Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial, is seen in the documentary Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today. (NARA)

When American filmmaker Stuart Schulberg shot his documentary about the first of the famous Nuremberg trials in 1945, he made two versions — one for the Germans and another for the American public.

For the Germans, the film was meant to show how their leaders had failed them and why top Nazis were being tried as war criminals. For the Americans, it was a chance to see one of the greatest courtroom dramas in history.

U.S. Signal Corps camera teams were able to shoot only 25 hours during the 10-month trial. (Schulberg Productions)

Yet when Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today is shown at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival this weekend, it will be the first time people are seeing it in North America.

Schulberg's documentary broke new ground — both for filming inside a courtroom and for exposing the public to a war crimes trial. Made at the behest of the U.S. War Department (later the Defence Department), it was never released to American cinemas. The original footage disappeared. Schulberg went on to make films about the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and then had a career at NBC. It was his daughter, film producer and financier Sandra Schulberg, who rediscovered Nuremberg.

"I wouldn't have started on this if we hadn't found all these fascinating documents about the making of Nuremberg after my mother's death when we were clearing out her apartment," says Schulberg, who has spent the last five years trying to restore the film.

The 78-minute print to be shown in Toronto is almost unchanged from the original created by Stuart Schulberg and editor Joseph Zigman. The doc follows a tight structure, laying out in painstaking detail the four main indictments against the 21 Nazi officials on trial, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer. The four counts were conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The documentary presents filmed evidence taken by the Nazis themselves in support of the indictment and it outlines the joint prosecution by the four allies — Britain, Russia, the U.S. and France. It also captures some of the trial's magnificent legal oratory, including U.S. Justice Robert Jackson's famous opening and closing statements.

Sandra Schulberg says she regrets not having had a chance to speak to her father about Nuremberg before he died in 1979 (at age 56).

"Although I was very engaged with my father's work as a teenager and young woman, it was work that he was doing then, which was fascinating. I never thought to ask him about his earlier work — for one, I'd never seen it," she says. Fortunately, her Uncle Budd, the author and filmmaker who accompanied her father to Germany, was able to tell her part of the story. (Budd Schulberg died last August.)

During the war, Stuart Schulberg had been part of OSS Field Photographic Branch, the film unit headed by Hollywood director John Ford. He was sent to Germany in June 1945 — initially to hunt down film footage of war atrocities. Later that year, he began his Nuremberg documentary. It was made under the aegis of Pare Lorentz, the producer known as Franklin Roosevelt's filmmaker. It was finished in 1948, and although it had a good run in German theatres, the U.S. Defence Department never released the English version.

"We have enough information to say this film was suppressed, and then the question is why — and I think there are many interesting reasons," Sandra Schulberg says. "They range from concern about the atrocity footage to concern on the part of some U.S. military officers who were not comfortable with the fact that German military officers had been put on trial."

The same unit put together a one-hour documentary of Allied film, taken during the liberation of the concentration camps. Films the Nazis themselves had shot helped secure their convictions. It was one of the earliest uses of film in a long, complex trial.

Stuart, left, and Budd Schulberg worked in the same OSS film unit during preparation for the Nuremberg trial. (Schulberg Family Archive)

Both the Washington Post and New York Daily Mirror columnist Walter Winchell wrote articles in 1949 speculating why the film was never released. "A hall of shame," Winchell said. The reasons may have had to do with keeping the new threat in Europe — the Soviets — at the top of the public mind, or with convincing Americans that they should continue to support the Marshall Plan.

Nuremberg was shown widely throughout Germany in 1949 as part of the "reorientation" process the Allies were carrying out in a shattered Europe.

"Unlike the film they forced people to see in 1945, called Death Mills, this was a film that was shown in regular movie theatres and people paid to see it," Schulberg says. There was a screening of the German version of Nuremberg at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004, and that inspired Schulberg to restore all of her father's films from the late 1940s. The 35 mm print that she eventually found came from German archives.

Schulberg, who has spent her career raising financing for films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Quills and Waiting for the Moon, worked with Josh Waletzky to create a print that could be seen by a modern audience. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today looks vintage, with the trademark imperfections of old film, but with crisp images of the inside of the courtroom.

The German print had no original sound — instead there was a translation over the parts of the film in which lawyers spoke in English, French and Russian. But the entire Nuremberg trial had been recorded and the tape still existed in both Washington and The Hague, Netherlands. Painstakingly, Schulberg was able to combine the original oration with the footage — not always completely synchronized, but that was a problem her father also faced.

"I thought it was important to preserve the tone, the original wording of the narration as much as possible. I made very few changes — just explanatory phrases for modern audiences to know who the characters were. Then we rerecorded it using this marvelous actor Liev Schreiber, so we created a new narration track in English, and then we had to reconstruct the music," she said. The original score was by German composer Hans-Otto Borgmann, and could not be separated from the German narration. Instead, New York composer John Califra was able to recreate it on a synthesizer.

German moviegoers exit the Kamera cinema in Stuttgart after seeing Nuremberg in 1948. (Schulberg Family Archive)

Schulberg finished the restoration process in November 2009, with a screening in The Hague, home of the international criminal court. That event was held in conjunction with the awarding of the Erasmus Prize to BenjaminFerencz, a prosecutor at some of the later Nuremberg trials.

There would be 12 more Nuremberg trials over the next four years, but this one was the groundbreaker — with the four bickering Allies agreeing to a single trial structure. The principles laid out in that courtroom in 1945 and 1946 underlie international justice as practised today in The Hague.

Schulberg knows that her father was permitted just 25 hours in the courtroom over the course of the trial; those restrictions make his accomplishment even more astonishing. For new generations who have never seen footage of the Holocaust, the film is a powerful educational tool. Witnessing the German leaders' pleas that they did not know or were not responsible in the face of such powerful evidence is a sobering lesson in human frailty. The Holocaust Museum and the Steven Spielberg Foundation have been supporters, as have the Dutch National Archives. Still, Schulberg had to scramble to raise the $200,000 it cost to restore Nuremberg.

The Toronto Jewish Film Festival had been following her progress closely.

"I think it was three years ago when they first contacted me when they heard I was doing this, and every year they would say, 'Is it ready, is it ready?' I was very encouraged by their eagerness for the film."

Nuremberg will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on April 18. The film will open in New York in September.

Susan Noakes writes about the arts for CBC News.