Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
Archival footage of an American Nazi rally that attracted 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in 1939, shortly before the beginning of World War II.
This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.
Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.
The secret Nazi death camp at Sobibor was created solely for the mass extermination of Jews. But on the 14th October 1943, in one of the biggest and most successful prison revolts of WWII, the inmates fought back.
A documentary about the rise of anti-Semitism in the USA after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In 1944, two prisoners miraculously escaped from Auschwitz. They told the world of the horror of the Holocaust and raised one of the greatest moral questions of the 20th century.
Andor Stern is the only Brazilian survivor of the Holocaust. In this documentary, he goes back in his memories to relive the deportation to Auschwitz at age 16, and the daily conquest of a free life.
Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.
Talal Derki returns to his homeland where he gains the trust of a radical Islamist family, sharing their daily life for over two years. His camera focuses on Osama and his younger brother Ayman, providing an extremely rare insight into what it means to grow up in an Islamic Caliphate.
When indie comic character Pepe the Frog becomes an unwitting icon of hate, his creator, artist Matt Furie, fights to bring Pepe back from the darkness and navigate America's cultural divide.
Filmmaker Peter Hegedus embarks on the challenging journey to make Sorella's Story, an immersive 360° film set on the beaches of Latvia in December 1941, when thousands of Jewish Women and children perished at the hands of Nazi collaborators. Along the way Peter teams up with Jewish-Australian 90-year-old Ethel Davies whose family was also killed in the same massacre.
About the nurses who used their professional skills to murder the handicapped, mentally ill and infirm at the behest of the Third Reich and directly participated in genocide.
A documentary film that tells the fascinating and incredible story of 13 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in former Czechoslovakia, during the II World War. These men and women, that back then were children, found a legendary Jewish-German character named Fredy Hirsch, who changed their lives forever. The work describes the terrible living conditions in Terezin Ghetto and; on the other hand, the approach to culture and art behind the walls of the concentration camp. Up to this moment, everything develops as a known story, but by the end of 1943 there is an unexpected turn when these children are deported together with their families to the extermination camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. And there, in the middle of hell, they lived in.
Auschwitz: Countdown To Liberation
The true story of German-Czech businessman Oskar Schindler (1908-74) as told by some of the Jews — more than a thousand people — whose lives he saved from extermination during World War II.
Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, the last two survivors of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, recount the horrors they experienced during the war and talk about their lives after their escape in a prisoner uprising in 1943. Willenberg would go on to become a hero of the 1944 Warsaw uprising while Taigman would be called as a witness during the infamous trial of Adolf Eichmann.
The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.