A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

This was so true when it came to convicting the Nazi war criminals. At the Nuremberg trials, the Allies had 250 tons of written material documenting the crimes committed by the Nazis. It was tedious reading material.

It wasn't until the prosecutor presented a film that showed the horrors of the concentration camps that the 21 Nazi's on trial knew it was over for them. Read more about this here...

Excerpt:

When everything was ready, the lights in the courtroom were dimmed; perhaps for security reasons, perhaps to gauge their reactions, the defendants were illuminated by small lights installed in their box. The clacking noise of the projector starting up was to prove the crack of doom for Hitler's amoral co-conspirators.

The film, "Nazi Concentration Camps," was a distillation of footage shot by Allied cameramen as their armies had liberated the death camps one by one in the final months of the war. The documentary was directed by Lt. Col. George C. Stevens, a noted Hollywood director in his own right (before enlisting, Stevens directed Woman of the Year; after the war, some of his most notable films included Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, Giant and A Place in the Sun, the last two of which earned him Best Director Oscars).

The scenes, many of them familiar to us now, were absolutely shocking in their day: Bulldozers shoving tumbling corpses into open pits. Bodies stacked like cordwood. Walking skeletons looking dazedly into the camera, uncomprehending. And then, just when the viewer's mind started to go numb, the camera would focus in on a single dead face among a literal pile of dead faces, eyes staring vacantly, glazed over, transforming the millions of deaths which (to paraphrase Stalin) up to that point were just a statistic, into the unspeakable tragedy of single death upon single death upon single death, repeated to horror.

The film lasted just under an hour. The effect on the mood in the courtroom can hardly be overstated. Some people could not bear to watch; one woman fainted. And as the images from the projector continued to flicker across the screen that fateful afternoon, the veneer of arrogance and invincibility that had been a hallmark of the Nazi true believers for 12 long years finally cracked. A psychologist assigned to monitor the defendants at the trial described what he observed among those sitting in the box while "Nazi Concentration Camps" was shown:

Funk covers his eyes . . . Sauckel mops brow . . . Frank swallows hard, blinks eyes, trying to stifle tears . . . Frank mutters, "Horrible!" . . . . Rosenberg fidgets, peeks at screen, bows head, looks to see how others are reacting . . . Seyss-Inquart stoic throughout . . . Speer looks very sad, swallows hard . . . Defense attorneys are now muttering, "for God’s sake – terrible." . . . Fritzsche, pale, biting lips, really seems in agony . . . Doenitz has head buried in his hands . . . Keitel now hanging head."

http://books.google.com/...

By the time the projectors high up on the courtroom balcony cranked out the sixth and last terrible reel, Field Marshal [Wilhelm] Keitel was defeated as few generals have been defeated on a field of battle. He sat there, bent over and broken, mopping his lined face with a soggy ball of handkerchief.

President Obama is doing the right thing by withholding pictures of torture from the public eye. If these pictures are released too soon, the public will become desensitized by the scenes of torture. It is best to present these pictures in a court of law, in front of a jury so that the shock value sways the jury to convict Dick Cheney and his cartel.