Best/Favorite Holocaust films?

these sorts of films aren't for everybody, I really enjoy them (probably not the right expression), because history
needs to be preserved and demonstrated to make sure we don't go back!
future generations should at least understand how cruel mankind can be and has been and how nothing
great comes out of war. if anything, maybe the 'watcher' of the films can try and put themselves in
their shoes and hope they themselves will never have to go through that in their life.

 

The only problem is that humanity has 'gone back' on many occasions since the end of WWII. Stalin didn't even wait for the ink to dry on The Potsdam Agreement.

 

yeah, the human species, seems to be a trait we've yet to learn about history.

 

A virus with shoes, as Bill Hicks memorably observed.

 

Son of Saul.

 

Of the films I’ve seen, I have to say Night and Fog was the most, effective.
It was like a punch to the gut.

 

Perhaps an in depth mini-series might be a good idea for these other aspects of it. I know some are out there though like the 2005 Auschwitz BBC documentary tv series..

 

PBS - Memory of the Camps

Discovered in the British archives, it is footage of the camps that was put together by Alfred Hitchcock to show why we fought. Deemed too terrible to show, it was lost for years. They found most of it and the voiceover script, and did new narration as there was no soundtrack, except for a little part. Warning: it is not for the faint of heart.

 

"The Pianist" (2002)

 

I just finished Kapo, a 1960 Italian/French production starring Susan Strasberg. A good film.

 

My wife watched all nine and a half hours of it in the theater in one day.

Ever since, I have acknowledged that she is a better person than I am. I just couldn't handle all of that in a single day.

 

Perhaps (and arguably) the very best historical novels on WWII and the Holocaust are herman Wouk's The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Both were adapted into excellent mini-series. As posted earlier the mini-series Holocaust is also excellent (young Streep, James Woods, Fritz Weaver).

 

I don’t know if I could get into Shoah. I think if there was a transcript of it, It might be able to disgest better by reading it. A nine and a half hour strictly interview format would be hard for me to sit through.

 

I think you would be surprised. It goes by pretty fast for a 9 and a half hour movie.

 

For a different perspective on the Holocaust, the BBC-made Conspiracy (2001) is excellent.

It's based on the only surviving copy of the minutes taken at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where SS leader Himmler's right-hand man Reinhard Heydrich and a group of Nazi lawyers & bureaucrats formulated the plan that became known as "The Final Solution". Featuring a top-notch British cast (Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci), Hannah Arendt's famous phrase the "banality of evil" is all over this film.

 

I remember that film. Branagh especially was chilling in his matter-of-fact approach. Shocking how often real monsters look and act nothing like we're taught they should.

As Terry Pratchett wrote in Small Gods:

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

 

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tells an interesting story from the unique perspectives of children from opposite sides

 

Au revoir, les enfants

Very heavy film, I only ever managed to sit through it once, it's very, very emotional. Similar experience goes with Schindler's List.

 

Yes, it's a terrifying thought. A woman who knew Heydrich commented in one of Laurence Rees' documentaries (The Nazis A Warning From History I think) that he was charming, debonair...loved classical music.

I used to think that education had a civilising effect on humanity, but that idea was completely shredded when I saw a little film made in 2015 called A Man Can Make A Difference, about the last surviving Chief Prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials - Benjamin Ferencz - who incidentally also helped set up the International Criminal Court in the Hague and is still kicking at 98.

The film mentioned that of the 4 commanders of the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile death squads that operated behind the lines) put on trial at Nuremberg, 3 held doctorates and the 4th was a double PHD. Very well educated monsters.