Verdict on Auschwitz

The horrors of Auschwitz are recalled in this documentary, which focuses on the first trial for the infamous death camp’s victims. The film slowly builds to the final verdict, which was delivered on August 20, 1965.

“If you pay any attention at all to Holocaust history, there’ll be few surprises in the actual evidence about the biggest site of Hitler’s Final Solution offered in this three-hour exhumation (shortened from a much longer 1993 version) of the trial of former Nazi apparatchiks at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Consider the context, though, and this German-made documentary becomes a fascinating record — via a two-year Frankfurt courtroom drama less splashy than either the Nuremberg or Eichmann trials that preceded it — of the country’s awkward baby steps toward confronting its hideous legacy. Culling from 430 hours of audio recordings and limited archive footage from the proceedings, as well as interviews with observers and participants, filmmakers Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner provide a deconstruction of the mechanics of life at Auschwitz so exhaustive, it would make Claude Lanzmann proud. VERDICT ON AUSCHWITZ dwells properly on the uniform mendacity and lack of remorse among the functionaries who ran the Third Reich’s most efficient charnel house — liars and cowards all, long after the fact. In testimony after testimony, often delivered in chillingly dispassionate tones by former victims about their treatment by sadists who went way beyond their brief, the film handily dispatches the notion that those who ran the camps were just following orders. The big fat elephant in the room is the court’s heavy emphasis on the perpetrators and nervous avoidance of the word “Jew.” Still, this is required viewing for everyone, especially for David Irving, Mel Gibson’s dad and all other profane deniers of a bloody century’s bloodiest genocide.“ (Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly)