År 1960 ger sig israeliska spioner ut på ett våghalsigt uppdrag för att gripa den ökände nazisten och krigsförbrytaren Adolf Eichman. Bygger på en sann historia.
Barbara Sukowa gör rollen som den tyska filosofen Hannah Arendt vid hennes rapportering av Adolf Eichmanns rättegång i Israel 1961. På uppdrag av tidningen The New Yorker reser hon till Jerusalem i tron om att hon ska stå öga mot öga med ett monster. Men det hon finner är en "ingen" och när hon levererar sina artiklar orsakar de omedelbart skandal i USA och Israel och snart i resten av världen.
The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.
When Israeli officials learn that Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann may be living in Argentina, they send a team of secret agents to apprehend him.
In the young Federal Republic of Germany, which in the late 1950s in politics and justice is still interspersed with only superficially purified Nazi cliques, leads the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer a lonely fight against the coverup of Nazi crimes and the restorative policy of the government Adenauer - he is firmly convinced that only in this way can the young democracy be consolidated. Not only his attitude, but also his temperament make Bauer vulnerable, again and again resistance forms from politics, intelligence services and the judiciary against the lone fighter.
In 1961, history was on trial... in a trial that made history. Just 15 years after the end of WWII, the Holocaust had been largely forgotten. That changed with the capture of Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi officer hiding in Argentina. Through rarely-seen archival footage, The Eichmann Trial documents one of the most shocking trials ever recorded, and the birth of Holocaust awareness and education.
Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman, the last two survivors of the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka, recount the horrors they experienced during the war and talk about their lives after their escape in a prisoner uprising in 1943. Willenberg would go on to become a hero of the 1944 Warsaw uprising while Taigman would be called as a witness during the infamous trial of Adolf Eichmann.
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.
