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)
A film about friendship in difficult times, Auschwitz.
Au revoir les enfants tells a heartbreaking story of friendship and devastating loss concerning two boys living in Nazi-occupied France. At a provincial Catholic boarding school, the precocious youths enjoy true camaraderie—until a secret is revealed. Based on events from writer-director Malle’s own childhood, the film is a subtle, precisely observed tale of courage, cowardice, and tragic awakening.
Shortly before the end of the war in 1945, the Allies can already be heard in Nesselbühl in Swabia when three freight cars are uncoupled at the station. The screams of the starving concentration camp prisoners inside can be heard throughout the village, but nobody dares to help them. Only the innkeeper's daughter Anna takes heart...
In one continuous shot, SHTTL shows the lives, loves, and inner conflicts within a Yiddish speaking shtetl on the border between Ukraine and Poland - one day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Benito Mussolini: Anatomy of a Dictator
Researcher Hannelore Witkovsky searches for the notorious Nazi war criminal Dr. Joseph Mengele's lost film about his experiments on a family of little people in Auschwitz including Holocaust survivor Perla Ubitsch, whom she befriends.
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.
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.
Irena Sendler is a Catholic social worker who has sympathized with the Jews since her childhood, when her physician father died of typhus contracted while treating poor Jewish patients. When she initially proposes saving Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, her idea is met with skepticism by fellow workers, her parish priest, and even her own mother Janina.
A documentary film about the Nazi criminal Stefan Rojek. Rojko was an SS-Oberscharführer in the Small Fortress Terezín during World War II, the "right hand" of the fortress commander Heinrich Jöckel. After the war he fled to Graz, later sentenced to life imprisonment, and was paroled on 24 June 1975. The film was made in cooperation with the SPB and the Memorial of National Suffering in Terezín.
13 years ago, director Bob Entrop made the film A piece of blue in the sky, the first film in the Netherlands that depicted the murder of almost 1 million Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. There is a taboo on what happened during the war, you don't talk about it with anyone and certainly not in front of a camera. Requiem for Auschwitz is a sequel, with the most valuable moments from the first film, supplemented with the grandchildren and the creation and performance of the 'Requiem for Auschwitz' by Sinti composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb by the Sinti and Roma Philharmonic from Frankfurt and a Jewish choir in the Berliner Dom in Berlin, during Holocaust Memorial Day. During his visit to Auschwitz in 2020 with four musicians from the Dutch Accompaniment Orchestra, Roger shows them the places that inspired him.
Chicken Soup With Knives is a personal documentary that chronicles filmmaker Leora Eisenstein’s journey (with her sister and other companions) to Lviv, her family’s hometown before World War II. There, she embarks on a search for her roots as well as a sense of justice. The journey from Israel to Ukraine encompasses meetings with current residents of Lviv, family reunions, and personal reflections. All of these elements converge as the film maps the effects of the past—and all of its painful memories—on the present.
Through interviews we meet some of the people who risked their lives to hide Jewish children during World War II and how this experience has continued to affect the survivors.
In the summer of 2001, 75-year-old Mathi Schenk made his last trip to Poland, following in the footsteps of his own past. He lives in the eastern cantons of Belgium, which were forcibly united with the German Reich after the invasion of German troops in May 1940. Those who did not volunteer for the Wehrmacht were – like Mathi Schenk – sent to war as forced soldiers for Germany. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, the 18-year-old arrived in the Polish capital and was assigned to the notorious SS Dirlewanger Brigade. During the 63 days of bitter fighting, which cost the lives of more than 200,000 Poles, he witnessed unimaginable atrocities against the people of Warsaw. While fleeing the Red Army, Polish farmers found the young soldier wounded in a ditch. Despite his German uniform, they hid him from the Russians in their village.
How much should you negotiate with the enemy? In Israel, the debate over that question evoked fury to the point of assassination. Such was the case of Kasztner. Dr Israel (Rezso) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who tried to rescue the last million Jews of Europe by negotiating face to face with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, was gunned down by another Jew who never set foot in Nazi Europe. After 50 years, his assassin Ze'ev Eckstein breaks his silence on the fateful night he shot and killed Kasztner. (Storyville)
In 1961, history was on trial... in a trial that made history. Just 15 years after the end of WWII, the Holocaust had been largely forgotten. That changed with the capture of Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi officer hiding in Argentina. Through rarely-seen archival footage, The Eichmann Trial documents one of the most shocking trials ever recorded, and the birth of Holocaust awareness and education.
Co-produced by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Research Institute, this Academy Award-winning documentary relates the harrowing story of Gerda Weissmann Klein and her journey of survival and remembering both before and after the war.
Czechoslovakian Zbynek Brynych directs this psychological drama set in World War II Terezin ghetto. A dark, visual portrayal of the trials and tribulations the Theresienstadt people faced on a daily basis presented in a series of memorable stories. Their hopes and dreams unfold against the perpetual threat of deportation (or worse) by the Nazis. Based on the novel "Night and Hope" by Arnost Lustig.
In the nine months prior to World War II, 10.000 innocent children left behind their families, their homes, their childhood, and took the journey... to Britain to escape the Nazi Holocaust.