecution was setting a dangerous precedent. Bryant noted that in 1945, U.S. War Secretary Henry Stimson had to assure his U.S. colleagues that international tribunals wouldn’t go after Jim Crow segregation.

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But the very real questions about the source of legal authority for a tribunal like the one established at Nuremberg were overridden by powerful U.S. arguments that exposing Nazi criminality would be essential for reforming Germany and delegitimizing its former leaders.

Some 24 top Nazis were tried in the original International Military Tribunal in 1945-1946; most were found guilty, and 10 were hanged. Scores of alleged German war criminals faced similar trials in the years that followed, and there was a parallel court in Japan. But the luster of America’s leading role at Nuremberg began to fade in the 1960s, and not just because of the contradictions exposed by the civil rights movement. Accusations of American war crimes in Vietnam — most famously 1968’s My Lai massacre of an entire village — triggered a climate of concern about the world community turning against the United States that would be only amplified by later events, such as the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib in the early 2000s.

In 1998, then-President Bill Clinton cited the legacy of Nuremberg in signing the Rome accord that established the ICC, but he never sent the treaty to a Senate that was sure not to ratify it. In post-Vietnam America, the kind of issues around legal jurisdiction that were brushed aside for the Nazis now loomed large. The U.S. delegation at Rome was actually one of just seven nations that voted against the ICC — putting us on a list with China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen ― while 120 nations, including many American allies, voted for it.

America’s split personality saw even greater hostility toward international justice during the presidency of Donald Trump, who in 2020 imposed economic sanctions and barred U.S. entry to two top ICC prosecutors after the panel said American actions would be included in a broad investigation of war crimes in Afghanistan. (Trump also pardoned three U.S. soldiers who’d been convicted of war crimes committed in Afghanistan.)

The Biden administration undid Trump’s sanctions and joined Graham and others in praising the ICC arrest warrant for its enemy, Putin. But recent actions by the ICC and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which issued a non-enforceable order that Israel halt any major invasion into the Gazan city of Rafah, have been harshly condemned by most American leaders, except a handful of progressive Democrats in the House.

“That Jekyll and Hyde divide will always be there — this tension between an international progressivism and a much older distrust of international institutions,” Bryant said.

Indeed, the twist that bodies like the ICC and ICJ — which would seem to be exemplars of the rules-based world order that the U.S. government claims to support — have turned against a longtime ally in Israel, and might eventually look at the American role in supplying so many of the bombs that have slaughtered civilians in Gaza, is exactly what ICC critics feared. It’s exactly why they didn’t want the United States to sign on to the ICC.

But a growing number of everyday Americans are wondering how a nation that found its moral voice at Nuremberg can now remain silent during the stream of images of burned or decapitated children coming out of Rafah.

“You can’t discriminate against what parties and countries the ICC would have jurisdiction over. You can’t just cherry-pick your targets,” Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia said. “So with respect to the ICC’s alleged equation of Hamas with Netanyahu, I think that’s a red herring. The bottom line is they both are guilty of violations of human rights, and that’s why they were both charged.”

Once again, the U.S. position on the ICC and its arrest warrants places us at odds with some of our closest allies like France and — irony alert — Germany, which voiced support for the concert of an international court for war criminals and its independence.

An America that once showed the world how war criminals can be brought to justice now risks becoming an isolated international pariah over its resistance to the ICC. Where is Spencer Tracy when you need him?

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