June, 1944, German-occupied Denmark. It has never been so dangerous to be part of the resistance. In a safe house, five fighters wait for comrades on a sabotage mission. When they do not return, and no news comes, fear begins to take hold.
A Hand of Peace: Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust
A double portrait of two dictators who were thousands of miles apart but were constantly fixated on each other.
In the occupied Netherlands during World War II, banker Walraven van Hall is asked to use his financial contacts to help the Dutch resistance. With his brother Gijs, he comes up with a risky plan to take out huge loans and use the money to finance the Resistance.
In WWII-Italy, the Gestapo blackmails a con man to impersonate a dead partisan commander in order to extract information from his fellow inmates.
Shoshana
Backstage before a performance, a French actor recalls his time in Madagascar during World War II, when he secretly ran a Resistance radio station under the watch of a collaborationist police chief. His story unfolds in flashback, revealing espionage, deception, and divided loyalties within the French ranks. Made for Britain’s Ministry of Information, this 1944 French-language propaganda short satirizes Vichy opportunism and wartime hypocrisy, and was shelved for decades before its release in 1993.
In Iasi, Romania, from June 28 to July 6, 1941, nearly 15 000 Jews were murdered in the course of a horrifying pogrom. At the time, the programmed extermination of European Jews had not yet began. After the war, the successive communist governments did all they could to ensure the Iasi pogrom would be forgotten. It was not until November of 2004 that Romania recognized for the first time its direct responsibility in the pogrom. All that remains of this massacre are about a hundred photographs taken as souvenirs by german and romanian soldiers, and a few remaining survivors.
The true story of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish painter who comes of age in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War. Fiercely imaginative and deeply gifted, she dreams of becoming an artist. Her first love applauds her talent, which emboldens her resolve. When anti-Semitic policies inspire violent mobs, she escapes to the safety of the South of France. There she begins to paint again, and finds new love. But her work is interrupted, this time by a family tragedy that reveals an even darker secret. Believing that only an extraordinary act will save her, she embarks on the monumental adventure of painting her life story.
During World War II, an Italian agent tries to infiltrate the Albanian guerrilla units under the identity of 'engineer Tosti'.
The gruesome story of the Jewish ghettos during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe in the dark days of World War II, based on the records written by their inhabitants, who bear witness to the human tragedy of the Shoah; but also to an indomitable will to live.
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials meet to determine the manner in which the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" can be best implemented.
September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.
A Canadian artist turned diamond merchant in Vienna, Austria risks his life to smuggle Jews out of the Third Reich.
Serge Toubiana, director of the Cinémathèque française, sat down with director Claude Lanzmann in his office in Paris in January 2013 to discuss the making of his epic work. Their conversation, presented here, was recorded exclusively for the Criterion Collection.
An American intelligence agent attempts to kidnap a top Nazi general.
Max Manus is a Norwegian 2008 biographic war film based on the real events of the life of resistance fighter Max Manus (1914–96), after his contribution in the Winter War against the Soviet Union. The story follows Manus through the outbreak of World War II in Norway until peacetime in 1945.
Filmed in 1983, during the presentation of Peter Weiss' play at the Fred Barry theater at UQAM. This document exposes us to a play dealing with the Shoah, and its intention to present the medium of video as a specific language.
Through flashbacks going as far back as the end of WW1, the story of a Nazi war criminal is exposed during his trial.
In an article on the Vatican and the holocaust at Jewish Virtual Library it says: “Pope Pius XII’s (1876-1958) actions during the Holocaust remain controversial. For much of the war, he maintained a public front of indifference and remained silent while German atrocities were committed. He refused pleas for help on the grounds of neutrality while making statements condemning injustices in general. Privately, he sheltered a small number of Jews and spoke to a few select officials, encouraging them to help the Jews.” This is a highly interesting documentary on this controversy.