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)
An in depth look at the persecution and subsequent death of the 5 million non Jewish victims of the World War II Holocaust and the lives of those who survived. Through stories of survivors and historical footage, these lesser known voices are brought to life. From the Roma and Sinti people who were also targeted for complete annihilation to the thousands of Catholic Priests who were killed for speaking out, Forget Us Not strives to educate and give tribute to those who were killed for their religion, ethnicity, political views, sexual orientation and physical handicaps.
A handful of prisoners in WWII camps risked their lives to take clandestine photographs and document the hell the Nazis were hiding from the world. In the vestiges of the camps, director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs, composing as such an archeology of images as acts of defiance.
The story of black and mixed race people in Nazi Germany who were sterilised, experimented upon, tortured and exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps. It also explores the history of German racism and examines the treatment of Black prisoners-of-war. The film uses interviews with survivors and their families as well as archival material to document the Black German Holocaust experience.
When the lights dim and the stage is revealed, Meschke channels life through the strings of his puppets, triggering the spiritual connection between the creator and his alter-egos: the charismatic Don Quixote, the loving Penelope, the inquisitive Baptiste, or the mysterious Antigone. THE MAN WHO MADE ANGELS FLY is a poetic story about a master of his craft that has inspired audiences to reflect upon common issues of suffering and the mortal coil. Visionary and un-biographic, imaginary tribute to the puppeteer.
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
Surviving against all odds. In 1940, Benjamin Orenstein, just a teenager, was sent to his first concentration camp in Poland. It was the beginning of a journey that would mark him for life. After years of silence, he now bears witness to one of the darkest chapters in history.
This story follows one man's quest to uncover the origins and reveal the mysteries of a possible Holocaust artifact some historians now say never existed: lampshades made of human skin. When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina receded, they left behind a wrecked New Orleans and a strange looking lamp that an illicit dealer claimed was 'made from the skin of Jews.'
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.
A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".
The Holocaust began with the indiscriminate mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen in the bloodlands of Eastern Europe and was perfected in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “Bullets And Blueberries” explores the motives, methods and madness of the perpetrators, using never-before-seen images captured by the killers themselves — images that fully capture the banality of evil.
Even high Nazi leaders like Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring were almost contemptuous of this party comrad, and yet he was one of the most influential figures in the Third Reich: Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic weekly "Der Stürmer", responsible for the worst propaganda and infamous for his corrupt and violent regime as Gauleiter of Franconia. By the Allies he was considered a symbol of Nazi hatred of the Jews. In 1946 he was sentenced to death in Nuremberg and executed.
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.
Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator
A portrait of Pope Pius XII (1876-1958), head of the Catholic Church from 1939 until his death, who, during World War II, and while European Jews were being exterminated by the Nazis, was accused of keeping a disconcerting and shameful silence.
A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?
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.
The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.
For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.
The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah.