Films and Television

The Holocaust has been one of the most filmed historical subjects of the second half of the twentieth century. The body of work runs from the immediate post-war Allied documentary footage of the camps in 1945, through the 1959 American film of The Diary of Anne Frank, the 1961 trial film Judgment at Nuremberg, the 1978 NBC television series Holocaust, the 1985 nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah, the 1993 Schindler’s List, and forwards into the present. Each major work has reshaped public understanding of the events; some have been criticised for distortion or sentimentality; the cumulative effect has been to make the Holocaust the most visually present of all twentieth-century historical catastrophes.

The Allied newsreels of April and May 1945

The first Holocaust films were the Allied military newsreels shot at the western camps in April and May 1945. The British military filmed at Bergen-Belsen on 15 April; the Americans filmed at Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Ohrdruf in the days that followed. The footage was shot under the supervision of officers including Sidney Bernstein at the British Ministry of Information and George Stevens for the United States Office of War Information; the directorial credits and the editorial decisions over what would be shown to the public were taken by people who would later be central figures in the post-war film industry, including Alfred Hitchcock as a consultant on the British project. The British compilation film, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, was completed in 1945 but withheld from public release for political reasons; it was finally screened in full in 2014. The American compilation, Death Mills, was released in 1945 to German audiences as part of the de-Nazification programme. The footage from these projects has remained in continuous use in subsequent Holocaust films and remains the visual record that the deniers most directly attempt to discredit.

The narrative film tradition

The first major Hollywood Holocaust narrative film was The Diary of Anne Frank, directed by George Stevens (the same Stevens who had filmed at the camps in 1945) and released in 1959. The 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer, was the first major film to use camp footage in a fictional courtroom setting. The 1965 The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet, was the first major American film to portray the post-war life of a survivor with the camp experience as a central rather than incidental subject.

The watershed for popular awareness was the 1978 NBC television miniseries Holocaust, written by Gerald Green, which over four nights and nine and a half hours followed two German families, one Jewish and one a member of the SS, through the persecution and murder. The series was watched by an estimated 120 million Americans and, when broadcast in West Germany in 1979, was watched by around half the West German adult population. The German broadcast is widely credited with shifting West German public attitudes towards the persecution within the federal republic itself; the post-broadcast public discussion led to the German federal parliament’s vote in July 1979 to abolish the statute of limitations on Nazi murder cases.

The 1993 Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, became the most-watched single Holocaust film and won seven Academy Awards. Its commercial success funded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Spielberg in 1994, which has since recorded testimonies from over 55,000 Holocaust survivors and which is now the largest archive of survivor testimony in the world.

The documentary tradition

The most significant single Holocaust documentary is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, released in 1985 after eleven years of work. The nine-and-a-half-hour film consists entirely of contemporary interviews with survivors, perpetrators and bystanders shot at the sites of the killing; it contains no archive footage of the camps, no music, no narration. The film’s deliberate refusal of the visual conventions of the documentary form was a polemical response to what Lanzmann regarded as the sentimentalising effect of those conventions in earlier Holocaust documentaries.

Other major documentary works include Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) on French collaboration during the German occupation, Erwin Leiser’s Mein Kampf (1960) using newsreel footage to construct a chronological account of the regime, and the BBC’s The World at War (1973), whose episode on the Holocaust (“Genocide”, episode twenty) was for many British viewers the first detailed treatment of the subject they had encountered.

The European films

European cinema produced its own substantial Holocaust filmography, often more difficult formally than the American work. Andrzej Wajda’s Korczak (1990) treats Janusz Korczak’s last weeks at the Warsaw orphanage. Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997) attempts a fable form that has been admired and criticised in roughly equal measure. Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002), based on the memoir of Władysław Szpilman, won three Academy Awards. László Nemes’s Saul fia (Son of Saul, 2015) follows a Sonderkommando member through a single day in Auschwitz-Birkenau and won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012) treats the journalist’s reporting of the Eichmann trial.

The argument over Holocaust film

Whether the Holocaust should be filmed at all has been a recurring question in the criticism. The historian and theorist Theodor Adorno’s argument, sometimes summarised as “no poetry after Auschwitz”, has been adapted by some to argue that fiction film cannot adequately treat industrial mass murder without misrepresenting it. Lanzmann himself, despite directing the major documentary, was sharply critical of fiction films treating the camps; he argued that the camps were unrepresentable in narrative cinema and that any attempt to dramatise them necessarily betrayed the experience. Spielberg’s response was the opposite: that the wider public would not engage with documentary alone, that Schindler’s List would do educational work that Shoah could not, and that the legitimate question was how to make the films well rather than whether to make them at all. The argument has not been settled and is unlikely to be.

What is here

Sources

  • Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, third edition 2003
  • Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable, Indiana University Press, 1988
  • Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005
  • Yosefa Loshitzky (ed), Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, Indiana University Press, 1997
  • Stuart Liebman (ed), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, Oxford University Press, 2007
  • Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933, Wallflower Press, 2005
  • Imperial War Museum, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, the 1945 British compilation released 2014, https://www.iwm.org.uk
  • USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu