I cannot recommend this too highly. The testimony of the survivors (both victim and guard) is honest and harrowing. The role of the former SS guard who comes forward in his old age to tell his story to silence the Holocaust deniers, at the same time as he sets out the context of the situation in which he worked and appears indifferent to the suffering of which he was a part, is central to this series. Very few who watch the programmes will end up pointing the finger at this man. It will most likely be pointing at oneself.
Watch the six programmes and you will see how your feelings towards what appears to be this cold German change. It’s a brilliant piece of construction and production. I wouldn’t want to spoil it further for those who haven’t watched it.
Thanks, Skippie. You’re not related to the bush kangaroo, by any chance?
Personally, while I thought that the series was exactly the right thing for the BBC to do for the anniversary last year, I felt it slightly weak by what we’ve come to expect as Laurence Rees’s own standards. The decision to reconstruct scenes made much of it seem like just another TV history documentary, something that isn’t true of his previous series.
Recommended viewing I agree but I thought it a little too judgmental. To my way of thinking something closer to a bare recitation of the facts was the way to convey the horror, rather than repeatedly stressing ‘murderers’ ‘stolen’ etc. The narrative should have faith that an adult audience would draw its own conclusions. I don’t like being told what to think.
The linguistic choices were marked and clearly a lot of thought had gone into them. Besides those you mention, the ones that stood out for me were ‘delusion’ (rather than, say ‘idea’, regarding the Germans’ stance on ‘the Jews’ plan for world domination’) and, perhaps most interestingly since it bucked the ‘judgemental’, or at least subjective trend, ‘Nazis’ instead of Germans. (I myself have bucked that trend above in the preceding sentence.) In this way the production distanced itself from Goldhagen’s ‘willing executioners’ position.
The two strongest elements of what I consider to be an extraordinary accomplishment (besides the bread-and-butter of the largely dispassionate testimony of the survivors, without which, like a Cantonese meal with no rice, there would have been no programme) are Groening’s role and the photographs of the camp. The one where the girl on valuables-sorting duty, dressed so beautifully, as are the girls with her, is smiling at the camera (because she’s been told to) is possibly the most grotesque image of the war I have yet seen.
I found the computer-generated reconstruction very effective in conveying the sheer size of the Auschwitz metropolis.