The Representation of Gas Chambers in Holocaust Films

THE REPRESENTATION OF GAS CHAMBERS

IN HOLOCAUST FILMS, 1944-2013

H.C.W. Bovekerk (s4240162)

MA Present(ed) History, Radboud University

Supervised by Dr. Remco Ensel

THE REPRESENTATION OF GAS CHAMBERS 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface.................................................................................................................................. 3

INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................... 4

Research Question............................................................................................................... 7

Status Quaestionis................................................................................................................ 7

THEORY & HISTORY...................................................................................................... 11

Representing History on Film............................................................................................. 11

History Film Typology......................................................................................................... 13

Representing the Holocaust on Film.................................................................................. 15

Nazi Gas Chambers 1939-1945........................................................................................... 18

GAS CHAMBER REPRESENTATIONS........................................................................ 21

1944-1965.............................................................................................................................. 21

1965-1985.............................................................................................................................. 28

1985-2005.............................................................................................................................. 37

2005-2013.............................................................................................................................. 47

CONCLUSION.................................................................................................................... 52

Filmography......................................................................................................................... 56

Bibliography......................................................................................................................... 57

Appendix I: Screenshots with Transcriptions....................................................................... 61


Preface

This thesis completes my MA Present(ed) History graduate program at Radboud

University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. My sister Heleen and my friends Kayleigh van

Oorschot, Jan van Tienen and Dennis Schep were so kind to read several drafts of this text. I

am very grateful for their comments. I remained dependent throughout this project on the

guidance of my supervisor Dr. Remco Ensel, whose ideas and comments were of great value

both to the content and the process of my research. As the formula goes, the responsibility for

any mistakes remaining in this text is solely mine. I thank dr. Aaron Kerner of San Francisco

State University for sharing some of his Holocaust film resources; dr. Iwona Gusc,

postdoctoral researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, for

translating into Dutch the voice-over of a Polish documentary from 1944; and my friends and

fellow students – my brothers from different almae matres – Jan van Tienen (again) and

Christoph van Veghel for the fine hours we spent together in various libraries and for

sacrificing a beautiful summer’s day to watch Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah with me. This thesis

owes most to my parents Henk sr. and Joke Bovekerk, without whose support throughout my

near-decade of university education I couldn’t have read as many books, watched as many

films, nor traveled as many countries as I have. I dedicate this text to them.

Hendrik Coenraad Willem Bovekerk

Nijmegen, September 2013


INTRODUCTION

A ‘gruesome depiction of horrific crimes committed by Nazis at Auschwitz’ – that is

how The Guardian described Uwe Boll’s film Auschwitz a year before its publication in

2011.1 The film’s trailer, which according to the article ‘sparked widespread revulsion’

among critics, begins with Boll in SS uniform leaning against a heavy metal door. As the

camera moves closer, the sound of people pounding the door from the inside grows louder

and a female face appears behind the door’s spyhole. The next sequence confirms that what

we are looking at is an operating gas chamber: naked men, women and children suffocating,

pounding the walls, clutching their throats in agony. Then follow shots of a prisoner pulling a

dead man’s teeth, of others shoving a child’s body into a furnace, and finally of the infant’s

body catching fire – filmed from inside the flames.2

Auschwitz opens with a statement by Boll – according to The New York Times ‘often

referred to as the worst filmmaker in the world’3 – who claims that almost seventy years after

the Holocaust ‘the world shows ignorance again on genocides’ and that therefore it was time

to make a movie that ‘actually showed (…) what Auschwitz was.’ He adds that ‘the movies

that got made about [the Holocaust] are more telling to heroes, like people tried to kill Hitler

(sic) – Stauffenberg, Sophie Scholl or whatever – or, eh, we have special people, they help

Jews, like Schindler’s List and The Pianist and so on, and I think it was time to actually do

something what (sic) (…) just showed what it really was, the horror.’

I don’t know if the world shows ignorance on genocides, but what I can point out is

that Boll shows ignorance on the history and theory of Holocaust films. His claim that it was

time to make a movie that ‘just showed what it really was, the horror’ is weak because it

overlooks two facts, one historical and the other theoretical. First, many films have been

1 K. Connolly, ‘German Director’s Holocaust Film Causes Outrage’, The Guardian, 12 November 2010,

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/12/uwe-boll-auschwitz-film-causes-outrage. 2 The trailer is available on YouTube via http://youtu.be/FS8E71RUOLU. 3 J. Schwartz, ‘Call Him the Worst Director (Then Duck)’, The New York Times, 18 May 2008,

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/movies/18schw.html?_r=0.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/12/uwe-boll-auschwitz-film-causes-outrage

http://youtu.be/FS8E71RUOLU

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/movies/18schw.html?_r=0


produced that claim to show what Auschwitz or the Holocaust ‘really was’, from Wanda

Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1947) to the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the

Final Solution (2005). Not all filmmakers show ‘the horror’ as Boll does, but films such as

Robert Enrico’s Au Nom de Tous les Miens (1983) and Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone

(2001) certainly show horrific images as well. Second, and more important, films can never

show what Auschwitz ‘really was’ because films cannot give unmediated access to past

reality. Representations of historical events are never identical to the events themselves and

history films therefore never present the real past, but always a reconstruction of that past.

However, Boll is a filmmaker and not a graduate student in Present(ed) History, and

his naïveté on these matters may therefore be excused. He is neither the first nor the last

filmmaker who claims to represent the past as it really was. The reason I present the story of

Auschwitz is that it illustrates the problematic I deal with in this paper, which is the

representation of gas chambers in films dealing with the Holocaust. My key objective is to

describe and understand the changing form and function of gas chamber representations in

Holocaust films. This form and function have varied over the last seven decades and from

this development it is possible to infer the changing meaning of gas chambers within

collective Holocaust memory, because even though the collective memory ‘seems to be an

impenetrable and inextricable texture of threads and patterns, of different thickness, color,

and material, it nevertheless may be “read” in its concrete forms of expression’ – such as film

and television.4 Strangely, even though by this logic Holocaust films are a primary source for

the historian of Holocaust memory, research into the representation of gas chambers, an

element as vital to contemporary Holocaust discourse as it was lethal during the Holocaust

itself, has so far been inexistent.

4 F. Van Vree, ‘Auschwitz and the Origins of Contemporary Historical Culture. Memories of World War II in a European

Perspective’ in: A. Pók, J. Rüsen & J. Scherer (eds.), European History. Challenge for a Common Future (Hamburg 2002)

202-220, 202.


In the past seven decades, Holocaust imagery has been widely disseminated, in the

West and beyond, through education and popular culture. Film and television, the two most

powerful popular media for most of this period, have had a substantial share in this process.

Documentaries, fiction films, miniseries and television programs have brought Holocaust

imagery, including images of gas chambers, to many millions of people around the world. 5

Although Boll might disagree, the idea and the image of the gas chamber and its role in the

Holocaust is firmly rooted in our historical consciousness. This has not always been the case,

of course. When Allied forces discovered gas chambers upon liberating various concentration

camps in 1944 and 1945, visual images of gas chambers had yet to be created and dispersed.

These forces, among them teams of filmmakers such as the US Army Signal Corps and the

British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit, were the first to shoot and disseminate

concentration camp and gas chamber imagery. American documentary Nazi Concentration

and Prison Camps (1945), presented as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials, is one result of

this.6 In the nearly seven decades separating Uwe Boll from these Allied filmmakers, a

myriad of Holocaust films and documentaries have been produced, several of which feature

images of gas chambers. These images have taken various forms and diegetic functions; from

black-and-white images shot at recently liberated camps in order to testify to atrocities

committed by the Nazis to graphic genocide reenactments in order to entertain spectators.

Some images, such as showerheads and ‘Bad und Desinfektion’ signs, have become

Holocaust icons while others, such as the Majdanek and Dachau gas chamber doors, seem to

have been forgotten.7 Images representing gas chambers are never wholly new, because to be

meaningful and recognizable they have to employ an already existing symbolic language.

5 Cf. Van Vree, ‘Auschwitz’, 202-203. ’Since the introduction of television – the storyteller of modern society par

excellence (Grebner) – in the late 1950s and 1960s, audio-visual representations constitute a dominant mode of knowledge in

Western culture. This also holds true for the image of the past.’ 6 Available on YouTube via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCy02267X8A. 7 The signifiers ‘gas chamber’ and ‘Auschwitz’ – verbally and visually – have certainly become iconic, a fact to which Boll’s

film, in contradiction to its stated purpose, attests. As Timothy Snyder puts it: ‘Today Auschwitz stands for the Holocaust,

and the Holocaust for the evil of a century.’ Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York 2010), viii.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCy02267X8A


Therefore, as history film theorist Anton Kaes writes about history films in general, ‘images

of images circulate in an eternal cycle, an endless loop, in a Möbius strip of cliché images,

validating and reconfirming each other (...).’8 Nevertheless, there is a variety of gas chamber

representations. The function of gas chamber representations within Holocaust films varies as

well. This changing function mirrors developments within collective Holocaust memory.

Research Question

How have the form and the function of gas chamber representations in Holocaust

films developed since the Holocaust? To answer this question I have analyzed twenty-four

films dealing with gas chambers in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. For each

film I have asked the following questions: (1) What images represent gas chambers? (2) What

is shown explicitly? What is not shown but only implied? (3) In what sequence are these

images shown? (4) What is the function of the images within the narrative?9 For each period –

three twenty-year periods and one eight-year period; a division as arbitrary as it is pragmatic

– of Holocaust filmmaking I have furthermore asked: (5) What trends are visible? (6) Which

images are recycled? (7) Which images become iconic? (8) Which images break with trends

(i.e. iconoclasts)?

Status Quaestionis

Although various Holocaust film studies have been conducted since the 1980s,

historical research into the representation of gas chambers in such films is inexistent.

Lawrence Baron has compiled an overview of ‘three waves’ of Holocaust film scholarship.10

The input of historians in this field has been marginal. The first wave of Holocaust film

studies arose in the wake of the NBC miniseries Holocaust (1978) and Claude Lanzmann’s

ten-hour documentary Shoah (1985). These studies focused on the development, the accuracy

8 A. Kaes, ‘History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination’, History and Memory 2-1 (1990) 111-

129, 112. 9 In Appendix I, I have collected screenshots with transcriptions of the relevant scenes from these films. 10 L. Baron, ‘Film’, in: P. Hayes & J.K. Roth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford 2011).

http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211869.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199211869.

http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199211869.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199211869



and the impact of Holocaust films in several countries. Insdorf, Doneson, Avisar, Shandler,

Mintz and Anker have critically discussed American Holocaust films and television

programs.11

On the other side of the Atlantic, Kaes, Santner, and Reimer & Reimer have

studied German Holocaust films, Colombat has surveyed French films, and Marcus has

looked at Italian films.12

A second wave emerged in reaction to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and

Roberto Benigni’s La Vita è Bella (1997). The success of these films in terms of

dissemination and awards gave the production of and the debate on Holocaust films a fresh

impetus. Loshitzky has edited a volume of critical reflections on Spielberg’s blockbuster.

These reactions comprise criticisms for blurring fact and fiction, comparisons with Shoah,

reflections on the representation of Jews and Gentiles, and national reception studies.13

La

Vita è Bella caused more critical consternation than Schindler’s List. Some, such as Denby

and Niv, have denounced the film for its humorous tone and happy ending.14

Many others,

such as Viano, Gilman, Kertész, Flanzbaum, Siporin, and Celli have applauded the film for

its style and integrity in dealing with the Holocaust.15

Since 2000, a third wave of Holocaust film studies has widened the scope of research

to include topics such as the impact of globalization, comparisons with other ‘genocide

films’, the representation of trauma, and the utilization of Holocaust films in education.

