NEW YORK — How do you make a story about the aftermath of World War II and the advent of the Cold War relevant for audiences in the 21st century?
By raising moral questions that still matter.
Abby Mann faced that task in reworking his powerful 1961 movie, "Judgment at Nuremberg," into an equally compelling story for the Broadway stage. The play, directed by John Tillinger, who also did "The Sunshine Boys" and "Inherit the Wind" for Broadway, opens at the Longacre Theatre on Monday.
The project reunites Mann with actor Maximilian Schell, who portrayed a passionate young German defense lawyer in the movie and who appears on stage as an aging German judge on trial. Schell took home an Academy Award for his performance. Mann, who wrote the original 1959 made-for-TV play, won an Oscar for his screenplay.
The basic plot remains the same. Months after the first Nuremberg trials convicted top Nazis like Hermann Goring and Rudolf Hess, an American judge, Dan Haywood, joins a tribunal deciding the fate of four "little people."
These low-level Nazis worked in the German judiciary, imposing penalties that ranged from sterilization to death for violating Nazi laws. Haywood is pressured by the government into acquitting the men so the United States can gain Germany's moral support against the Soviets, who have just begun their famous blockade of Berlin.
Some aspects of the material may feel familiar to audiences for whom Holocaust has become a household word. But it's the bigger issues the story raises that make it compelling. Can ordinary people be blamed for the actions of their political leaders? Did the men on trial have any real alternative but to sentence people according to Hitler's rules?
Various characters try to convince the judge that they did not know about concentration camps and that they suffered as much as anyone else, losing children and spouses to bombings and battles. They complain that the Nuremberg trials are nothing more than "the victors judging the vanquished."
Mann does not resolve all the moral questions he raises.
"People were trying to survive, and I'm not so pompous as to say that I have the answers," he says in an interview. "What I think is enormous is the questions. . . . This all really happened. But why did it happen?"
To help audiences relate to the material, Mann has added three crucial scenes. One looks at American race relations. Another suggests that anti-Semitism may not disappear in postwar Germany. And the third scene reminds today's audiences of just how frightened the West was of Communism, both in 1948, when the story is set, and in 1961, when the film debuted.
The first scene unfolds near the beginning of the play. Right after Haywood arrives in Nuremberg, which was the site of some of Hitler's most virulent rallies, he begins chatting with a black captain from the newly desegregated U.S. Armed Forces.
"I grew up in Texas," the captain says. "I've known these people before. They speak another language and dress differently, but . . . they're just like people in my hometown, people in my own unit."
"Are you trying to say that what happened here could happen at home?" asks Haywood.
"Can I imagine that the people there would have done things like this if there wasn't a government to stop them and they might be punished?" the captain responds. "I guess a day doesn't pass when I don't wonder about that. . . . People with my shade of skin react differently to what happened here than people with your shade of skin."
The captain has a special meaning for Mann, who recently wrote a cable-TV drama about a real case in which a black man was sentenced to die for the killing of a white teenager.
"Judge after judge in Texas went along with that decision, and five days before he was supposed to be executed, it was discovered he was innocent," Mann says. "That's why the guy says, 'I'm from Texas.' "
In the second new scene, the most important German defendant, a Nazi judge named Ernst Janning (Schell) is visited in jail by his daughter, Thea, who has just returned from New York City. She complains that the Americans are "acting as though no one else ever had problems with the Jews except us. Everyone's always had problems with them."
"So it begins again," Janning responds.
"It's what people are saying in Germany," Thea says. "Every person my age is saying it."
"I thought this was all over, but it isn't, is it?" Janning answers.
The scene resonates with the contemporary realities of neo-Nazism and Holocaust revisionists. Mann says he based the new material on what he encountered during a trip to Germany years after the war: "The young people were saying things like, 'Everybody has problems with the Jews' as a raison d'etre for trying to redeem their parents, by believing that part of it was the Jews' fault."
The new scene also adds a dimension to Janning's character that was missing in the film. Janning ultimately rises in the courtroom and admits his guilt, and the new scene with his daughter helps explain why.
"I changed it to give him a little more relevance and to understand a little more about it — a different motivation as to why he stands up in court," Mann says.
In the final added scene, an American general handling the airlift of supplies into Soviet-blockaded Berlin tries to convince the American prosecutor that the fight against Communism is more important than convicting low-level Nazis.
"If Berlin goes, Germany goes," the general says. "If Germany goes, Europe goes. . . . You convict these men, you'll make Communism look more attractive to the German people."
Mann recalls that when "Judgment at Nuremberg" first aired on television in 1959, "there were a lot of people who felt we really should not do it. The Cold War was at its height. Some people felt I was embarrassing the (Eisenhower) administration."
But Mann, then 42, did not back down. He went on, of course, to write the screenplay for the film and also wrote a novel based on the movie.
He's written many other high-profile works over the years, including the movies "Ship of Fools" and "A Child Is Waiting," and made-for-TV films including "The Atlanta Child Murders," "King," about Martin Luther King Jr., and "The Marcus-Nelson Murders," which inspired the series "Kojak."
The new production of "Judgment at Nuremberg" is being staged by Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre. The cast includes Marthe Keller as a charming German war widow, a role played by Marlene Dietrich in the movie; Randall's wife, Heather, as a German witness (portrayed by Judy Garland in the movie), whose friendship with an older Jewish man led to his execution; and George Grizzard as Judge Haywood, a role played by Spencer Tracy in the film. Mann changed the judge's home state from Maine to North Carolina to accommodate Grizzard's Southern roots.
"People seem to be more affected emotionally by the play than they were by the movie," Mann says. "I've been trying to figure out in my own mind why."