Auschwitz - Inside the Nazi State
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Gert Heidenreich, Horst-Gnter Marx, Linda Ellerbee, Linda Hunt, Samuel WestBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; German (Original Language); Hungarian (Original Language); Polish (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 300 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-29
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: BBC Worldwide
Movie Reviews of Auschwitz - Inside the Nazi State
Movie Review: A History of Hell
Summary: 5 Stars
I just watched this film again, for the second time.
Three years ago, I made the trip to southern Poland and visited O'wi'cim, just outside Krakow.. I saw part of remnants of the massive concentration camp and industrial complex there that that the Germans called Auschwitz- Specifically the two extermination camps at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau. The experience was one of the most searing of my life.
I walked the grounds along the barbed wire and railway tracks, through the iconic gates and buildings.. I got a sense of the scale of the place, of the geography. Something that had always been somewhat abstract to me, became that afternoon very - and all too horrifically - substantial. I wandered the vast Birkenau compound past the small ponds still gray and clouded with the ashes of hundreds of thousands. I witnessed the piles of shoes, glasses, suitcases.. The hair shorn in a great heap.. Relics of the thousands of victims murdered at the very end of the war. I stood by the rubble of the gas chambers, blown to slag by the SS as the Soviets bore down on them in the very last days of the Reich..
I stood and gazed up at the cruel sneering mendacious "Arbeit Macht Frei" - that famous motto borrowed from Dachau emblazoned in steel wire above the entrance - with fresh eyes, as if for the first time.
The nightmare was overwhelming. I wandered about mute, not sure how to process any of it.
As I left, I stopped in the gift shop, and bought this film. I watched it in my hotel that night. It brought everything I had seen that day into clearer focus.
Watching beforehand would of course have been better, for this film's strength is that it re-enacts many of the crucial moments in the history of the place: it's architectural expansion, the principal personalities involved, the larger political and historical context. It gives a decent sense of how the original Polish army cavalry barracks and parade ground that formed the germinal nucleus of Auschwitz I was developed initially into a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, and then incrementally grew into something far more ambitious and monstrous. With the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, many of the 2 to 3 million Soviet prisoners taken that first year were funneled through Auschwitz, where they were brutally worked and starved to death.
At this point Himmler and the industrial giant IG Farbin decided to expand the complex, creating an SS command complex and a huge industrial park run by slave labor that grew up about the original concentration camp dubbed Auschwitz III.
All of this seems relatively banal, compared to what came next. The narrative expands to describe the relatively halting and "small" scale atrocities that the Wehrmacht and SS began committing throughout the newly conquered Baltic, Ukrainian and Belorussian territories. Himmler was concerned, because he felt that the process of butchering Jews and other undesirables in groups of dozens and hundreds and thousands with rifles was both inefficient and "too brutalizing" to those committing the acts. The wizards of the SS Einzatzgruppen death squads began to devise various solutions. They actually experimented with blowing a few groups up with explosives, before deciding that the resulting rain of viscera and body parts was too gruesome even for Nazis..
Carbon Monoxide, then other gases were tried. They finally hit upon Zyklon B, a gas previously used to exterminate lice and rodents, as the suitable tool to murder millions with industrial efficiency. The "gas shower" technique had been already developed by doctors at asylums back in Germany before the war. The technique had been used to euthanize tens of thousands of mentally and physically handicapped..
And so it went. The machinations and insanely hideous essential details are laid out with relentless spare economy. The narrative is relentless, leaving one nauseous and aghast. It tells the history of the entire Holocaust through the prism of of the evolution of the camp.
The story of the Nazis is mostly depicted with actors reenacting the story.. Contemporary footage of the locations, interviews with several dozen camp survivors and other witnesses, along with some vintage film footage and photos help carry the story along. The Germans are presented in their twisted humanity - socializing with one another, playing with their families - all while feeling their way forward with demonic clownishness as they organize the industrial genocide of millions.
There are even several former SS men who inexplicably agreed to be interviewed. Clear eyed octogenarians who gaze steadily at the camera, as they admit their continuing antisemitism and describe how they personally participated in the butchery.
Astonishing. Is there a statute of limitations on genocide?
We listen to how they describe feeling nothing as they shot prisoners, and then tell how they still hate Jews and consider Slavs to be backward. "The French had toilets in their homes, but the Russians.. They for the most part had only outhouses behind their houses.." This was apparently rationale enough to exterminate them by the hundreds of thousands after they surrendered.
As I finished watching this again this afternoon for the first time since I returned from Poland, memories of that accursed place flooded back. I've been feeling queasy and vaguely homicidal since. I'm a borderline pacifist, but I gotta say watching unrepentant Nazis spew venom brings dark thoughts..
In lieu of venting my anger in a truly satisfying way such as enlisting with Patton to go shoot some fascists, I have to settle for typing this review.
The history so competently detailed in this film must be remembered. I give it my highest recommendation. Watch it.
Summary of Auschwitz - Inside the Nazi State
AUSCHWITZ:INSIDE THE NAZI STATE - DVD MovieMore than any previous documentary about the Holocaust, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State reveals the inner workings of the Nazi implementation of Hitler's infamous "final solution." Drawing on the latest academic discoveries, this remarkable BBC series presents a wide-ranging, meticulously researched biography of the titular "killing factory" and its evolution into a highly efficient location for industrialized extermination of well over one million Jews, gypsies, and other so-called "mongrel races" between 1940 and 1945. From "Surprising Beginnings" to "Liberation & Revenge," the six-chapter program chronicles the gradual process that escalated into the Holocaust, focusing its expansive European timeline on the detailed movements of preeminent (and highly corruptible) Holocaust engineers like Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Höss, and "death doctor" Josef Mengele. Through painstakingly authentic reenactments of crucial meetings including the Wannsee Conference (where the "final solution" was secretly devised), we see and hear the Nazi thought processes, built on virulent hatred and bigotry, that "justified" mass murder on an unprecedented scale.
Subtle but exacting use of computer-animated effects allows three-dimensional exploration of newly discovered architectural plans and buildings long-ago destroyed, revealing the transformation of Auschwitz as World War II progressed. Along with rare archival footage, thorough documentation, and frank testimony from Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators (not all of them penitent about their crimes), these programs make expert use of commanding narration by Oscar®-winning actress Linda Hunt, who brings depth and gravitas to a grim litany of sobering facts and figures. The result is an all-encompassing portrait of Auschwitz unlike anything seen before, masterfully written and produced by Laurence Rees with equal parts tenacity, intelligence, and integrity, informed by an overriding sense of moral outrage that is entirely appropriate to the history being examined. It's a remarkable achievement, as important as Shoah as a definitive exploration of one of the darkest chapters in human history. --Jeff Shannon
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