11 A. Insdorf, Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust (New York 1983). J.E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film

(Philadelphia 1987). I. Avisar, Screening the Past. Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington 1988). J. Shandler,

While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York 1999). A. Mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of

Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle 2001). D. Anker, Imaginary Witness. Hollywood and the Holocaust (New York

2004). 12 A. Kaes, From Heimat to Hitler. The Return of History as Film (Cambridge 1989). E. Santner, Stranded Objects.

Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca 1990). C. Reimer & R. Reimer, Nazi Retro-Film. How German

Narrative Cinema Remembers the Past (New York 1992). A. Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (Metuchen 1993).

M. Marcus, Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (Toronto 2007). 13 Y. Loshitzky (ed.), Spielberg’s Holocaust. Critical perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington & Indianapolis 1997). 14 D. Denby, ‘Life is Beautiful’, New Yorker 75-3 (1999) 96-9. K. Niv, Life is Beautiful, but Not for Jews. Another View of

the Film by Benigni (Lanham 2005). 15 M. Viano, ‘Life is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory and Holocaust Laughter’, Film Quarterly 53-1 (1999) 26-34. S.L.

Gilman, ‘Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films’, Critical Inquiry 26-2

(2000) 279-308. I. Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14-1 (2001) 267-272; H. Flanzbaum,

‘But Wasn’t it Terrific? A Defense of Liking Life is Beautiful’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14-1 (2001) 273-86. S.

Siporin, ‘Life is Beautiful: four riddles, three answers’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7-3 (2002) 345-363. C. Celli,

‘Comedy and the Holocaust in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful/La Vita è Bella’, in: M.F. Norden (ed.), The Changing

Face of Evil in Film and Television (Amsterdam / New York 2007).


Baron has examined how Holocaust films reflect contemporary cinematic trends.16

Hirsch has

applied trauma theory to films and documentaries concerned with Holocaust inferred

trauma.17

Hirsch and Kacandes have edited a volume on pedagogical and theoretical issues

concerning the use of Holocaust representation in education.18

Kerner, the latest author to

publish a book on Holocaust films, has made a broad global survey of more and lesser-known

Holocaust films.19

Only Libby Saxton – Chair of the Film Studies Department at Queen Mary,

University of London – has dealt with the representation of gas chambers, but summarily and

not from an historical perspective. As part of a shift in the focus of debate ‘from the question

of whether the [Holocaust] could or should be represented to the question of how it might

adequately or responsibly be represented’ she has examined how Holocaust filmmakers can

encourage responsible as opposed to voyeuristic spectatorship.20

In a chapter called ‘Through

the Spyhole: Death, Ethics and Spectatorship’ she analyses how several fiction and

documentary films dealing with gas chambers ‘imagine, construct or revisit these sites of

unconscionable atrocity.’ The gas chamber representations she discusses – the earliest of

which dates from 1974, even though gas chambers feature in many earlier Holocaust films as

well – serve ‘to offer some insights into spectatorial agency and responsibility.’ Her study

does not outline the changing image of gas chambers in Holocaust films, nor does it reveal

developments in collective Holocaust memory by doing so.21

It is my contention that such a study is interesting on its own merits. Results would

not only show the developing ideas and values of filmmakers regarding the representation of

gas chambers in particular and the function of gas chambers in filmic Holocaust discourse in

16 L. Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present. The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham

2005). 17 J. Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia 2004). 18 Hirsch & Kacandes, Teaching the Representation. 19 A. Kerner, Film and the Holocaust. New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries and Experimental Films (New York

2011). 20 Saxton, Haunted Images, 2. Italics in original. 21 Ibidem, 72-73.


general, but also illustrate how global collective Holocaust memory has developed and how

the popular meaning of gas chambers has changed over the past seven decades. In the face of

the hitherto inexistence of like research, this study will open up new terrain in both the fields

of Holocaust memory and Holocaust film studies.

Before presenting my results, I will first outline the theoretical and historical notions –

representing history on film, representing the Holocaust on film, and Nazi gas chambers –

that have formed the background to my research.


THEORY & HISTORY

In our largely postliterate society, historical filmmakers have become preeminent

public historians. Film – ‘the contemporary medium still capable of both dealing with the

past and holding a large audience’22

– disseminates representations of the past on a much

larger scale than do for instance books or museums. In Western societies, the historical film

has become the dominant mode of public historical representation. Film is a powerful

medium: it reaches a global audience it its private sphere. Because films represent the world –

even if they do so through analogy or fantasy – it has an impact on people’s worldview.

Historical films, popular films most prominently, produce public perception of the past unlike

any other medium. As Anton Kaes observed already in 1990, ‘film and television have

become the most effective (and paradoxically least acknowledged) institutional vehicles for

shaping historical consciousness.’23

Representing History on Film

History films represent the past. What does this mean? ‘To re-present past events’

means ‘to make these events present again’. However, past events are gone and cannot really

be made present again, at least not as they actually were. An event ‘cannot be recovered and

“re-experienced,” since it is not “out there” to be visited and photographed like a foreign

country.’24

What remains of the past in the present are traces in the world and in memory.

Based on these remnants, human beings symbolically reconstruct the past by representing it

in various forms, from elementary images or propositions to complex narrative structures

such as are presented in history books and films. These representations are not identical to the

22 R. Rosenstone, ‘History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film’,

The American Historical Review 93-5 (1988) 1173-1185, 1175. 23 Kaes, ‘History and Film´, 112. ‘Historical films,’ claims Kaes, ‘interpret national history for the broad public and thus

produce, organize, and, to a large extent, homogenize public memory. Surpassing schools and universities, film and

television have become the most effective (and paradoxically least acknowledged) institutional vehicles for shaping

historical consciousness. They are powerful because they can make history come alive more readily than commemorative

addresses, lectures, exhibitions or museums; they can resituate past events in the immediate experience of the viewer.’ 24 Kaes, ‘History and Film´, 117. Although the foreign country comparison is popular with historian because it signifies an

actual presence in time and space, it begs the question whether the same objections hold true for representing foreign

countries ‘as they actually are’. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out, a country is also a narrative construct, a complex

system of signs whose ontological ground resides in the imagination.


absent past but symbolically ‘stand in’ for them – another meaning of representation – as a

tool to explain and understand the past.

Can historical claims be empirically verified when their referent – i.e. the past – is

absent? If they could not, this would delegitimize not only the historical discipline but also

the judiciary system; it would furthermore give way to Holocaust denial, because if historical

claims cannot be verified then anything goes. Remnants of the past can and do function as

empirical data to verify historical claims. But when it comes to narrative structures – stories

about the world in the past, the present and the future – verification becomes much more

difficult. That is because narrative structures are not ‘out there’ but are imposed on the world

by us, like webs we throw over the world in order to get a grip on it in time.25

Some webs are

better than others because they incorporate more facts and provide a better understanding and

explanation of the worl, but all webs are products of the present time of their production. The

way a web is spun is dependent on the context in which it is spun. In other words, human

explanations and understandings of past, present and future times are themselves subject to

and products of time. From this it follows that the narratives we construct about the past not

only represent the past events they claim to represent (their salient content), but also represent

the present context of their production (their latent content). Therefore we can study the

content of representations about the past as primary sources of the present time and place in

which they came into being.26

25 Allow me to note that ‘an event’ is itself a narrative construction, with beginning, middle, and end. 26 See Doneson, The Holocaust (2nd ed.), 8. ‘As a product of the society that produces it, film reflects public attitudes and

acts, therefore, as a primary source of evidence for the historian. Like a more conventional document, therefore, a film must

be “read” and analyzed for what it can reveal to us about the period in which it was created. In this regard, American films

that deal with the Holocaust serve a dual function. Yes, they focus on themes portraying National Socialism and the

persecution of the Jews; but they also explore contemporary issues that were and are germane to American society at the

time of their appearance. Consequently, the analysis must proceed on both levels: on the salient level, the one that depicts the

Holocaust itself, and on the latent level, the one that explains a particular film’s contemporary meaning. The two are

connected, of course. On the salient level, the Holocaust often works as a metaphor for the discourse taking place on the

latent level. Thus the event -- the Holocaust -- is a function of its current environment as well as a reflection of its own

history.’


History Film Typology

History films are narrative constructs, complex systems of signs that represent both

past events and the present context of their production. Within this conception, variations are

possible. History film theorist Robert Rosenstone distinguishes three types of history films:

the dramatic feature film, the opposition or innovative film and the documentary film.27

The dramatic feature film is by far the most popular type of history film. It typically

tells the story of men and women caught up in the sweep of historical events and shows the

impact of these events on individual lives. Dramatic feature films are fictional in the sense

that most elements are invented: for example, the events are reenacted before the camera in

compressed or altered form, the people involved are played by actors, and dialogues are more

often written for the occasion than recorded during the actual events. Dramatic feature films

are part of the Hollywood tradition but not necessarily produced in or by Hollywood. Their

goal is predominantly to entertain the public and to produce profits. Rosenstone gives a six-

fold characterization of how the Hollywood tradition presents history: (1) It presents a story

with a beginning, middle and end, containing a moral message and usually a view that things

have gotten better; (2) It presents a story of individuals who are renowned for heroic deeds or

who have suffered from exploitation or oppression; (3) It presents a story of a unitary, closed,

and completed past, provides no alternatives to what is happening on the screen and admits of

no doubts; (4) It personalizes, dramatizes, and emotionalizes the past, creating the sense that

we are not watching a representation of events, but experiencing them directly; (5) It gives us

the ‘look’ of the past; of buildings, costumes, artifacts, etc; (6) It shows history as a holistic

process: film brings together things that written history often splits apart.28

The innovative or opposition film is a more obscure and less popular mode of

historical representation. Most innovative films are produced in opposition to Hollywood

27 R. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow 2006). R. Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film as Real History’,

Film-Historia 5-1 (1995) 5-23. Rosenstone, ‘History in Images’. 28 Rosenstone, History on Film, 47-48.


conventions. They search for a more sophisticated vocabulary in which to render the past on

screen and attempt to present history in a more complex, interrogative and self-conscious

way. Some of these films can be labeled ‘postmodern’ in the sense that they self-reflexively

foreground their own construction, present history from a multiplicity of perspectives, deviate

from dramatic story development, problematize the histories they present, employ humor,

parody, and absurdism, refuse to insist on a coherent meaning of events, and ‘never forget

that the present moment is the site of all past representation.’29

The goal of innovation or

opposition films is to gain understanding rather than to provide entertainment.

