On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).
A woman’s Holocaust memoir takes the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher-turned-detective reveals her story as an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.
Anne Frank's world famous diary came to an abrupt end shortly before she and her family were discovered hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex at the top of Otto Frank's office building, on August 4, 1944. While her diary tells the story of Anne's life, the story of her death reveals the atrocities encountered by millions of Jews during the Holocaust. In a solemn remembrance of the horrors that Anne Frank and these millions of others suffered during the dark days of World War II, National Geographic Channel (NGC) takes viewers inside the concentration camps in a two-hour special. In keeping with NGC's tradition of unparalleled storytelling, Anne Frank's Holocaust incorporates new findings and rarely seen photographs to reintroduce the story of the massacre of Jews in one of the most comprehensive documentaries on the subject to date.
A documentary exploring how Albanians, including many Muslims, helped and sheltered Jewish refugees during WWII at their own risk, and trying to help the son of an Albanian baker that housed a Jewish family for a year return some Hebrew books that the family had to leave behind.
In 1935, German scientists dug for bones; in 1943, they murdered to get them. How the German scientific community supported Nazism, distorted history to legitimize a hideous system and was an accomplice to its unspeakable crimes. The story of the Ahnenerbe, a sinister organization created to rewrite the obscure origins of a nation.
Nazi troops massacre 30,000 Jews over a three-day period in September 1941. Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine.
For the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer looks back through the eyes of those who were imprisoned there.
In 1945, two young American soldiers, brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg, are commissioned to collect filmed and recorded evidence of the horrors committed by the infamous Third Reich in order to prove Nazi war crimes during the Nuremberg trials (1945-46). The story of the making of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a paramount historic documentary, released in 1948.
As a 10-year-old “Mengele Twin,” Eva Kor suffered some of the worst of the Holocaust. At 50, she launched the biggest manhunt in history. Now in her 80s, she circles the globe to promote the lesson her journey has taught: Healing through forgiveness.
A dramatic documentary film that deals with the Nazi rise to power in Germany in the 1930s and the development of the persecution of Jews up to the Holocaust. The film tells about the attitude of the Finnish government to the request for the handover of the Finnish Jews presented by Heinrich Himmler in the summer of 1942. The main focus of the film is the life of Jewish refugees in Finland in the years 1938-1942 and the attitude of the Finnish government to their handover in the fall of 1942.
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.
The Black Book, drafted during World War II, gathers numerous unique historical testimonies, in an effort to document Nazi abuses against Jews in the USSR . Initially supported by the regime and aimed at providing evidence during the executioners’ trials in the post-war era, the Black Book was eventually banned and most of its authors executed on Stalin’s order. Told through the voices of its most famous instigators, soviet intellectuals Vassilli Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg and Solomon Mikhoels, the documentary, provides a detailed account of the tragic destiny of this cursed book and puts the Holocaust and Stalinism in a new light.
The story of the German occupation of Latvia and one of Rīga’s major 20th century historical tragedies, which will be remembered by the people of Rīga forever. French teacher Riva Šefere, lawyer Aleksandrs Bergmanis, music teacher Gabriela Paraša, film historian Valentīna Freimane and historian and founder of the museum “Jews in Latvia” Marģers Vetermanis are just a few of the 30 000 Latvian Jews who were imprisoned in the Riga ghetto. These are eyewitness memories of the holocaust that need to be told.
A gripping documentary about the courage and determination of a young English stockbroker who saved the lives of 669 children. Between March 13 and August 2, 1939, Nicholas Winton organized 8 transports to take children from Prague to new homes in Great Britain, and kept quiet about it until his wife discovered a scrapbook documenting his unique mission in 1988. Winton was a successful 29-year-old stockbroker in London who "had an intuition" about the fate of the Jews when he visited Prague in 1939. He quietly but decisively got down to the business of saving lives. We learn how only two countries, Sweden and Britain, answered his call to harbor the young refugees; how documents had to be forged and how once foster parents signed for the children on delivery, that was the last he saw of them.
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)
Syndrome K is the true story about a highly contagious, highly fictitious disease created by three Roman Catholic doctors during the holocaust to hide Jews in a Vatican-affiliated hospital.
A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.
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.
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.