By STEVE DOLLAR

It’s textbook stuff, right? Watching Stuart Schulberg’s documentary “Nuremberg” in junior high school history class was an experience shared by many Americans of a certain generation. At least, it seems so. What the schools actually showed, however, were other documentaries that used filmed excerpts from the Nuremberg trials, which in 1945 and 1946 brought the members of Hitler’s inner circle—including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess and Albert Speer—to be judged for war crimes before an international military tribunal.

In reality, “Nuremberg” was exhibited all over Germany in the aftermath of World War II, but for reasons that remain unclear, it was never distributed in America. Until now. On Tuesday, a new restoration of “Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today” will screen at the New York Film Festival. Then on Wednesday, it will begin a one-week run at Film Forum.

The restoration project was a labor of love for Schulberg’s daughter, Sandra Schulberg, a movie producer, Columbia University professor, and niece of Budd Schulberg, the Oscar-winning screenwriter (“On the Waterfront”) who also played an essential role in making the original film. The family legacy is undeniable, but Ms. Schulberg said that taking up the project wasn’t as easy as it might sound.

“I could have been my father’s daughter and not attempted this had I not been a filmmaker,” she said. “If I had been a dentist, I would have been overwhelmed at the idea.” After watching a German-language version of the documentary at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival, Ms. Schulberg’s curiosity was further aroused when she began poring through an inventory of her father’s documents that she inherited after her mother’s death. “They made it pretty clear that this was an untold story, long buried.”

Now that the restoration is complete and the film will begin circulating, Ms. Schulberg (who collaborated with the filmmaker and sound designer Josh Waletzky on the project) has come to terms with the suppression of her father’s work —whether it was by Hollywood or the government, which was advancing the Marshall Plan. “If Americans had seen this film at the time, it would have reopened the wounds of the war, would have reminded people of the horrific, horrific atrocities that occurred,” she said. “Truman was trying to win the peace.”

The story of the making of “Nuremberg” is worthy of its own film. In the summer of 1945, the Schulberg brothers, Stuart (1922-79) and Budd (1914-2009), under the command of legendary director John Ford in Washington D.C., led a team from the OSS Field Photographic Branch on a four-month mission to find films and photographs to be used as evidence against the Nazis at Nuremberg. Reels of film were snatched from fires thought to have been set by one of the German film editors assisting the brothers. Budd Schulberg personally apprehended Leni Riefenstahl at her Austrian chalet to work alongside him in the editing room as a material witness. “She thought she was being arrested as a war criminal,” Ms. Schulberg said of the infamous Nazi propagandist.

Restoring the brothers’ effort became a case of history repeating itself. “We had to start over from scratch,” Ms. Schulberg said. The complete trial was recorded on audio, but only 25 hours of film footage was shot, which, as in 1947, made synchronization of sound and image a creative act. Then as now, much coverage is provided by a narrator, a role filled in the restoration by actor Liev Schreiber.

“Having done so much work on and around the subject of the Holocaust, I had become a little shy of the subject,” Mr. Schreiber said. “But I had no idea how compelling [this] was. I had no idea.”

One observer deeply shaken by the restored film is Ernest Michel, the 87-year-old founder of the United Jewish Appeal, who witnessed the first Nuremberg trial as a reporter for the German news agency DANA. Mr. Michel was then a 22-year-old survivor of the concentration camps whose byline often identified him as “Former Inmate of Auschwitz 104995.”

“I had to really control myself,” Mr. Michel said, recalling his presence at the trial, where he sat mere feet from Göring. Last week, he shared a table in his offices with Ms. Schulberg following the NYFF press screening of “Nuremberg,” having just watched the film for the first time in decades. “This film, it affected me. I must say, it really bowled me over.”

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