Friday, May 2, 2014

TV Documentary: AUSCHWITZ: INSIDE THE NAZI STATE (2005) (AA)

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This well done BBC documentary series about the Holocaust and the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp tackles one of history's most horrible but super important subjects that has to be told so people can think twice before they decide to HATE another group or tribe: (AA) not for joy but for the importance of the subject matter.

From Wikipedia: Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution' is a BBC six-episode documentary film series presenting the story of Auschwitz through interviews with former inmates and guards to include authentic re-enactments of relevant events. It was first televised on BBC One on 11 January 2005. In the United States, this series first aired on PBS television stations as Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State in early 2005 and was released, under that title, in a 2-DVD box set (Region 1), by BBC Warner, on 29 March 2005.[1][2]

The series uses four principal elements: rarely seen contemporary color and monochrome film from archives, interviews with survivors such as Dario Gabbai and former Nazis such as Oskar Gröning, computer-generated reconstructions of long-demolished buildings as well as meticulously detailed and historically accurate re-enactments of meetings and other events. These are linked by modern footage of locations in and around the site of the Auschwitz camp.
Laurence Rees stressed that the re-enactments were not dramatisations, but exclusively based on documented sources:
There is no screenwriter… Every single word that is spoken is double — and in some cases triple — sourced from historical records.[3]
This reflects the conception of the earlier BBC/HBO film Conspiracy, which similarly recreates the Wannsee Conference (an event briefly portrayed in programme 2 of this series) based on a copy of the minutes kept by one of the attendees, although that film also includes speculative dramatised sections.
The computer-generated reconstructions used architectural plans that only became available in the 1990s when the archives of the former Soviet Union became accessible to Western historians. The discovery of these plans is described in the 1994 BBC Horizon documentary Auschwitz: The Blueprints of Genocide.

Episodes
Episode
number
TitleOriginal UK
broadcast
1.Surprising Beginnings11 January 2005
2.Orders and Initiatives18 January 2005
3.Factories of Death25 January 2005
4.Corruption1 February 2005
5.Frenzied Killing8 February 2005
6.Liberation & Revenge15 February 2005

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