The documentary history film is most like academic history, in that both disciplines

make claims about past reality and present evidence to support those claims. Documentary

film theorist Bill Nichols defines documentaries as films about ‘situations and events

involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories

that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events

portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing

the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory.’30

What he means is that

documentary films tell stories about events and people in the real world, but always do so

from a distinct perspective that determines how the story is told. The goal of documentary

film is to explain and understand events. Although the documentary seems to give direct

access to history, it is fictional in the sense that it is constructed in a present to make sense of

the past. The documentary resembles the dramatic feature film in that both often tell a linear

story, deal with large topics through the experience of small groups, utilize objects and places

to create a ‘reality effect’31

and aim for an emotional response not only through images but

also through the music, sounds and rhetoric. The difference between the documentary and the

dramatic film is that the majority of the documentary images is not staged for the camera, but

29 Rosenstone, History on Film, 18-19, 50-51. 30 B. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington 2001), 14. 31 R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language (New York 1986), 141-148.


collected from museums and archives. Exceptions are illustrative reenactments and ‘talking

heads’ segments, i.e. contemporary interviews with witnesses or with experts.32

Nichols

distinguishes six types or modes of documentary films: (1) The expository documentary

speaks directly to the viewer with voice-over and argumentative logic. Most people associate

this mode with documentary in general; (2) The observational documentary looks on as

social actors go about their lives as if the camera were not present; (3) The participatory

documentary interacts with his or her social actors and participates in shaping what happens

before the camera. Interviews are a prime example, often coupled with archival footage to

examine historical issues; (4) The reflexive documentary calls attention to the assumptions and

conventions that govern documentary filmmaking and increases awareness of the

constructedness of the film’s representation of reality; (5) The performative documentary

emphasizes the expressive aspect of the filmmaker’s engagement with a subject; (6) The

poetic documentary stresses visual and acoustic rhythms, patterns, and the overall form of the

film, and has a close proximity to experimental, personal, and avant-garde films.33

Representing the Holocaust on Film

The question whether the Holocaust in general and the gas chambers in particular can

and should be represented has been hotly debated. Various philosophers, filmmakers and

survivors have claimed – often with reference to German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s

dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric – that the Holocaust is beyond

representation, ineffable, incommunicable, incomprehensible, and so on.34

‘Auschwitz cannot

be explained nor can it be visualized,’ wrote for instance Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, ‘I

who was there do not understand.’35

However, the focus of the discussion on Holocaust

representation has shifted from the question whether the events could or should be

32 Rosenstone, History on Film, 17, 70-74. 33 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 31-32, 149-153. 34 L. Saxton, Haunted Images. Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London & New York 2008), 6-7. Th.W. Adorno,

Prisms (Cambridge 1955), 34. 35 Saxton, Haunted Images, 6. Doneson, The Holocaust (2nd ed.), 3.


represented to the question how they might be represented.36

No event is unrepresentable in

itself and each event poses challenges to representation – in that regard the Holocaust is no

different from other events. What gives the Holocaust a Sonderstellung – if anything does – is

the nature and the scale of the genocidal events that go by that name. As Saul Friedländer

puts it, ‘we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and

representational categories, an “event at the limits” (...) the most radical form of genocide

encountered in history: the willful, systematic, industrially organized, largely successful

attempt totally to exterminate an entire human group within twentieth-century Western

society.’37

Adequate Holocaust representation – constructing a narrative web with which to

explain and understand what happened – is problematic for several reasons. First, the Nazis

willfully eliminated most witnesses and evidence – primary sources for the historian – of

their crimes. Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi relates how SS militiamen told prisoners that

‘however this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear

witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him (...) because

we will destroy the evidence together with you.’38

The SS prevented Sonderkommandos from

sharing their experiences with others, and photography in concentration and extermination

camps was prohibited by SS-leadership, resulting in a dearth of visual traces.39

Secondly, the

proportions of the Holocaust were unprecedented and unrepeated.40

This poses challenges to

36 Saxton, Haunted Images, 2. 37 S. Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Harvard 1992), 2-3. ‘The

extermination of the Jews of Europe,’ writes Friedländer, ‘is as accessible to both representation and interpretation as any

other historical event. But we are dealing with an event which tests our traditional conceptual and representational

categories, an “event at the limits”. What turns the “Final Solution” into an event at the limits is the very fact that it is the

most radical form of genocide encountered in history: the willful, systematic, industrially organized, largely successful

attempt totally to exterminate an entire human group within twentieth-century Western society.’ 38 P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London 1989), 1. 39 F. Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz. Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Chicago 1999), 29. Müller and his fellow

Sonderkommando members ‘had become privy to a secret and were no longer allowed to come into contact with other

prisoners or with SS men not in the know.’ Cf. Levi, The Drowned, 34-36. 40 Despite post-WWII genocides and catastrophes, writes Levi, ‘the Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum,

both in its extent and quality. In no other place and time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never

were so many human lives extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity,

fanaticism and cruelty. Levi, The Drowned, 9-10. Although, as Norman Finkelstein points out, the uniqueness of the


representation, because it is so unlike other events that no frame of reference exists for

representing and understanding it. As Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote, ‘We can

enumerate and describe each of these events, but they remain singularly opaque when we

truly seek to understand them.’41

Nevertheless, based on the witnesses and evidence that have survived, historians have

been able to reconstruct, explain and understand the events of the Holocaust to a large degree,

and a myriad of filmmakers have attempted to represent these events in film. Between 1945

and 1960 already over a hundred Holocaust-related feature films and television dramas were

produced, and many more would follow. Whether in dramatic, documentary or innovative

form, the systematic destruction of Jews by the Nazi regime has been the subject of

innumerable films, and the body of Holocaust films seems ever growing. ‘Over the past

decade,’ observed Terri Ginsberg in 2004, ‘Holocaust films of nearly every generic and

formal structure have been produced as well as distributed across an expanding global

context, as Holocaust cinema has become an increasingly mainstream, international

venture.’42

The fact that at least twenty-seven dramatic feature films and twenty-one

documentary Holocaust films have been published since Ginsberg’s observation attests to the

popularity of the Holocaust film.43

What is true of history films in general – as I have explicated above – is true of

Holocaust films in particular. On the salient level Holocaust films represent the events of the

Holocaust and on the latent level they represent the time and place of their production, e.g.

Holocaust should not become a dogma. ‘At the most basic level,’ he writes, ‘every historical event is unique, if merely by

virtue of time and location, and every historical event bears distinctive features as well as features in common with other

historical events. The anomaly of The Holocaust [i.e. the ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust] is that its

uniqueness is held to be absolutely decisive.’ The Holocaust Industry. Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.

Second Edition (London & New York 2003), 42. 41 G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (New York 2002), 12. ‘From a historical perspective

we know,’ he writes, ‘for example, the most minute details of how the final phase of the extermination was executed, how

the deportees were led to the gas chambers by a squad of fellow inmates (the so-called Sonderkommando), who then saw to

it that the corpses were dragged out and washed, that their hair and gold teeth were salvaged, and that their bodies, finally,

were placed in the crematoria. We can enumerate and describe each of these events, but they remain singularly opaque when

we truly seek to understand them.’ 42 T. Ginsberg, ‘Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Holocaust and Film’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies

26-1 (2004) 47-59, 47. 43 Cf. Wikipedia, ‘List of Holocaust Films’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films


the meaning of the Holocaust for contemporary filmmakers and audiences. More particular

still, it is true of the representation of gas chambers, both in terms of their form and function.

The changing image of gas chambers in Holocaust films and the changing role of these

images within the story of the Holocaust are revealing of both the changing nature of

collective Holocaust memory and the changing role of gas chambers within Holocaust

discourse. My findings therefore reveal changes in popular Holocaust discourse and

collective Holocaust memory.

Nazi Gas Chambers 1939-1945

A gas chamber is an airtight room that can be filled with gas as a means of execution.

Nazi Germany used gas chambers to end what they believed to be lebensunwertes Leben, i.e.

life unworthy of life. The Nazis began using gas chambers in December 1939 for

‘euthanizing’ handicapped, chronically ill, and elderly Poles and Germans. Victims were

brought in under the pretense of medical examinations and were subsequently led to

‘showers’, where they were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.44

In 1941, after Hitler had

called the euthanasia program to a halt because of domestic resistance, the Nazis began to

systematically murder Jews, Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war and others by the same

method.45

In December 1941 they introduced the large-scale use of gas vans in the Polish

village of Chełmno. Forty to sixty victims were forced into a single van, the van’s exhaust

fumes were piped back into the enclosed vehicle, and after several minutes all victims had

suffocated to death. Between 152,000 and 310,000 Jews and over 4,000 Gypsies were

murdered in this way at Chełmno.46

However, this method proved inefficient and insufficient for the millions of Jews the

Nazis intended to kill. Therefore they planned – in a project named Aktion Reinhard, in honor

of assassinated SD-leader Reinhard Heydrich – to build three extermination camps with

44 Snyder, Bloodlands, 256-257. 45 Yad Vashem, ‘Gas Chambers’, 1. 46 J.R. Fischel, The A to Z of the Holocaust (Lanham, Toronto & Oxford 2005), 60.


large, stationary gas chambers in 1942. These camps were Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka.47

When transports arrived at these camps, some victims were chosen to join the

Sonderkommando while a few others with useful skills were selected to work in the camp.

The rest was ‘sent on an assembly line, where they were stripped of their possessions and

clothing and their hair was cut. They were then pushed into the gas chambers with their arms

raised so the maximum number of people could be jammed in. Babies and young children

were thrown in on top of the crowd.’48

In these three camps, approximately two million Jews

were exterminated during the twenty months of their operation.49

Bełżec extermination camp, in March 1942 the first to be operational, had three gas

chambers in a camouflaged wooden barrack. Jews were gassed with carbon monoxide. An

engine was installed at a shed outside the gas chamber from which gas was piped into the

enclosed space. Newly arrived victims, having been made to believe that they had arrived at a

work or transit camp, were killed in this way immediately upon arrival. Approximately

500,000 to 600,000 Jews were killed at Bełżec.50

Sobibór, the second Aktion Reinhard

extermination camp, housed its gas chambers in a brick building.51

The gassing of Jews by

carbon monoxide began in May 1942. Victims had to undress in the railway square and were

told that ‘following their baths, they would have their possessions returned to them and be

sent to Ukraine, where they would be able to live and work.’ By September, an additional

building containing six gas chambers became operational, increasing extermination capacity

to 1,200 to 1,300 people a day.52

The third Aktion Reinhard camp, Treblinka, was established

in July 1942. It was modeled after Sobibór and had three gas chambers in a massive brick

building that could be hermetically sealed. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Jews arrived each day

by freight train and later these numbers were increased to more than 12,000 a day. Upon

47 Yad Vashem, ‘Gas Chambers’, 1. 48 Ibidem, 2. 49 Fischel, The A to Z, 32. 50 Ibidem, 49. 51 Yad Vashem, ‘Gas Chambers’, 1. 52 Fischel, The A to Z, 214-215.


arrival, men were separated from women and children and all were ordered to undress,

bundle their clothes and leave their valuables. They were told that after showering they would

receive clean clothes. ‘The walls of the chambers were covered with white tile, shower heads

were installed, and water pipes ran across the ceiling, all constructed in order to give the

appearance of “showers.” In reality the pipes conducted the carbon monoxide into the

chambers.’ Ukrainian mercenaries guarded the doors of the gas chambers and started the

engine. ‘Some 20 to 25 minutes later, an SS officer would check through the window to be

sure that everyone had been asphyxiated. Jewish prisoners (the Sonderkommando) were then

ordered to remove the corpses.’ Between July 23 and August 28, 1942 approximately

268,000 Jews were exterminated by this method. Later ten additional gas chambers were

built. In total, between 700,000 to 900,000 Jews were killed in Treblinka.53

Auschwitz was the largest of the death camps. It comprised three camps: Auschwitz I,

the main Auschwitz camp; Auschwitz II, Birkenau, the extermination camp where between

1.1 and 1.5 million Jews were gassed with Zyklon B; and Auschwitz III, Buna Works, the

slave labor camp where Jews were being worked to death. Although execution and genocide

by gas took place in Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Ravensbrueck,

Dachau, Majdanek, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Auschwitz, the latter above all

‘has become synonymous with the Holocaust and has come to symbolize the genocidal

policies of Nazi Germany.’54

Of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in

the Holocaust, at least three million died in gas chambers, of which almost half at Auschwitz.

Others died from bludgeoning, shooting, starvation and other forms of maltreatment in

various ghettos, concentration camps, labor sites, during deportation or in or near their

hometowns. Therefore, contra what Boll and many others believe, the Holocaust can be

reduced neither to Auschwitz nor to the gas chambers.

53 Ibidem, 236-238. 54 Ibidem, 39-40; Yad Vashem, ‘Gas Chambers’, 2. Cf. Snyder, Bloodlands, viii.


GAS CHAMBER REPRESENTATIONS

I have found twenty-four Holocaust films that visually represent gas chambers (see

Filmography). Fourteen of these are dramatic feature films, ten are documentaries, and one of

these documentaries is also an innovative history film. Thirteen are from North America

(eleven from the United States and two from Canada), ten are from Europe (five from France,

two from the United Kingdom, and one each from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany),

and one is a US/UK co-production.55

1944-1965

From the end of the war until 1965, seven Holocaust films represented gas chambers.

Year Title Country Type

1944 Majdanek Cemetery of Europe Poland Expository Docu

1945 Death Mills US Expository Docu

1945 Nazi Concentration Camps US Expository Docu

1946 The Stranger US Dramatic Feature

1948 Daleka Cesta Czechoslovakia Dramatic Feature

1955 Night and Fog France Poetic Docu

1961 Judgment at Nuremberg US Dramatic Feature

The first film to represent gas chambers was Polish expository documentary Majdanek:

Cemetery of Europe (1944). Like its American counterparts Death Mills (1945) and Nazi

Concentration and Prison Camps (1945), it was compiled from footage shot by Allied film

crews after liberating various concentration camps, not including Auschwitz. All three films

show black-and-white (b/w) images of the gas chambers at Majdanek and Dachau (Figures 1

and 2). These shots, recycled in several films until 1968, are embedded within similar

sequences showing the gas chamber door with a ‘Bad und Desinfektion’ (Majdanek) or

‘Brausebad’ (Dachau) sign on or above it, the chamber’s interior, dummy shower heads and

55 Saxton additionally discusses the The Eighty-First Blow (1974), Riesen ins Leben (1995), and Der Tod ist ein Meister aus

Deutschland (1999). I haven’t been able to find these films, although I have found others that Saxton ignores.


pipes protruding from the ceiling, Zyklon B canisters, and the furnaces and chimneys of the

crematoria. All three documentaries furthermore show emaciated or exhumed corpses

preceding or following the gas chamber representations. Curiously, and attesting to

incomplete knowledge of German extermination procedures, the narrator of Death Mills

claims that ‘not all died slowly and horribly by starvation: millions died quickly and horribly

by burning in the furnaces of Poland.’ In reality, millions died quickly and horribly in gas

chambers before burning in said furnaces.

Figure 1: The Majdanek gas chamber

Figure 2: The Dachau gas chamber

These early gas chamber images – and the same is true for those in The Stranger

(1946) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – functioned as evidence of the atrocities

committed by the Nazis, as outlined by the various narrators.56

Survivors are depicted but

their testimonies hardly heard. A scene from Death Mills illustrates this tendency to focus on

the perpetrators and not on the victims/survivors: near the end an image of survivors is

56 Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) was used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials (Baron, ‘Film’, 2). Similarly, The

Stranger (1946) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) show concentration camp and gas chamber images to attest to the

crimes committed by Nazi characters within the story, as outlined by respectively Mr. Wilson and Colonel Lawson.


accompanied by the comment that ‘the faces of these women at Mauthausen tell the stories of

their sufferings’ without giving these survivors a voice in the documentary.

Most films from this period recycled these images from Majdanek and Dachau. The

one that did not was Orson Welles’s war crime drama The Stranger (1946). The Stranger

follows Nazi hunter Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) to the town of Harper, Connecticut, in

search of fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler (Orson Welles), who now goes by the name of

Charles Rankin. Mr. Wilson shows concentration camp imagery to Rankin’s wife (Loretta

Young) to convince her of her husband’s Nazi past. The function of this gas chamber image

is therefore same as in the expository documentaries discussed above: to testify to the crimes

committed by the Nazis, here personified by Franz Kindler. The gas chamber is represented

with an image of a brightly lit bathing room never seen before or since in Holocaust films.

Mr. Wilson peculiarly comments that in this gas chamber ‘candidates were first given hot

showers so that their pores would open and the gas would act that much more quickly.’

Image and commentary attest to the fact that in 1946, gas chamber imagery and information –

although Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps was used as evidence in the Nuremberg

Trials – had yet to find its way to American filmmakers like Orson Welles and through them

to the American public.57

Remarkably, all four of these early Holocaust films – and the same is true for Night

and Fog (1955), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

(1968) – refer to Holocaust victims as ‘prisoners’, ‘candidates’ or ‘inmates’ but hardly ever

as Jews, even though victims were predominantly Jewish.58

By contrast, the Jewish identity

of the victims is central to Alfréd Radok´s drama film Daleká Cesta (1949), the first

Czechoslovakian Holocaust film. Daleká Cesta – English title Distant Journey or The Long

57 Death Mills (1945) was shown to German citizens to inform them of the genocide committed ‘behind the curtain of Nazi

pageants and parades’, as the narrator puts it. It was not meant to be shown to the American public, as is evident from an

opening statement that reads: ‘This film will not be shown to the general public without permission of the War Department.’ 58 In Judgment at Nuremberg, chief prosecutor Colonel Lawson (Richard Widmark) ‘mentions the Jews, but along with

members of “every occupied country of Europe.” In so doing, Judgment obscures the reality of Nazi policy against the Jews

(…).’ Furthermore, there are no Jewish characters in the film. Doneson, The Holocaust (2nd ed.), 99-101.


Journey – tells the story of Jewess Hana Kaufmannová (Blanka Waleská) and Gentile

Antonin Bures (Otomar Krejca), a couple whose relationship is complicated by the

introduction of anti-Jewish measures. Near the end of the film’s mostly documentary overture

– before the dramatic story of Hana and Tonik takes off – the image of the Majdanek gas

chamber door (Figure 1) signifies the gas chamber in particular and the Holocaust in general.

The image is dislodged from the sequence in which it was presented in the documentaries

discussed above and employed as a synecdoche (i.e. the image shows a part but signifies the

whole) at the end of a sequence showing a speech by the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher,

rallying German children, the slogan ‘Jews get out!’ painted on a fence, smiling Aryan

children, and imprisoned Jewish children (a fictional image that prefigures the scene

discussed below). The synecdoche has a double function: extradiegetically (in tandem with

the archival images) it signifies the implied logical end of Nazism – genocide – and

diegetically (employing fictional images) it prefigures the fate of the Jewish protagonists.

A later scene, at Theresienstadt, evokes the idea of a gas chamber – without showing

one – in a sequence that shows Hana escorting a group of newly arrived children to a bathing

room (the same image as is used in the overture) and asking them to undress; an adult man

undressing; the children hesitating; various quick close-ups of shower heads, pipes and hooks

on the ceiling and walls of the shower room, accompanied by ominous musical tones; and

finally both children and adults panicking and shouting: ‘It’s gas! Gas! Gas!’ Since Nazi gas

chambers were often disguised as shower rooms, close-ups of non-water-dispensing shower

heads feature in many later Holocaust films. The striking similarity of these images (Figure

3) corroborates Anton Kaes’s claim that ‘images of images circulate in an eternal cycle, an

endless loop, in a Möbius strip of cliché images, validating and reconfirming each other

(...).’59

The bathroom/gas chamber scene in Daleká Cesta functions to signify the fear of the

59 A. Kaes, ‘History and Film’, 112.


Jewish children – the close ups of the shower heads combined with the ominous music are

shot from their perspective and represent their fear – and by analogy that of the

Czechoslovakian Jews in general. The film is saturated by fear; it depicts ‘a grotesque

nightmare’ writes Kerner, ‘a world thrown into chaos, life was precarious, and the threat of

deportation – which meant almost certain death in an Auschwitz gas chamber – hung

overhead like the Sword of Damocles.’60

Daleká Cesta is the only film from this period that

represents a gas chamber from the perspective of the Jewish victims. A possible explanation

for this, as well as for the Gentile-Jewish love story, can be found in Radok´s family sphere:

his father was half-Jewish, his mother a Gentile, his grandfather died at Theresienstadt and

many other relatives on the paternal side died during the Holocaust.61

Radok’s emphasis on

Jewish Holocaust victims is exceptional in this early period of Holocaust filmmaking.

Figure 3: Shower heads in Daleká Cesta (1949), Holocaust (1978), Les Uns et les Autres (1981),

Schindler’s List (1993), The Grey Zone (2001) and Auschwitz (2011).

Released in 1955, Alain Resnais’s poetic documentary Nuit et Brouillard, which

outlines the story of Nazi concentration camps from isolation and deportation to

concentration and extermination, was the first film to present color imagery of a gas chamber

and, more importantly, to focus on the suffering of victims inside the gas chamber. It does,

however, not emphasize that these victims were mostly Jewish but ‘it takes a more universal

60 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 25. 61 Ibidem, 21-25.


approach and in fact only references Jewish victims once, along with images of deportees

wearing the Star of David.’62

Early on, Night and Fog recycles the image of the Majdanek

gas chamber door (Figure 1), which by now can fairly be called a Holocaust icon. It does so

in a sequence showing the facades of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Auschwitz I, a face expressing

amazement (‘First sight of the camp,’ says the narrator, ‘it’s another planet.’), of prisoners

gathered in a camp’s square, of the Majdanek door with the ‘Bad und Desinfektion’ sign, and

finally of naked prisoners standing in line. Here again, as in Daleká Cesta, the Majdanek door

signifies the Holocaust synecdochically.

Later on in the film, the gas chamber fully materializes: after two b/w shots of Zyklon

B canisters – similar shots feature in five of these seven films – a sequence of moving color

images shows the facade of (again) the Majdanek gas chamber, the inside of the chamber

with dummy water container, piping and shower heads, two closed doors with peepholes, and

finally a shot moving upwards from a small window to a battered concrete ceiling. ‘The only

signs, but you have to know, are the fingernail scrapings on the ceiling. Even the concrete

was scratched up.’ These fingernail scrapings (Figure 4) function to show the suffering of the

victims. However, according to Resnais, not only the Jews but all human beings are possible

victims of gas chambers, since suffering is the universal and never-ending human condition:

although ‘war nods of to sleep, it keeps one eye always open. (…) We pretend it all happened

only once, at a given time and place. We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear

to humanity’s never-ending cry.’ The gas chamber representations in Night and Fog therefore

function to illustrate universal suffering, ‘humanity’s never ending cry’, rather than the

particular genocide inflicted by the Nazis on the Jewish people.

62 Ibidem, 4.


Figure 4: Scratched-up concrete in Night and Fog

Stanley Kramer’s American courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg – shot during

the trial of Adolf Eichmann and released on the day he was sentenced to death, 14 December

196163

– recycles the sequence of images of the Dachau gas chamber as shown in Death Mills

and Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps. In good dramatic tradition, Judgment adds to this

a close-up of presiding Judge Haywood (Spencer Tracy) biting his fist in agony at what he

sees.64

Preceding and following the gas chamber imagery, the film shows burnt and

emaciated corpses, making this the first American Holocaust drama to show explicit atrocity

footage.65

These images again serve as evidence to the crimes committed under Nazi

authority – as in The Stranger diegetically rather than extradiegetically – and testify to the

guilt of the authorities, signified by the accused Nazi judges.

In this first period of Holocaust filmmaking, both the form and the function of gas

chambers representations are remarkably constant. Most films use gas chamber images from

Majdanek or Dachau to signify gas chambers and do so in an expository documentary mode,

even within the dramatic feature films. The image of the Majdanek gas chamber door is used

so often that it can rightly be called an iconic gas chamber image. The function of these gas

63 Doneson, The Holocaust (2nd ed.), 93-94. ‘The Eichmann trial must have lent authenticity to producer-director Stanley

Kramer’s film and helped to make it so successful as well.’ 64 Similarly, in The Stranger, the gas chamber image is followed by the horrified face of Mrs. Rankin (Loretta Young), the

newly-wed wife of fugitive Nazi Franz Kindler (Orson Welles). This demonstrates well how dramatic feature films, as

Rosenstone puts it, personalize, dramatize, emotionalize, and moralize the past that is presented: the emotional reaction

visible on the dramatized, diegetic spectator’s face instructs the actual spectator how to relate morally to what is shown. 65 The Stranger does so too, but hardly recognizable as such. A side note: a 1951 teleplay by Aby Mann, of which Judgment

at Nuremberg is a remake, provides a curious illustration of how Holocaust representations on TV are subject to commercial

pressures: the word ‘gas’ was censored from the teleplay on demand by the show’s sponsor, the American Gas Association,

which objected to the use of the word ‘gas’ in reference to extermination camps and gas chambers. Insdorf, Indelible

Shadows, 3. Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 29. Anker, Imaginary Witness, 46:00.


chamber representations is primarily to attest to the atrocities committed by the Nazis and not

to show the suffering of the victims, which is emphasized in only two films. The fact that

most Holocaust victims were Jewish is not something you can deduce from these films.

