Nazijäger - Reise in die Finsternis

There have been a lot of movies about the Holocaust - and I've seen a fair number of them. There's a point at which you think you've seen it all. You're not dismissive of the subject, obviously, but you just think there's nothing much more that can be said. I approached this with that kind of mindset - and I was wrong. This is gut-wrenching. Not in an especially graphic sort of way because there really isn't much overt brutality shown. But gut wrenching anyway. These were children. 10 - 11 - 12 year old children. Little boys and little girls rounded up by the Nazis for some of their infamous medical experiments. You can't help but wonder. How? Why? The story rotates between testimony from the Nazi accused at trials, to their statements in front of British investigators and to the experiences of the children. And the dates being given were haunting. The children were murdered on April 20, 1945. The Third Reich had less than a month to survive; the children were done away with because they were incriminating evidence. Just horrific.

The story is based on the accounts of sisters Anda and Tatiana (who survived) and focuses on them and their cousin Sergio (who didn't) - all three from Italy but taken by the Nazis. It also revolves around Anton Freud - grandson of the famous psychoanalyst - who served with the post-war British war crimes investigation. Apparently it was originally a mini-series in Germany (and the audio is German, with English subtitles) but I watched it in a movie format and it transitioned well. There's a particularly heart warming scene near the end when the child actors who played Anda, Tatiana and Sergio meet with the real Anda and Tatiana.

I don't want to say that I "liked" this. Because it's horrific. But there's long been Holocaust-denial, and there's rising anti-semitism in many parts of the world, and things like this need to be remembered. I give it 9/10.

No matter how much of WW2 you see, there's always some new angle that can just tear your heart out. I wasn't sure quite what to expect from this, maybe spy action, maybe clumsy moralizing? But by the end I will admit that this 57 yr old man was weeping like a child.

We start with what seems like a fairly conventional post-WW2 movie -- we have our Allied investigators looking into the backgrounds of various suspects, presumably ultimately to be tried for war crimes or otherwise punished. After twenty minutes or so things come into focus, we're going to be investigating specifically what happened to a group of twenty children.

But along the way the tone changes. We get flash-forward scenes, to real life in the present as we see the child actors in various situations, and two child survivors, now old adults, talking and walking around the camps. We get flash-back scenes, to during the war, as we see the children in the camp.

The contrast between all three situations is just unbearable, from the safety of now, to the at least tolerable situation after the war to the reality of life in the camps. No matter how often you see it and hear about it it, how can you not just burst into tears?

So yes, even if you have seen this sort of thing before, Schindler's list or, whatever, watch this one. It's a well-executed addition to the canon.