The Specialist

Mar 31, 1999

2h 8m

★ 6.1

Overview

Composed exclusively of the footage recorded by Leo Hurwitz during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, A Specialist is a courtroom drama painting the portait of a zealous bureaucrat who has immense respect for the Law and hierarchy, a police official responsible for the elimination of several million people, a modern criminal.

Genres

Documentary

Production Companies

Amythos Films

Image Création

Lotus-Film

Momento!

The Specialist Trailers

Cast

Himself

Adolf Eichmann

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

6.6

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

Apr 7, 2005

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

5.0

Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell

Jan 1, 2000

In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.

0.0

Peter Eisenman: Building Germany's Holocaust Memorial

Feb 20, 2009

This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.

7.3

Erna, Helmut and the Nazis

Apr 29, 2021

Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.

0.0

Łódź Ghetto

Mar 22, 1989

The Polish city of Łódź was under Nazi occupation for nearly the entirety of WWII. The segregation of the Jewish population into the ghetto, and the subsequent horrors are vividly chronicled via newsreels and photographs. The narration is taken almost entirely from journals and diaries of those who lived–and died–through the course of the occupation, with the number of different narrators diminishing as the film progresses, symbolic of the death of each narrator.

7.3

Goering's Catalogue: A Collection of Art and Blood

Mar 14, 2021

For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.

6.4

Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust

Oct 8, 2024

A portrait of Pope Pius XII (1876-1958), head of the Catholic Church from 1939 until his death, who, during World War II, and while European Jews were being exterminated by the Nazis, was accused of keeping a disconcerting and shameful silence.

6.3

A Hole In The Head

Mar 16, 2017

A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".

0.0

Elie Wiesel Goes Home

Feb 12, 1997

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

7.5

1944: Should We Bomb Auschwitz?

Sep 19, 2019

In 1944, two prisoners miraculously escaped from Auschwitz. They told the world of the horror of the Holocaust and raised one of the greatest moral questions of the 20th century.

0.0

Modus Operandi

Mar 5, 2008

Between 1942 and 1944 some 24,916 Jews were deported from Belgium to Auschwitz. The roundups and deportations were organized and carried out by the Nazis with the - not always conscious - cooperation of Belgian authorities. The attitude of the authorities here varied from outright resistance to voluntary or unwitting collaboration.

6.7

Nazi Death Camp: The Great Escape

May 12, 2014

The secret Nazi death camp at Sobibor was created solely for the mass extermination of Jews. But on the 14th October 1943, in one of the biggest and most successful prison revolts of WWII, the inmates fought back.

7.2

Stanisław Lem: Autor Solaris

Nov 2, 2016

An account of the life and work of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a key figure in science fiction literature involved in mysteries and paradoxes that need to be enlightened.

4.2

Naked Rose

Apr 24, 2013

Among the millions of victims of the Nazi madness during the Second World War, Pierre Seel was charged with homosexuality and imprisoned in the Schirmeck concentration camp. He survived this terrifying experience of torture and humiliation, and after the war he married, had three children, and tried to live a normal life. In 1982, however, he came to terms with his past and his true nature and decided to publicly reveal what he and thousands of other homosexuals branded with the Pink Triangle had undergone during the Nazi regime. Il Rosa Nudo (Naked Rose), inspired by the true story of Pierre Seel, depicts in a theatrical and evocative way the Homocaust, focusing on the scientific theories of SS Physician Carl Peter Værnet for the treatment of homosexuality, which paved the way for the Nazi persecution of gay men.

7.2

Inside a Nazi Mind: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

Nov 15, 2023

An analysis of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, published in 2006, which dissects the ruthless mechanisms of the Shoah from the detached point of view of Maximilian Aue, a high-ranking Nazi officer.

4.5

Human Lampshade: A Holocaust Mystery

Sep 29, 2012

This story follows one man's quest to uncover the origins and reveal the mysteries of a possible Holocaust artifact some historians now say never existed: lampshades made of human skin. When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina receded, they left behind a wrecked New Orleans and a strange looking lamp that an illicit dealer claimed was 'made from the skin of Jews.'

The Specialist

Overview

Genres

Production Companies

The Specialist Trailers