- Adaptation Displacement: Believe it or not, the movie is a remake of a TV episode. The episode, which had the same title as the film, was part of the anthology series Playhouse 90. Maximilian Schell won an Oscar reprising his role from the teleplay, but most of the cast was different; for instance, Claude Rains had appeared in the Spencer Tracy role for the TV production and Paul Lukas the Burt Lancaster role.
- Common Knowledge: The press and even several people in the industry put forth the narrative that Montgomery Clift was in such a bad way that the camera just captured confused improvisation from him. While he had trouble remembering some of his lines and was encouraged to ad-lib by Stanley Kramer, the Making Montgomery Clift documentary revealed that he was performing his own rewritten dialogue (with a taped phone call confirming he played the character as someone who "holds onto himself, in spite of himself, with dignity). So it was, surprise surprise, acting.
- Diagnosed by the Audience: Rudolph — who stammers and has difficulty stringing together sentences, especially when asked to construct an elementary one using three related words — clearly has some kind of learning disability, and it kept him from advancing very far in school. It's purposefully never specified what it is, because anything beyond a basic diagnosis that would mark him for sexual sterilization was unimportant to the Nazi regime.
- Genius Bonus: Much of Rolfe's defence (when he isn't trying to discredit the prosecution witnesses) consists of tu quoque arguments about how the Allies had similarly unsavory laws in the past. While this might seem like irrelevant whataboutery at first glance, the Nuremberg trials generally followed the principle of not punishing the accused for things that the Allies were themselves guilty of.note Rolfe's argument doesn't really cut any legal water because the Allied countries had repealed (or at least stopped using on a national level) the laws in question long before the Nazis came to power, but it's still probably the best tactic he has when it comes to defending four people who are very clearly guilty.
- Harsher in Hindsight: At one point in the movie, during his Heroic BSoD, Lawson tells Haywood, "One thing about Americans, we're not cut out to be occupiers. We're new at it and not very good at it." And that was before Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: In this film, William Shatner plays an American Army Captain. Five years later, he'd portray a far more famous Captain.
- One-Scene Wonder: Judy Garland's and Montgomery Clift's scenes.
- Retroactive Recognition: Werner Klemperer appears as one of the defendants, several years before his famous role as wacky Nazi Colonel Klink in Hogan's Heroes.
- Unintentional Period Piece: The movie's parting words — "The Nuremberg trials held in the American Zone ended July 14, 1949. There were 99 defendants sentenced to prison terms. Not one is still serving his sentence." — meant something to the audiences of 1961, just a dozen years after the film's setting. A modern audience has to put themselves in that time frame or else their reaction will be, "Duh, they're all dead by now."
- Values Resonance: The film emphasizes the largely unpunished complicity of the Nazi civil service in the Holocaust, America's hypocritical background in having racial and eugenics policies that partially inspired certain Nazis, and the U.S. government and public's willingness to let perpetrators of war crimes go not just unpunished, but uncondemned due to a combination of Realpolitik and Bystander Syndrome, all of which are valid points that have often been emphasized less rather than more in popular culture since the film's release.
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