Raul Hilberg

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.

This film by Johanna Heer and Werner Schmiedel represents a homage to a man revered internationally as one of the great humanitarians of the 20th century. Raul Hilberg and other intellectuals also perceive him as a philosopher, although his primary work for many decades was the investigation of Nazi criminals.

About the life and work of controversial American Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein.