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 National Socialist community "Kraft durch Freude" was a political organization with the task of organizing, monitoring and standardizing the leisure time of the German population. It is known today mainly as a vacation organization that practically brought mass tourism to Germany for the first time. The documentary shows private footage of travelers, film sequences from the Ministry of Propaganda as well as material from Eva Braun's film archive and thus provides a comprehensive insight into how vacations were organized in the Third Reich.
In 1945, 160 German cities lay in ruins and the loss of millions of lives, billions in material assets and countless cultural treasures was mourned throughout Europe... With the question “How could it happen?”, the film goes back to the year 1914, when the “primal catastrophe of the 20th century” took its course with the First World War.
A Nazi propaganda film made to promote anti-Semitism among the German people. Newly-shot footage of Jewish neighborhoods in recently-conquered Poland is combined with preexisting film clips and stills to defame the religion and advance Hitler's slurs that its adherents were plotting to undermine European civilization.
Comprised of video shot during the Nazi regime, including propaganda, newsreels, broadcasts and even some of Eva Braun's colorized personal home movies, we explore the way in which the Third Reich infiltrated the lives of the German population, from 1933 to 1945.
The SS chief Heinrich Himmler wanted to exchange Jews against so-called German Reich abroad, against arms sales or for cash - with the express approval of Hitler.
During the Nazi regime, there was widespread persecution of homosexual men, which started in 1871 with the Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Thousands were murdered in concentration camps. This powerful and disturbing documentary, narrated by Rupert Everett, presents for the first time the largely untold testimonies of some of those who survived.
Featuring never-before-seen film footage of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, The Architecture of Doom captures the inner workings of the Third Reich and illuminates the Nazi aesthetic in art, architecture and popular culture. From Nazi party rallies to the final days inside Hitler's bunker, this sensational film shows how Adolf Hitler rose from being a failed artist to creating a world of ponderous kitsch and horrifying terror. Hitler worshipped ancient Rome and Greece, and dreamed of a new Golden Age of classical art and monumental architecture, populated by beautiful, patriotic Aryans. Degenerated artists and inferior races had no place in his lurid fantasy. As this riveting film shows, the Nazis went from banning the art of modernists like Picasso to forced euthanasia of the retarded and sick, and finally to the persecution of homosexuals and the extermination of the Jews.
The absurd and often surrealistic story of the last propaganda film of the Third Reich.
The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.
This portrait that goes against the grain depicts the Führer as a lazy, isolated leader, cut off from reality, incapable of governing without his "apostles". They are Hitler's essential ministers, advisers, rivals, courtiers. They hate each other, and the Führer puts them in competition, often to get the worst out of them. The portraits of Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer but also Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and Doctor Joseph Mengele trace the rivalries, hatreds and predations that punctuate the entire frightening epic of Nazism. This documentary is composed of a selection of archive images and testimonies from descendants and specialists of this period.
The film focuses on Cologne citizens of different social backgrounds and political views, who took different paths to their common anti-fascist commitment in the Cologne National Committee for a Free Germany. They describe the events in Cologne before 1933, the mood of the population when Hitler came to power and the proletarian resistance struggle - despite growing fascist terror.
In June 1944, optimism reigned in the Allied camp. In the West, the Normandy landings were a success. In their advance, the troops soon threatened the German border. In the East, the Red Army launched an attack. With Operation Bagration, it swept into Belarus and forced the Wehrmacht into a terrible retreat. It was a time for confidence. There was no doubt: "The war would be over before Christmas." And yet... The war dragged on for almost another year. Eleven long months of fighting, punctuated by terrible battles and atrocious war crimes. Eleven months of fear and hope, which shook the certainties of the leaders and the daily lives of the men. Eleven murderous months, which left an eternal scar on hearts and in history.
This is the story of an incredible rise to power, the most comprehensive documentary on Hermann Goering ever made. He was a man of many faces: vain, ambitious, more brutal than any other of Hitler's minions, yet the most popular Nazi official of all, at times even more popular than Hitler himself. He embodied the jovial side of the Third Reich. Yet the same man who organised dissolute bacchanals also founded the Gestapo, set up the first concentration camps, and had his own comrades murdered in the purge of 1934. These unique personal records form the largest and most important single film find from the Nazi era in past years.
This film captures the affair, full of love, lust, and despair, between Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, from 1932 until their double suicide in 1945.
In February 1945, American troops launched a major offensive intended to bring about the end of the Third Reich. Accompanying them were two dozen cameramen from the U.S. Signal Corps, who documented the downfall of Nazi Germany on 35mm celluloid. A two-part SPIEGEL-TV documentary by Michael Kloft.
Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?
Discovering Paris under the German occupation through the story of an SS soldier and more generally of Wehrmacht soldiers allows us to follow the daily life on the German side. These soldiers enjoyed privileged status, during their stay, they were led to believe that they belong to a social elite, a status unreachable back in Germany during peacetime. And who better than a German who has led such lifestyle to serve as a common thread and tell this story?
Chronicles the adventurous life of Hungarian-born Jewish lawyer Benjamin Ferencz, who fled to the USA as a child and later became chief war crime prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1949 and one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002.
Mein Name sei Altmann