The Wannsee Conference: The Documentary

Jan 19, 2022

0h 45m

★ 6.8

Overview

It was arguably the deadliest conference in human history. The topic: plans to murder 11 million Jews in Europe. The participants were not psychopaths, but educated men from the SS, police, administration and ministries. The invitation to the meeting at Wannsee came from Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. The Wehrmacht's campaigns of conquest in Eastern Europe marked the beginning of the systematic murder of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. In mid-September 1941, Hitler made the decision to deport all Jews from Germany to the East. Although there had been transports before, Hitler's order represented a further escalation in the murderous decision-making process. Persecution and discrimination had been part of everyday life since 1933. But as a result, the living conditions for the Jews in the Third Reich became even more difficult, among them the Berlin Jew Margot Friedländer, born in 1921, and the Chotzen family.

Genres

Documentary

History

TV Movie

Production Companies

History Media

ZDF

The Wannsee Conference: The Documentary Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

Self - Narrator (voice)

Philipp Schepmann

Self - Interviewee

Margot Friedländer

Self - Interviewee

Götz Aly

Self - Interviewee

Robert Gerwarth

Self - Interviewee

Peter Klein

Self - Interviewee

Martin Kröger

Self - Interviewee

Martin Cüppers

Self - Interviewee

Barbara Schieb

Self - Interviewee

Marcus Gryglewski

Self - Interviewee

Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann

Self (archive footage)

Adolf Hitler

Self (archive footage)

Hermann Göring

Kurt Gerstein—a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS—is appalled to discover that a poison gas he helped discover is being used to kill Jews. Driven by his conscience to alert the rest of the world, Gerstein teams up with a young Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana, but their protestations fall on deaf ears in the Vatican.

8.5

The Last Apostle: Journies in the Holy Land

Jan 1, 2020

Dr. Mark Fairchild, world-renowned archaeologist, traces the hidden years of Saint Paul's life in the mountainous Turkish countryside of Rough Cilicia.

8.6

Disintegration Loop 1.1

Sep 11, 2001

Disintegration Loop 1.1 consists of one static shot of lower Manhattan billowing smoke during the last hour of daylight on September 11th, 2001, set to the decaying pastoral tape loop Basinski had recorded in August, 2001. Shot from Basinski's roof in Williamsburg Brooklyn, this is an actual documentary of how he and his neighbors witnessed the end of that fateful day. It is a tragically beautiful cinema verite elegy dedicated to those who perished in the atrocities of September 11th, 2001.

7.0

Charlie Grant's War

Jan 27, 1985

A Canadian artist turned diamond merchant in Vienna, Austria risks his life to smuggle Jews out of the Third Reich.

5.9

Operation Valkyrie

Feb 24, 2004

In 1944, a group of high command officers plot an attempt against Hitler, and one of the leaders of the conspiracy, Stauffenberg, goes to a meeting with the Fuhrer in charge of exploding the place. However, Hitler survives and the officers are executed. This unsuccessful operation was called "Valkyrie Operation", and this realistic movie discloses this true event.

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?

6.3

Charlotte

Apr 22, 2022

The true story of Charlotte Salomon, a young German-Jewish painter who comes of age in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War. Fiercely imaginative and deeply gifted, she dreams of becoming an artist. Her first love applauds her talent, which emboldens her resolve. When anti-Semitic policies inspire violent mobs, she escapes to the safety of the South of France. There she begins to paint again, and finds new love. But her work is interrupted, this time by a family tragedy that reveals an even darker secret. Believing that only an extraordinary act will save her, she embarks on the monumental adventure of painting her life story.

6.6

The Grey Zone

Sep 13, 2001

The story of Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando — one of the thirteen consecutive "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of assisting in the extermination of fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life.

6.3

The Hindenburg

Dec 25, 1975

Colonel Franz Ritter, a former hero pilot now working for military intelligence, is assigned to the great Hindenburg airship as its chief of security. As he races against the clock to uncover a possible saboteur aboard the doomed zeppelin he finds that any of the passengers and crew could be the culprit.

0.0

Die Bundesstrassen - Stiefkinder des Wirtschaftswunders

Sep 19, 1957

The mineral oil tax and its use are taken as an opportunity to examine the topics of road construction and motor vehicle traffic using the example of West German federal highways.

0.0

Wie konnte es geschehen? - Teil 1: "Deutschland erwache..." (1914 - 1938)

Jan 1, 2006

In 1945, 160 German cities lay in ruins and the loss of millions of lives, billions in material assets and countless cultural treasures was mourned throughout Europe... With the question “How could it happen?”, the film goes back to the year 1914, when the “primal catastrophe of the 20th century” took its course with the First World War.

7.9

Downfall

Sep 16, 2004

In April of 1945, Germany stands at the brink of defeat with the Russian Army closing in from the east and the Allied Expeditionary Force attacking from the west. In Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler proclaims that Germany will still achieve victory and orders his generals and advisers to fight to the last man. When the end finally does come, and Hitler lies dead by his own hand, what is left of his military must find a way to end the killing that is the Battle of Berlin, and lay down their arms in surrender.

8.0

Judgment at Nuremberg

Dec 18, 1961

In 1947, four German judges who served on the bench during the Nazi regime face a military tribunal to answer charges of crimes against humanity. Chief Justice Haywood hears evidence and testimony not only from lead defendant Ernst Janning and his defense attorney Hans Rolfe, but also from the widow of a Nazi general, an idealistic U.S. Army captain and reluctant witness Irene Wallner.

7.0

St. Louis

Oct 21, 2019

Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.

No Image Available

6.0

Die Dichter und die Räterepublik

Jan 1, 1990

Documentary film with play scenes about the rise and fall of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 from the perspective of various well-known poets and writers who experienced the events as contemporary witnesses.

8.6

Schindler's List

Dec 15, 1993

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

6.8

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

Apr 21, 1938

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

6.7

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

Jun 2, 1938

Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.

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.

0.0

Requiem for Auschwitz - the film

Aug 2, 2022

13 years ago, director Bob Entrop made the film A piece of blue in the sky, the first film in the Netherlands that depicted the murder of almost 1 million Sinti and Roma during the Second World War. There is a taboo on what happened during the war, you don't talk about it with anyone and certainly not in front of a camera. Requiem for Auschwitz is a sequel, with the most valuable moments from the first film, supplemented with the grandchildren and the creation and performance of the 'Requiem for Auschwitz' by Sinti composer Roger Moreno Rathgeb by the Sinti and Roma Philharmonic from Frankfurt and a Jewish choir in the Berliner Dom in Berlin, during Holocaust Memorial Day. During his visit to Auschwitz in 2020 with four musicians from the Dutch Accompaniment Orchestra, Roger shows them the places that inspired him.