1965-1985

From 1965 to 1985, five films have been produced that represent gas chambers: a

Canadian and an American expository documentary, both from the 1960s, a very popular

American dramatic miniseries from the late 1970s, and two French dramatic feature films

from the early 1980s. Gas chambers are represented more dramatically and increasingly

function to show the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust.


1965 Memorandum Canada Expository Docu

1968 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich US Expository Docu

1978 Holocaust US Dramatic Feature

1981 Les Uns et les Autres France Dramatic Feature

1983 Au Nom de Tous les Miens France Dramatic Feature

In contrast to most films discussed so far, the Canadian expository documentary

Memorandum (1965) emphasizes the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims. Shot in the

summer of 1965, Memorandum follows Bernard Laufer, a Jewish survivor now living in

Canada, and twenty-nine other American Jewish survivors on a day-and-a-half ‘pilgrimage’

to Bergen-Belsen. The story of their visit is framed by scenes from a peaceful post-war West

Germany on the one hand – e.g. the opening of the Jewish embassy and the Frankfurt Trials

against former Auschwitz officers – and archival footage of the Third Reich and the

Holocaust on the other.

Memorandum features a contemporary shot (shot during the making of the film) of

the entrance to the gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz I and several shots of a model

of Crematorium II of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Mieczyslaw Stobierski (Figure 5). The camera


moves closely over the sculpted entrance, the undressing room, the operating gas chamber

and furnaces as an interviewed German prosecutor explains this ‘devilish idea’ to the

filmmaker.66

This film is the locus of a transformation in the function, form and location of

gas chamber representation. First, as in previous films, it outlines the crimes of the

perpetrators, while, as in later films, it zooms in on the Jewish victims. It does so quite

literally: by zooming in on sculpted gas chamber full of suffocating people. Secondly, this

sculpted scene is a dramatic reenactment, prefiguring later films in which genocide

reenactment becomes the dominant mode of gas chamber representation. There is

furthermore a scene in which a survivor of Treblinka testifies to his experiences, prefiguring

many survivor testimonies in later films. Thirdly, Memorandum shows the Auschwitz gas

chambers, prefiguring the trend to signify the Holocaust by showing Auschwitz. This film

can therefore rightly be called a turning point in gas chamber representation.

Figure 5: Stobierski’s model with running gas chamber

Jack Kaufman’s expository documentary The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968)

– based on the book by William F. Shirer – which recycles images from Majdanek and

Dachau for the last time (Figures 1 and 2), is the only film from this period that does not

present new ways or images to represent gas chambers. Its gas chamber representation is

formally and functionally closer to the films from the previously discussed period than it is to

those from this period. Kaufman’s film – aimed to answer the question how it was possible

66 The prosecutor also explains that it is almost impossible to sentence those Nazis who killed by memorandum, i.e. from

behind their desks using a telephone, to which the filmmaker peculiarly responds: ‘So the answer is to use the telephone.’


that ‘an ancient and cultured people steeped in Christianity (…) collapsed into savage

barbarism in the mid-twentieth century’ and therefore primarily concerned with Nazi

Germany and only secondarily with the Holocaust – presents one new gas chamber image as

well: a sequence showing various victim processions, a canister of Zyklon B, and the doors at

both Majdanek and Dachau ends with a b/w still shot of a nearly closed door with an

peephole, taken from inside the Majdanek gas chamber with heavy backlight shining through

the door (Figure 6). Although this sequence functions as evidence to the ‘barbarism’ of the

Third Reich, it can be argued based on camera position, lightning, and the climaxing

extradiegetic music that this new image – never seen before or since in Holocaust films – is

shot from the perspective of the victims nearing their extermination.

Figure 6: Inside the Majdanek gas chamber

Kaufman outlines the Holocaust, from deportation to extermination, but does not use

the word ‘Holocaust’ to refer to this process – none of the films discussed so far do. It does

use ‘Holocaust’ once, but in another context, that of Hitler’s strategy for the battle against

Britain and France, which the narrator refers to as ‘Holocaust from the sky and thunder from

the ground.’ Like most of the films discussed so far, The Rise and Fall does not mention the

Jewish identity of the victims. It mentions ‘Hitler’s racial fantasies: achieve a pure Aryan

world’ and continues that ‘to this end, hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people are

herded into ghettos and relocation centers.’ (Emphasis added) It furthermore refers to victims


as ‘housewives, factory hands, professors, schoolchildren’, ‘human cargo’, ‘prisoners’, and

‘unsuspecting victims’, but never as ‘Jews.’

The three dramatic feature films representing gas chambers in this period, starting

with the American miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss (1978), really focus

on the victims. They furthermore herald a new trend in Holocaust filmmaking – genocide

reenactment. However, none of these films show events inside a functioning gas chamber in

the way Stobierski’s model does. This scene, according to Saxton ‘variously described as the

“primal scene”, “nerve center” or “constitutive crime” of the genocide,’ will remain off-

screen in Holocaust films until the release of Uwe Boll’s film Auschwitz in 2011.67

Holocaust tells the story of the Jewish family Weiss, caught up in the sweep of

German events between 1933 and 1945. It is a dramatic feature film par excellence: it

personalizes and emotionalizes – Wiesel would say ‘trivializes’68

– the Holocaust. All four

episodes were broadcast worldwide and its impact ‘may be read from the fact that the term

“Holocaust” – which was hitherto limited to the Anglo-Saxon world – since then is used all

over the world.’69

Holocaust dramatically reenacts genocide in gas chambers at Hadamar

Euthanasia Center and at Auschwitz. At Hadamar, a group of handicapped people – including

Anna Weiss (Blanche Baker), who is traumatized after being raped by Nazi soldiers – is

locked into a wooden barn by lab-coated doctors and nurses. There’s no music – only the

sound of birds chirping, signifying the casualness of the operation. The camera follows a

doctor who walks from the door over to the left side of the barn, where an internal

combustion engine and an operator in blue overalls are located. After the doctor starts the

engine, the shot cuts away to another doctor checking the time on his watch, after which it

cuts back to a close-up of the engine. The camera moves from the engine, over the exhaust

67 Saxton, Haunted Images, 2. 68 E. Wiesel, ‘Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory’, The New York Times, 11 June 1989,

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm. 69 Van Vree, ‘Auschwitz’, 211. 120 million US citizens watched Holocaust ‘and following its broadcast President Jimmy

Carter formed a presidential commission (…) to determine an appropriate way for the United States to commemorate the

Holocaust’, resulting in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 28.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm


pipe, all the way up to the point where the pipe enters the barn. Neither the suffering of the

victims nor their dead bodies are shown. The next shot shows mother Berta (Rosemary

Harris) and her daughter-in-law Inga (Meryl Streep) reading the letter from Hadamar

informing them of Anna’s death. This scene invites viewers to empathize with the victims

rather than to despise the perpetrators. ‘Whatever feelings the spectator might experience

over Anna’s fate,’ writes Kerner, ‘these feelings have less to do with the violence visited

upon the character and more to do with an empathetic response to the suffering endured by

the family. The loss of a child, a daughter, or a sister is what spawns a spectator’s emotional

response.’70

Figure 7: Inside the Holocaust gas chamber

Holocaust features two similar and related gas chamber scenes at a fictional

Auschwitz. In the first, Major Dorf (Michael Moriarty), the antagonist of the family Weiss

who personifies Nazi Germany, and a professor visit Auschwitz for inspection purposes.

Accompanied by a prisoner string quartet, Dorf and the professor meet camp commander

Rudolf Höss and enter the crematorium building. The first image signifying that the

characters have entered a gas chamber is a close-up of a conical metal showerhead attached

to a pipe hanging from a white ceiling. Similar images are used in other films (see Figure 3).

As the camera zooms out, several other showerheads appear (Figure 7). While Höss explains

the genocidal procedure to the professor – this scene functions primarily as an exposé on gas

70 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 134.


chambers – the trio moves on to the undressing room. After an SS-guard salutes Höss, male

prisoners silently and obediently move towards the gas chamber – covering their genitals,

showing the American aporia that it is acceptable to show genocide but not to show nudity.

Inside, the SS reassures them that ‘it’s only a shower.’ As Dorf, Höss and the professor

approach the closed door, the camera cuts away to a gas-masked SS on a roof, emptying a

canister of Zyklon B in a chimney (Figure 8; cf. Figure 21). With the sound of coughing and

screaming in the background – the suffering is kept off-screen – the professor looks through

the spyhole (Figure 9; cf. Figure 18): ‘Absolutely fantastic! Like a scene from Dante’s

Inferno… and those sounds… almost like they’re wailing in the synagogue.’71

Figure 8: An SS emptying a canister of Zyklon B

Figure 9: The professor observing the victims

The second Auschwitz scene is played on the same set, making iconic gas chamber

imagery – e.g. the close-up of the showerhead, the peephole –redundant. Commanded by SS-

71 Cf. Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 287n24: ‘In both Amen and the NBC miniseries Holocaust, the spectator is taken

right up to the gas chamber door, and characters gaze through the peephole, but in both cases the films never cut to the

subjective view; leaving the spectator right at the threshold. A trailer for a yet-to-released (sic) Uwe Boll film, on the other

hand, takes us from the peephole straight into the gas chamber during a gassing.’


men, Berta Weiss and other women undress and proceed to the gas chamber, covering their

breasts. After a cutaway to two members of the Sonderkommando collecting the women’s

clothes – one of them is Berta’s son Karl, showing that in Holocaust, the Holocaust is really a

family affair – the camera cuts back to Berta’s face as she enters the gas chamber. The scene

ends with the sound of Zyklon B crystals falling and evaporating.

The gas chambers have several functions within this story. Holocaust tells the story of

the family Weiss and through them the story of the European Jews, victims of the Nazis.

Therefore, in contrast to the early post-war gas chamber representations, the gas chambers in

Holocaust function to show the suffering of the Jews. Furthermore, the gas chamber

representation at Auschwitz provides the story with closure. It does so together with another

closing scene, that of only surviving son Rudi Weiss going to Palestine in 1945. Holocaust

therefore closes with the following message: the mother dies in Auschwitz but the son

survives and goes to Palestine to create the state of Israel. Holocaust is the first Holocaust

film that directly connects the gas chambers to the state of Israel.

Claude Lelouch’s Les Uns et les Autres (1981) tells the story of two generations of

French, American and Russian artists. The first generation lives through the war; the story of

the second generation is set in the 1960s and 1970s. The post-war generation’s story begins

when French soldiers return to Paris after the end of the Algerian War in 1962 and it ends

when a group of second generation artists organize – having learned from both wars, one

supposes – an international concert and dance performance on top of the Arc de Triomphe in

Paris to raise money for the Red Cross and awareness for suffering in the Third World. There

is a short gas chamber representation in the first part of the film, aimed more to substantiate

the suffering of the war generation in general than to emphasize either the crimes of the Nazis

or the suffering of the Jews in particular. The gas chamber in this story is not given special

status but is rather one of many things that happened during the war. The gas chamber is


represented in a sequence similar to, though shorter than, that in which Berta Weiss enters the

gas chamber: we see a prisoner orchestra playing a sad symphony, naked male prisoners in a

white room with showerheads on the ceiling, an SS shutting a rather large peephole framing

our view into the gas chamber (Figure 10), the Sonderkommando collecting the prisoners’

clothes, and finally again the orchestra. Unlike Holocaust, the Jewish identity of the victims

is not emphasized (although it is acknowledged) and the gas chamber is not the end of the

story, because this film is not about Jewish suffering but about universal suffering. In that

respect Les Uns et les Autres resembles Nuit et Brouillard, which is also evident in the film’s

motto, a quote by Willa Cather: ‘There are only two or three human stories, and they go on

repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.’ This motto puts the

Holocaust on a par with all other ‘human stories’ and therefore universalises its meaning.

