Now the subjects of a despotic chief, far from having any favor to expect from him, as both themselves and all they have are his property, or at least are considered by him as such, are obliged to receive as a favor what he relinquishes to them of their own property. He does them justice when he strips them. He treats them with mercy when he suffers them to live. In a beautiful house, during a beautiful day, next to a library with no books, a table is set for the last supper of its inhabitants.
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.
How did Nazi Germany, from limited natural resources, mass unemployment, little money and a damaged industry, manage to unfurl the cataclysm of World War Two and come to occupy a large part of the European continent? Based on recent historical works of and interviews with Adam Tooze, Richard Overy, Frank Bajohr and Marie-Bénédicte Vincent, and drawing on rare archival material.
He is considered to be one of the greatest German film stars, Hans Albers, known as "Der blonde Hans", a man made for the cinema. He was an actor, singer, idol of the Germans - and darling of the Nazis. Nevertheless, he could not protect his great love, the Jewess Hansi Burg. In 1938 she had to flee to London from anti-Semitism in Germany. But Albers himself stayed in Germany and continued to film, driven by a desire for a career and the call of money. In 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War, they meet again: Hansi Burg returns to the land of the murderers of her parents in the uniform of the British Army and visits Hans Albers in his villa on Lake Starnberg. He lives there with another woman. The rival has to go, then there is a tense debate. For a day and a night, the blonde Hans has to face uncomfortable questions and even more uncomfortable truths.
Discovering Paris under the German occupation through the story of an SS soldier and more generally of Wehrmacht soldiers allows us to follow the daily life on the German side. These soldiers enjoyed privileged status, during their stay, they were led to believe that they belong to a social elite, a status unreachable back in Germany during peacetime. And who better than a German who has led such lifestyle to serve as a common thread and tell this story?
This is the story of an incredible rise to power, the most comprehensive documentary on Hermann Goering ever made. He was a man of many faces: vain, ambitious, more brutal than any other of Hitler's minions, yet the most popular Nazi official of all, at times even more popular than Hitler himself. He embodied the jovial side of the Third Reich. Yet the same man who organised dissolute bacchanals also founded the Gestapo, set up the first concentration camps, and had his own comrades murdered in the purge of 1934. These unique personal records form the largest and most important single film find from the Nazi era in past years.
The spectacular moon landing in 1969 was also a success of more than 100 technicians and engineers from Germany, some of whom had already revolutionized weapons technology and built rockets in Hitler's service during World War II. The documentary analyzes the entanglements of German NASA employees with the Third Reich.
Strasbourg was home to one of three Reich Universities founded by the Nazis, known as a project close to Hitler's heart. The university, founded in 1941, is infamous for the human experiments performed on KZ prisoners by the professors of the medical faculty. What did its dean, Johannes Stein, grandfather of documentarian Kirsten Esch, know of these crimes?
Germany, 1945. Soldier Willi Herold, a deserter of the German army, stumbles into a uniform of Nazi captain abandoned during the last and desperate weeks of the Third Reich. Newly emboldened by the allure of a suit that he has stolen only to stay warm, Willi discovers that many Germans will follow the leader, whoever he is.
The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.
This exclusive documentary recounts the crazy project of Nazi Germany which secretly gave birth to Aryan children as far as France. In these maternities for the rich called the ‘Lebensborn’, the Nazis raised ‘perfect’ children born of progenitors from the SS and women with well defined racial grounds. This plan gave birth to thousands of children who were called ‘Hitler's Children’. They were supposed to lead the world one day. It wasn’t until 30 years later that the existence of one of these centers in France was discovered. For the very first time, the children born in the ‘Lesenborn’ in Lamorlaye find out about their existence and disclose one the most frightening plans of History, as well as the dark secret of their origins.
In December 1941, Czech soldiers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš parachute into their occupied homeland to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich.
Before Dawn charts the years of exile in the life of famous Jewish Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, his inner struggle for the "right attitude" towards the events in war torn Europe and his search for a new home.
Chronicles the adventurous life of Hungarian-born Jewish lawyer Benjamin Ferencz, who fled to the USA as a child and later became chief war crime prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1949 and one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002.
When Adolf Hitler reawakens at the site of his former bunker in present-day Berlin, he is mistaken for a comedian and quickly becomes a media phenomenon.
In the spring of 1939, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus embarked on a risky and unlikely mission. Traveling into the heart of Nazi Germany, they rescued 50 Jewish children from Vienna and brought them to the United States.