During the trial of the major Nazi war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, American and Soviet prosecutors used film in an unprecedented fashion. Concerned that claims of Nazi atrocities might be dismissed as the stuff of Allied propaganda, on two occasions prosecutors dimmed the courtroom's lights and screened films that captured the horrific scenes that greeted the liberators of Nazi concentration camps. These films provided, so prosecutors argued, irrefutable evidence of incredible crimes.

They also, however, served larger political purposes, which are explored in Ulrike Weckel's excellent new book, Beschämende Bilder. Deutsche Reaktionen auf allierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager. The screening of atrocity films at Nuremberg paved the way, Weckel shows, for a larger and more ambitious use of atrocity films as a way of showing Germans the crimes perpetrated by the regime that many of them had vociferously and tenaciously supported. German POWs were, as a matter of course, forced to watch atrocity movies by their American and British captors, and the four Allied powers also arranged for the screening of atrocity films in their respective occupation zones. Weckel meticulously examines the specific films screened by the Allies—there were ten in all—as well as the circumstances that surrounded their showing.

How successful was this unusual cinematic project as a tool of collective reeducation, or, to use a more contemporary term, as an instrument of transitional justice? American occupiers, intent on securing social scientific answers to this question, administered questionnaires to their target audience. These questionnaires sought to ascertain whether, for example, Germans were more likely to register feelings of collective guilt after having watched an atrocity film. The fact that the survey recorded no such result was widely interpreted at the time—and by more recent scholars—as a sign of the failure of the atrocity film project.

Weckel, who uses more sophisticated and subtle interpretive tools, arrives at different answers in part because she poses different questions. Weckel insists that the fixation on collective guilt represented a mistake on the part of both certain Allied assessors and previous scholars. Less designed to foster collective guilt, the screening of atrocity films, Weckel argues, can be better understood in terms of a politics of shame. This focus, she insists, is more faithful to the motives of the Allies; Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, notably rejected the collective guilt argument in his opening address to the IMT. Jackson knew full well that morally indicting all Germans for the crimes of the regime would both diminish the legal liability of those actually responsible for orchestrating Nazi atrocities and frustrate the goal of building a reliable democracy in the defeated country.

All the same, the Allies, in particular the Americans, felt genuine outrage at Nazi atrocities and so felt morally authorized to shame Germans. And regardless of the occupiers' motives, Weckel shows that the POWs and the ordinary Germans who constituted the films' target audience perceived these documents of atrocity as tools of public shaming. In developing this argument, Weckel delivers both a fine archival history and a nuanced contribution to media reception theory. She rightfully insists that the audience's perception and understanding of the films were shaped not only by the images and commentary that they encountered on the screen, but also by the staging and circumstances of the screening—mandatory in the case of POWs, and under the watchful and reproachful gaze of occupiers in the case of ordinary Germans.

These exercises in shaming aroused a rich variety of responses from Germans; Weckel's resourceful and dogged work of archival retrieval, which presents the reader not only with the results of American surveys, but more revealingly, with a broad swath of German reactions to the films in the form of diary entries, excerpts from memoirs, articles plucked from POW newspapers, and more recent interviews, marks the book's central accomplishment. The breadth of sources reflects the breadth of German responses. Some Germans confessed that their national identity had become a source of deserved shame; others registered disgust at the crimes of the regime and yet bristled against the perceived moral arrogance of the occupiers; fewer engaged in fitful gestures of evasion and denial.

In inventorying these responses, Weckel rejects any effort to compress such a broad spectrum of reactions into simple binaries. To ask whether the politics of shaming was successful is, she insists, to ask the wrong question. In defending this position, however, Weckel is only partially successful. While the historian might be satisfied in sampling the full range of responses, those tasked with engineering a transition to democracy in a country riven by the legacy of horrific crimes do not enjoy this luxury. Here it is crucial to ask whether certain responses predominate, whether certain tactics of screening are seen as more efficacious than others. Ever the rigorous historian, Weckel refuses to draw lessons that might guide future projects of public pedagogy in transitional societies.

As a final matter, in a book so generously attentive to the politics of reception, Weckel might have paid greater attention to how Germans under Hitler had been trained to view film. Did Germans view Allied atrocity films as they did in part because Nazi propaganda, which used film in a highly sophisticated manner, had socialized them to absorb images—particularly those coming from an enemy/occupier—in particular ways? A willingness to speculate more generously on the politics of shaming and attention to the legacy of Nazi cinematic propaganda would have strengthened an otherwise impressive and richly documented study of a radical project of filmic pedagogy.