None Shall Escape

The war is over and an international tribunal has been set up. In the dock sits a German officer named Wilhelm Grimm. The witnesses take the stand one by one: his former fiancée, a Pole who had been his pupil, a priest. What they describe reaches back to the end of the First World War. It starts in the years when Grimm was a village schoolteacher and shows step by step what he became. The film opened in January 1944, that is, while the war was still going on. It imagined a trial of this kind before the Nuremberg tribunals began, and became one of the first Hollywood productions to take the killing of Polish Jews directly as its subject. André de Toth directed; Lester Cole wrote the screenplay. Alexander Knox plays Grimm. The accused says in his defence that he was deceived and coerced; the film does not accept it.