Figure 10: The gas chamber in Les Uns et les Autres

Au Nom de Tous les Miens (1983) presents the Jew – personified by the protagonist

Martin Gray (Michael York) – as a tragic hero. The gas chamber is part of his defiant life

story but not central to it: it is just one of the many things he suffered though endured. Based

on the book by the same title, Au Nom de Tous les Miens tells the incredibly story of Martin

Gray, a defiant Jew from the Warsaw ghetto, who in the fall of 1942 is deported to Treblinka

where he is set to work in a Sonderkommando. He escapes, returns to the Warsaw ghetto in

March 1943 where he helps his father to organize the uprising, after which he joins the Polish

partisans. By November 1944 he has worked his way up to the position of Red Army captain


and marches for Berlin to end the war. After the war he migrates to the US to live with his

grandmother. He marries and moves to Southern France, where he loses his wife and children

in a forest fire in October 1970. Still covered in ashes, he dictates his life story into a

recording machine for the benefit of future mankind.

Au Nom de Tous les Miens stages events at Treblinka extermination camp in graphic

detail. Twelve minutes into the story, Gray’s Sonderkommando is escorted to the gas

chamber by whip-carrying SS-men. Behind the building, an excavator is digging a mass

grave. When they arrive at the gas chamber, a guard checks his watch, then looks inside

through a spyhole. After a cutaway to the Sonderkommando, the film cuts back to the bottom

of the doors, from which a yellow liquid – body fluids of the dead – is flowing into a ditch.

After peeping through another hole, a guard yells at the Sonderkommando to open the door.

What we see is a floor covered with naked corpses, some played by actors and others made

out of plastic (Figure 11). The Sonderkommando proceeds to transport the corpses to the

excavated pit. Halfway between the gas chamber and the pit, the corpses are relieved of their

golden teeth – shown in close-up. The scene ends with a shot inside the mass grave, which is

full of what look like light blue plastic corpses.

Figure 11: Actors playing mass murdered victims

Au Nom de Tous les Miens is a tragic story: Gray suffers enormously and yet survives

to educate future generations. The function of the gas chamber within this narrative is to

show one of many things the Jew Martin Gray has suffered. But seeing the nature of the


images – Enrico has attempted to create shocking atrocity footage resembling that of Death

Mills and Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps – it is also to send shivers down the spines

of the spectators. Au Nom de Tous les Miens is the first film to represent the gas chamber as a

horror element.

The form and the function of gas chamber representations in Holocaust films have

changed considerably in this period. Where in the previous period gas chambers were

represented with images of the Majdanek and Dachau gas chambers to attest to the crimes of

the Nazis, gas chamber representation in this period is increasingly done in dramatic mode to

signify the suffering of victims of Nazi Germany. That these victims were predominantly

Jewish becomes more and more visible in these Holocaust films, although Jewish identity is

really central only in Memorandum (1965) and Holocaust (1978). The form of gas chamber

representation, although increasingly through dramatic reenactment, is more varied than in

the previous period. Although some elements feature in several representations – e.g. the

spyhole and conical showerheads – the language signifying gas chambers is still evolving.

1985-2005

The third twenty-year period of Holocaust filmmaking has brought forth most films

dealing with gas chambers: six drama films of which four from the US, one from the UK and

one from France and three documentaries, of which one from France, one from the US and

one from Canada. The documentary mode of gas chamber representation changes from

expository to participatory: documentaries feature more and more testimonial accounts. The

dramatic mode remains dominant. All films emphasize the Jewish identity of the victims and

the gas chamber becomes more central in these Holocaust films.


1985 Shoah France Participatory Docu

1987 Escape from Sobibor UK Dramatic Feature

1989 Triumph of the Spirit US Dramatic Feature


1993 Schindler’s List US Dramatic Feature

1998 The Last Days US Participatory Docu

1998 Apt Pupil US Dramatic Feature

1999 Zyklon Portrait Canada Poetic Docu / Innovative

2001 The Grey Zone US Dramatic Feature

2002 Amen France Dramatic Feature

Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hour documentary Shoah (1985) – ‘the quintessential

Holocaust film’ according to Kerner72

– is a piece of iconoclasm par excellence. Over the

course of eleven years, Lanzmann shot 350 hours of film in fourteen countries.73

The ten

hours of documentary film resulting from this process are entirely devoted to the Holocaust.

However, in contrast to earlier films, Shoah represent the story of the Holocaust indirectly

and fragmentarily, through interviews with perpetrators, bystanders and victims (and with the

father of that tripartite distinction Raul Hilberg), and with contemporary shots at Auschwitz

and other extermination sites now turned into ruins, landscapes or monuments. Especially

during Filip Müller’s testimonial account of working in the Sonderkommando, Shoah shows

contemporary gas chamber sites – mostly ruins – at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau and

the sculpture by Stobierski (see Figure 5). These images function as an illustration to

Müller’s account, much like in the early expository documentaries. However, what makes

Shoah interesting is not so much what it does show as what it does not: Lanzmann refuses to

use archival images or dramatized reenactments. He has even stated that if he would find

footage of gas chambers in use, he would destroy it.74

He claims that the Holocaust is not

transmissible through representations – it is rather obscured by them – and they should

therefore be prohibited.75

For Lanzmann, every attempt to represent the Holocaust is

72 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 203. 73 Ibidem, 203. 74 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 203. 75 ‘The Holocaust,’ claims Lanzmann, ‘is unique firstly in that it erects around itself, in a circle of flames, a limit which

cannot be crossed because a certain absolute of horror is intransmissible: to claim to do so is to become guilty of the most


immoral. Nevertheless, Lanzmann’s Shoah is itself a Holocaust representation: it makes the

Holocaust present again in the imagination – though by different means. Therefore his

interdiction on representation should be interpreted as an interdiction on dramatic

reenactment and archival footage only.

The six dramatic feature films from this period perpetuate the trend of genocide

reenactment set by Holocaust in 1978. Escape from Sobibor (1987) tells the heroic story of a

group of defiant Sobibór prisoners – mostly Jews but also Russian prisoners of war – who

organize an uprising and escape from the extermination camp in October 1943. Halfway into

the story, the spectator follows an adolescent prisoner on his way to deliver a message to a

guard working near the gas chambers. The scene is accompanied by extradiegetic orchestral

music, signifying that something significant is about to happen. Although there is only one

route, several signs saying ‘Desinfektion’ point the boy in the right direction and

simultaneously evoke the idea of the gas chamber. Through a wooden gate that also says

‘Desinfektion’ the boy enters a clearing in the forest. Women and children guarded with

whips and shepherds enter a wooden building and come out naked on the other side, joining a

long line of women and children on their way to a brick building on the other side of the

clearing. The music becomes louder as prisoners enter the brick building. As guards close the

doors, the music climaxes and the sound of people screaming is added to the soundtrack. The

camera zooms out to show more of the building, cuts away to a zombie-like

Sonderkommando, then cuts back to smoke rising from the building (Figure 12). The scene

ends with a shot of the boy’s face, showing his emotional reaction.

This gas chamber representation functions to show why the prisoners organize the

revolt: if they do not, they will end up in the gas chamber themselves. Surviving Sobibór

therefore means to have escaped the gas chamber. From here it is a small step – though not

serious transgression. Fiction is a transgression; I profoundly think that there is a prohibition on representation.’ Quoted in

Saxton, Haunted Images, 26.


taken explicitly in this film – to the idea that surviving the Holocaust means escaping the gas

chamber. The gas chamber has a central place in Escape from Sobibor.

Figure 12: Smoke rising from the Sobibór gas chamber

Triumph of the Spirit (1989) – partly filmed at Auschwitz I – tells the story of former

Greek Jewish boxing champion and Holocaust survivor Salomo Arouch (Willem Dafoe), who

is deported with his family and girlfriend to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Arouch survives by

fighting boxing matches for the entertainment of the SS. His father and brother die in the

camp. His mother and grandmother and many other men, women and children are gassed

upon arrival. The first shot of the gas chamber scene shows them waiting in line before

descending the stairs into the crematorium. The shot resembles a scene from Stobierski’s

model (Figure 13). The semblance of the mise-en-scène to what the real Auschwitz-Birkenau

crematorium entrance looked like – as reconstructed in the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The

Nazis and the Final Solution (2005) discussed below – is remarkable. ‘Things will be better

now,’ says an SS-officer to the Jews waiting in front of the brick building. ‘First you will be

going into the bathhouse, where you will shower and be disinfected.’ Again, ‘disinfection’

signifies what is to come. When the men, women and children have entered the building the

camera moves upward, showing first the gloating SS-officers and then – resembling Escape

from Sobibor – the flame-throwing smokestack of the crematorium. Inside, the victims

undress, and as they stand naked in the gas chamber waiting for the showers to start pouring

water, the image cuts away – as in Holocaust – to two gas-masked SS-men emptying a


canister of Zyklon B through a hole in the roof (see Figure 20). As in Escape from Sobibor

and Holocaust, the moment of death stays off-screen. Besides being partly shot in Auschwitz

and partly in scenery similar to Auschwitz, the gas chamber representation is not very

innovative, possibly meaning that gas chamber representation is reaching a point of saturation

in 1989 and that the visual language signifying gas chambers becomes more firmly

established. The function of the gas chamber in this film is to show what is at stake for

Arouch: losing a boxing game means a one-way ticket to the gas chamber. But Arouch

doesn’t lose; he wins every game and survives. As in Escape from Sobibor, surviving the

Holocaust means to escape the gas chamber, and the music accompanying the gas chamber

scenes (a requiem of choir and strings, growing more intense as the characters move closer to

the gas chamber) signifies that the gas chamber is central to the story of the Holocaust.

Figure 13: Entrance to the crematorium. Stobierski (from Shoah) left, Triumph right.

Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Schindler’s List (1993) tells the story of Oskar

Schindler, a German Gentile capitalist who starts a pots and pans production factory upon

German invasion of Poland and employs Jewish laborers. He makes sure that none of ‘his

Jews’ are deported to extermination camps, thereby saving all their lives. In the process, he

transforms from ‘a self-centered womanizer’ into a ‘self-sacrificing savior.’ However, as

Kerner puts it, ‘Jewish survival is not the narrative aim of Schindler’s List; it is rather an

incidental artifact of Schindler’s transformative accession as savior.’76

76 Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 31-32.


Schindler’s List demonstrates that gas chamber representation has reached a saturation

point. Near the end of the movie, Spielberg tricks the spectator – utilizing iconic gas chamber

images such as a flame-throwing chimney, a ‘Bad und Desinfektion’ sign and showerheads –

in believing that he is about to witness a gassing from inside the gas chamber. On a cold

night, female ‘Schindler Jews’ arrive in a snowy (or ashy?) Auschwitz-Birkenau. They have

been deported there by mistake: Schindler has given the Nazis a list with the names of Jews

that are not to be deported to Auschwitz. After a shot of a smoking chimney – similar to the

one in Triumph of the Spirit but taller – the women’s hair is cut short. They undress and enter

a room with a ‘Bad und Desinfektion’ sign above the entrance (Figure 14). The camera

follows the women into the room, cuts back to guards closing the doors, and then films the

women through the spyhole, aligning the perspective of the spectator with that of the guards

(Figure 15). The image cuts back to the naked women inside and to a close-up of a conical

showerhead (see Figure 3). Then the lights are turned off. Although these elements trigger

our gas chamber alarm, when the lights are turned back on there is water coming from the

showers and the chamber turns out to be a bathing room after all, giving both the women and

the spectator great relief. ‘Ironically,’ observes Saxton, ‘Spielberg inverts the trick used by

the SS to entice prisoners to their deaths without arousing their suspicions; instead of

disguising a gas chamber as a shower room, he disguises a shower room as a gas chamber.’77

When the women are back outside they see less fortunate Jews on their way to the real gas

chamber. They see these people descend into the undressing room, after which the camera

turns upwards to show the smoking chimney, in what is almost an exact copy of the gas

chamber scene in Triumph of the Spirit. After all, Spielberg conforms to the trend not to show

the genocide on screen. Like in Escape from Sobibor and in Triumph of the Spirit, this scene

shows what the Schindler Jews have survived: the gas chamber.

77 Saxton, Haunted Images, 77.


Figure 14: Schindler’s Jews enter the shower

Figure 15: Filmed through the spyhole

In contrast to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, James Moll’s participatory documentary

The Last Days (1998) does employ archival images. It tells the stories of a small number of

American Jewish Holocaust survivors. Moll illustrates the testimony of former member of the

Sonderkommando Dario Gabbai with contemporary images shot inside the crematorium of

Auschwitz I (like Lanzmann does in Shoah) and with archival images. It also shows a

hitherto unseen close-up of a door’s spyhole, reaffirming this image as iconic. In the same

year, this image ‘travels’ to the dramatic mode, as an imitation of this image is used in the

dramatic feature film Apt Pupil (Figure 16 and 17). That this dramatic feature film by Bryan

Singer is inspired by The Last Days is evident not only from this image but also from the

striking similarities between the former Nazi interviewed by Moll and the elderly German

character of Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen) in Singer’s film.


Figures 16 and 17: Peepholes in The Last Days (left) and Apt Pupil, both from 1998.

Apt Pupil (1998), adapted from the book by Stephen King, tells the story of high

school student Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) who gets obsessed with the SS past of his

German neighbor Dussander. ‘I want to hear about it,’ Todd tells Dussander after school.

‘Everything they are afraid to show us in school.’ Dussander initially refuses, but changes his

mind when Todd threatens to inform the police about his real identity. After hearing

Dussander’s testimony (another aspect Singer took from The Last Days), the gas chamber

haunts Todd in his nightmares, which is illustrated by the iconic spyhole image (see Figure

18). This representation functions to make clear that Nazis and gas chambers are really scary;

they are the stuff of nightmares, not unlike the usual monsters in Stephen King thrillers. Apt

Pupil is exceptional in that unlike all other films from this period it is not told from the

perspective of Jewish Holocaust survivors, but from the side of the German perpetrator.

Figure 18: Peepholes in respectively Holocaust (1978), Au Nom de Tous les Miens (1983),

Schindler’s List (1993), Apt Pupil (1998), Amen (2002) and Auschwitz (2011).


Elida Schogt’s poetic documentary and innovative history film Zyklon Portrait (1999)

interweaves a history of Zyklon B – present by a neutral, objective, ‘scientific’ voice – with

the personal history of her ancestors, some of whom died in Auschwitz. Schogt stays away

from iconic imagery, giving her documentary an iconoclastic character. She juxtaposes her

mother’s testimony with blue-colored underwater photography (hydrogen being the main

element of Zyklon B), b/w images of Zyklon B canisters and insects (Zyklon B was initially

produced to combat vermin), models of gas molecules, bathing rooms, abstract visual

patterns and blue x-ray photos of lungs. Without showing iconic gas chamber imagery, the

combination of the exposition on Zyklon B and the Holocaust with her mother’s memories of

her mother (i.e. Elida Schogt’s grandmother) evokes the idea of a gas chamber quite strongly.

The blue visual patterns, the gas models, the underwater photography and the shower room

next to a swimming pool (possibly that where the underwater images were shot) are an

innovative way to signify the gas chamber. After the male narrator has explained what

Zyklon B does to the human body, we hear the voice of the filmmaker’s mother, who says

that ‘those last moments you do not want to visualize.’ With this statement Schogt conforms

to the by now established norm in gas chamber representation not to show the moment of

death on screen.

Of the six dramatic feature films in this period, only Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey

Zone (2001) shows dead gas chamber victims (and one living) on-screen, much like in Au

Nom de Tous les Miens. All other films suggest death by gassing without showing dead

bodies. Besides this difference, The Grey Zone is in many ways like the other films, and most

like Triumph of the Spirit, featuring a stage modeled after Birkenau, a ´Bad und Desinfektion´

sign, white-walled gas chambers with conical shower heads and pipes, gas-masked SS-men

pouring a canister of Zyklon through a chimney, a prisoner orchestra accompanying the

victims down a stairway into the undressing room, and a chimney producing black smoke.


The main difference is that Nelson does not employ the image of the spyhole, but takes the

viewer right into the gas chamber. Kaes’s claim that in history films images of images

circulate in an eternal cycle of cliché images is again confirmed. The Grey Zone tells the

story of the largely failed uprising of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau in which

one of the crematoria was blown up. Named after the essay by Primo Levi in his book The

Drowned and the Saved, the film is not only set between the grey product of the crematorium,

but it also problematizes the distinction between victim and perpetrator, showing that it is not

a black and white opposition. The gas chamber functions as the mise-en-scène of this story.

The last dramatic feature film from this period, Amen (2002) by Costa-Gavras,

examines the attitude of Pope Pius XII and the Vatican towards Nazi Germany and the

Holocaust. When SS-officer Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), member of the SS Hygiene

Institute, discovers that his colleagues are mass-murdering Jews, he notifies the Vatican in

the hope that they will inform the international community, which they don’t. Amen almost

literally duplicates the gassing of disabled people at Hadamar in Holocaust. It also represents

a test run of a gas chamber at a Polish extermination camp by employing the iconic images of

gas-masked SS-men pouring Zyklon B through a chimney and SS-officers observing its

effect through a spyhole (Figure 19). Again, we see the outside of the building, but not what

happens inside.

Figure 19: A test run at Auschwitz in Amen (2002).


This third twenty-year period of Holocaust filmmaking has brought forth most films

dealing with gas chambers. With the exception of the iconoclasts Shoah and Zyklon Portrait,

gas chamber representation is rather uniform. All dramatic feature films employ similar icons

to represent gas chambers. In 1993, the visual language representing gas chambers is so

firmly established that Steven Spielberg can utilize it in order to play a trick on his spectators.

By 1998, Bryan Singer can represent a gas chamber showing only the iconic image of the

peephole. Interestingly, the documentary mode of gas chamber representation changes from

expository to participatory. This is no doubt partly due to the influence of Claude

Lanzmann’s ten-hour tour de force, but it can also be due to the fact that before 1985 –

possibly before Holocaust in 1978 is better – nobody wanted to talk about his Holocaust

experiences or nobody wanted to listen. Dramatic reenactment remains the dominant mode of

gas chamber representation, which doesn’t surprise since dramatic feature film is the most

popular form of history film. All films from this period emphasize the Jewish identity of the

victims. Where before 1965, Jews were hardly ever mentioned in Holocaust films, their role

as victims is by now firmly established. A final conclusion regarding this period is that the

gas chamber functions more and more as a narrative element that provides the protagonists

with a reason for action: whether it is to escape from Sobibór, to win boxing games, or to

blow up the crematorium of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it is all done to escape the gas chambers. In

reality, almost no one escaped the gas chambers.

2005-2013

The fourth and final period of Holocaust filmmaking has so far brought forth three

films representing gas chambers: an expository documentary by the BBC, a UK/US dramatic

feature film and the German film Auschwitz discussed in the introduction above.

Interestingly, all films are set in Auschwitz, which corroborates the claim put forward at the


end of the previous chapter that Auschwitz ‘has become synonymous with the Holocaust and

has come to symbolize the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany.’78


2005 Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution79 UK Expository Docu

2008 The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas UK/US Dramatic Feature

2011 Auschwitz GER Dramatic Feature

Expository documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (2005) tells ‘the

story of the evolution of Auschwitz and the mentality of the perpetrators (…) based in part on

documents and plans only discovered since the opening of archives in Eastern Europe and

informed by interviews with people who were there, including former members of the SS.’ It

shows various contemporary shots, computer-animated reconstructions, and archival footage

of amongst other places Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz as evidential illustrations to the

presented history, which focuses on the perpetrators. The use of computer-animated

reconstructions is an innovative strategy of gas chamber representation. One such animation

takes the viewer from the stairs descending into the undressing room, to the gas chamber at

Auschwitz-Birkenau. This sequence is repeated several times throughout the six episodes.

Where previously discussed dramatic feature films reconstructed parts of Sobibór, Treblinka

and Auschwitz as stage for a dramatic story, this BBC-produced documentary is the first film

to feature a full reconstruction of these extermination camps in an attempt to show these

camps wie sie eigentlich gewesen. Interestingly, while this documentary employs reenacted,

dramatic scenes as illustration to the narrative, it does not reenact scenes involving the

genocide. Furthermore, a segment on the Euthanasia Program in the first episode shows

previously unseen archival footage of emaciated people arriving by horse carriage and

entering a brick building, after which the image cuts away to an image of pipes connected to

78 Ibidem, 39-40; Yad Vashem, ‘Gas Chambers’, 2. Cf. Snyder, Bloodlands, viii. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas does not

specify the camp’s location, but Boyne’s novel does. J. Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (London 2008). 79 This documentary is available on YouTube via http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAAHqbv8nIU.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAAHqbv8nIU


the exhaust pipes of a car and a lorry. Formally resembling the scene at Hadamar in

Holocaust and in Amen, the image moves from the car, over the pipes, to the point where the

pipes enter the brick building (Figure 20). From this analogy it could be argued that in both

Holocaust and Amen the spectator’s perspective on this scene is aligned with that of the

perpetrator.

Figure 20: Rare footage shown on Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution

Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) tells the story of Bruno, the

young son of the Auschwitz camp commandant, who at the perimeter of the camp befriends

an imprisoned boy of his own age. This boy ‘in striped pajamas’ has lost his father, and

Bruno infiltrates the camp to help find him. When the boy’s mother discovers that Bruno is

missing, she bursts into her husband’s office, who is just explaining to other SS-officers how

‘the weekly capabilities’ of the camp ‘will be almost trebled’ by an extension of its facilities.

As Bruno’s father explains this, we see his fingers move over a blueprint of the camp with the

words ‘crematorium’ and ‘gaskammer’ clearly inscribed, prefiguring the scene that is to

come. After Bruno’s father is informed, images of the parents and SS-men looking for Bruno

are interwoven with images of Bruno and his friend in a procession of male prisoners on their

way, through the rain, to a gas chamber. Although the story is largely told from the

perspective of the perpetrator, Bruno’s transformation into victim seems to want to

problematize the distinction between perpetrator and victim.

Arrival at the gas chamber is represented by an image of the prisoners descending a

staircase with metal handrail, an iconic gas chamber image. Thereafter we see shots of the

prisoners undressing, a Kapo repeating the cliché that ‘it’s just a shower’, naked men entering


a room with metal door with iconic spyhole, and all of them crammed together in the room.

Then, like in Schindler’s List, the lights are turned off, and as Bruno and the other boy hold

hands, we see from their perspective a shot of a gas-masked face dropping Zyklon B crystals

into the room (see Figure 21). Then the image cuts away to a shot of the metal door

accompanied by the sound of people pounding the door from the inside. Thereafter the

soundtrack is silent, and we see only the door. Again, suffering and death are implied but

kept off-screen. The next shot is filmed outside, where an SS-man stores the Zyklon canister

in box and where Bruno’s parents stand in shock.

Figure 21: Pouring Zyklon B through a hole in the roof in Holocaust (1978), Triumph of the Spirit (1989), The

Grey Zone (2001), Amen (2002), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and Auschwitz (2011).

The only Holocaust film ever made that shows a reenactment of the genocide from

inside the gas chamber – in almost pornographic form – is Uwe Boll’s Auschwitz (2011),

explaining why it caused widespread revulsion. It makes Boll an iconoclast, breaking with

the trend to keep the gassing off-screen. All other elements of Boll’s representation are cliché

images: people undressing, the metal door with spyhole, the ‘Bad und Desinfektion’ sign,

conical shower heads, the Sonderkommando taking away clothing and other personal

belongings, SS-men emptying Zyklon B canisters into the room, a smoking chimney, and

piles of emaciated corpses. Although Boll claims that the function of these images is to show

for the first time what Auschwitz ‘really was’, their form suspects that Boll .


Although all gas chamber representations perpetuate the use of iconic imagery in this

period, there are two innovations: first, the use of computer-animated gas chamber imagery

and second, the depiction of gassing in operation. In two films, the function of gas chamber

representation is mainly to show what Auschwitz ‘really was’, although the method for doing

so differs considerably. All three films from this period focus more on the perpetrators than

on the victims, and all three films are situated at Auschwitz.


CONCLUSION

The objective of this research has been to describe and understand the changing form

and function of gas chambers in Holocaust films. Describing this imagery is what I have done

above; now it is time to come to understand its development. In what follows I try to make

sense of the changing image of gas chambers throughout nearly seven decades of Holocaust

films. But before that, let me summarize my most important findings.

Until 1965, both the form and function of gas chamber representations were

remarkably consistent. Gas chambers were represented predominantly by authentic black-

and-white images of the gas chambers at Majdanek and Dachau shot by Allied forces after

liberating these camps and presented in an expository documentary mode. The image of the

Majdanek gas chamber door was particularly popular. Used both often and synecdochically

in both documentary and dramatic feature films, it leads me to conclude that this was the

iconic gas chamber image of this period. Gas chamber representations functioned as evidence

of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and not as evidence of the suffering of the victims.

Survivors were depicted but their side of the story was mostly neither heard nor told.

Furthermore, the majority of the films did not mention that Jews were the Nazis’ primary

victims.

In the period from 1965 to 1985, which saw the release of five films showing gas

chambers, the form and function of gas chamber imagery changed considerably. Archival

footage of Dachau and Majdanek moved out of the picture to make place for dramatic gas

chamber representations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The focus in these

films shifted from the perpetrators to the victims, although their predominantly Jewish

identity is not yet manifest in all films. After the broadcasting of the American miniseries

Holocaust in 1978, in which the Jewish identity of the victims is not only manifest but also

central, genocide reenactment became the dominant mode for representing gas chambers. The


moment of death – the gassing – remained off-screen. Holocaust represented a gas chamber

using a white room with conical metal shower heads hanging from the ceiling, metal doors

with peepholes, naked women entering the room and an SS-man emptying a canister of

Zyklon B into the room through a chimney-like hole in the roof. Subsequent gas chamber

representations in dramatic feature films were similar to that in Holocaust, although the

variation in this period shows that the visual language signifying gas chambers was still

evolving.

The period between 1985 and 2005 has brought forth nine films representing gas

chambers, most of them located in Auschwitz. While Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) explicitly

opposed both dramatization and archival images, the dominant mode of representation

remained the dramatic feature film. Focus remained on the victims until around the year 2000

and their predominantly Jewish identity was fully acknowledged. The gas chamber

increasingly functioned as a motive for heroic action by the Jewish protagonists, such as

escape and uprising. This means that Jews were no longer victims but became heroic

survivors. By 1993, the visual language signifying gas chambers was sufficiently established

for Steven Spielberg to deceive his spectators, utilizing iconic imagery, into believing they

were going to see an operating gas chamber from the inside. However, in all films the

moment of gassing – the genocidal core – remained off-screen. Starting around the year 2000,

the focus moves back to the perpetrator, although the distinction victim/perpetrator is

increasingly problematized.

Since 2005, three films have been produced that represent gas chambers, of which

Uwe Boll’s Auschwitz was the latest in 2011. All were located at Auschwitz and focus again

more on the perpetrator than on the victims. Showing computer-animated reconstructions of

gas chambers in Auschwitz and other extermination camps, he BBC documentary Auschwitz

was the most innovative. The dramatic feature films from this period recycled cliché images,


with the exception of Boll’s almost pornographic gassing scene. Where Spielberg tricked his

viewers into believing they would witness a gassing on screen, Boll’s film actually did so for

the first time in the history of the Holocaust film, in graphic detail.

What do these changes in the form and function of gas chamber representations reveal

about the changing meaning of gas chambers within collective Holocaust memory? Five

general conclusions can be formulated. First, before 1965, gas chambers represented one of

several atrocities committed by the Nazis. After 1965, the gas chambers increasingly

signified the suffering of the victims. Since the late 1970s, gas chambers signify the suffering

of the European Jews. Second, gas chambers have increasingly become a central element of

collective Holocaust memory. Since the 1980s, having survived the Holocaust means to have

survived the gas chambers. Third, gas chambers have increasingly become associated with

Auschwitz, and Auschwitz has increasingly become the iconic image of the Holocaust. Four,

based on the ratio between dramatic feature films, documentaries and innovative history films

dealing with the Holocaust, the Holocaust is remembered more as a closed, dramatic story

than as an event continuously challenging human understanding, an event which requires

interrogation and reflection, such as is done in documentaries and the rare innovative history

films representing the genocide. Fifth, the fact that the gassing of people inside the gas

chamber – arguably the greatest crime in the history of humanity – is not reenacted but kept

off-screen in all but one film demonstrates that there is still a taboo on the representation of,

and therefore a certain reverence for, this ‘genocidal core’.

What have we gained by this research? The changing image of gas chambers

throughout nearly seven decades of Holocaust filmmaking had not been researched before.

Libby Saxton has examined the representation of gas chambers from an ethical perspective.

She surveyed a number of gas chamber representations made since 1974 and has judged

whether these encourage either responsible or voyeuristic spectatorship. Her study neither


outlined the changing image and function of gas chamber representation, nor interpreted

these changes as markers of developing collective Holocaust memory. By describing and

interpreting the changing form and function of gas chamber representation in Holocaust films

I been able make a number of observations about the changing nature of collective Holocaust

memory and the changing meaning of gas chambers in Holocaust discourse, which had not

been made before, neither by Saxton nor by other students of Holocaust film and Holocaust

memory.


FILMOGRAPHY

1944 - Majdanek: Cmentarzysko Europy (Aleksander Ford)

1945 - Death Mills (Billy Wilder)

1945 - Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps (George Stevens)

1946 - The Stranger (Orson Welles)

1949 - Daleká Cesta (Alfréd Radok)

1955 - Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais)

1961 - Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer)

1965 - Memorandum (Donald Brittain & John Spotton)

1968 - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Jack Kaufman)

1978 - Holocaust (Marvin Chomsky)

1981 - Les Uns et les Autres (Claude Lelouch)

1983 - Au Nom de Tous les Miens (Robert Enrico)

1985 - Shoah (Claude Lanzmann)

1987 - Escape from Sobibor (Jack Gold)

1989 - Triumph of the Spirit (Robert Young)

1993 - Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg)

1998 - The Last Days (James Moll)

1998 - Apt Pupil (Bryan Singer)

1999 - Zyklon Portrait (Elida Schogt)

2001 - The Grey Zone (Tim Blake Nelson)

2002 - Amen (Costa-Gavras)

2005 - Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (Laurence Rees, Catherine Tatge)

2008 - The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman)

2011 - Auschwitz (Uwe Boll)


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Appendix I

Screenshots with Transcriptions

Majdanek: Cmentarzysko Europy (POL 1944)

Part 2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFPgvizwyl8 (0:17 - 1:14)

Bath no. 1, where prisoners can take showers. And across from it is bath no. 2 – the most bloody bathing spot

every known to mankind. Prisoners are forced to undress, put their clothes on neatly on hangers, and enter the

bathing room.

All available room should be utilized, so that not a centimeter of space remains free. The iron door is

hermetically sealed. In the dark, nothing can be seen inside.

The executioner’s hand opens the Zyklon B container. Light green crystals of gas, a horrible martyrdom.

Through the small, barred window the SS-executioner observes the slow death of the victims. One must hurry.

The next victims are waiting.80

Death Mills (US 1945)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdba86U2g68 (6:20 - 7:30)

Gas chambers were the principal agent of death – and their use was admirably organized. Prisoners were told to

prepare themselves for a shower bath.

80 Translated from Polish by dr. Iwona Gusc, postdoctoral researcher at the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide

Studies (NIOD).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFPgvizwyl8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdba86U2g68


They were even given towels to make them believe this story.

But when the doors of the bathroom were closed behind them, poison gas – Zyklon was released through the

shower ducts.

In Dachau, in Auschwitz, in Majdanek – the German murder trust standardized the procedure of slaughter. The

death gas was always the same – Zyklon.

Cremation was the chief means of disposal of the great mass of bodies. Auschwitz alone had four of them going

night and day like the blast furnaces of Pittsburg.


Nazi Concentration Camps (US 1945)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCy02267X8A (44:54 - 46:54)

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber.

They had been persuaded to remove their clothing under the pretext of taking a shower, for which towels and

soap were provided.

This is the Brausebad, the shower bath. Inside the shower bath, the gas vents.

On the ceiling the dummy shower heads. In the engineer’s room, the intake and outlet pipes. Push buttons to

control inflow and outtake of gas.

A hand valve, to regulate pressure. Cyanide powder was used to generate the lethal smoke. From the gas

chamber, the bodies were removed to the crematory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCy02267X8A


The Stranger (US 1946)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbcq8JS8XHo (59:12 - 1:00:35)

Mr. Wilson: ‘I have been showing your father some films and I would like you to see them too. I am on the

Allied Commission for the punishment of war criminals. It’s my job to bring escaped Nazis to justice. It’s that

job that brought me to Harper.’

Mrs. Rankin: ‘Well surely you don’t think that... Mr. Wilson I’ve never so much as even seen a Nazi!’

Mr. Wilson: ‘Well, you might, without you realizing it. They look like other people and... act like other people,

when it’s to their benefit.’

Mr. Wilson: ‘A gas chamber, Mrs. Rankin. The candidates were first given hot showers so that their pores

would be open and the gas would act that much more quickly.’

Mr. Wilson: ‘And this is a lime pit in which hundred of men, women and children were buried alive.’

Mrs. Rankin: ‘Why do you want me to look at these... horrors.’

Mr. Wilson: ‘All this you’re seeing, it’s all the product of one mind. The mind of a man named... Franz

Kindler.’

Mrs. Rankin: ‘Franz Kinder?’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbcq8JS8XHo


Daleká Cesta (CZEC 1949)

(4:38 - 5:05)

Streicher: ‘Ein Volk, das nichts auf die Reinheit seiner Rasse hält, geht zugrunde.’

The nation which neglects the purity of its race will perish.

(1:23:25 - 1:27:06, at Theresienstadt)

Prisoner 1: ‘It’s OK! Yes, OK.’

Prisoner 2: ‘What’s this for?’

Prisoner 1: ‘He’s asking what is this for.’

Prisoner 3: ‘Why should I know? And why are you bricking this up?’

Prisoner 1: ‘What?’

Prisoner 3: ‘Why are you bricking up?’

Prisoner 1: ‘He wants to know why are we bricking this up?’


Female prisoner 1: ‘Transport.’

Prisoner 4: ‘What did you say?’

Female prisoner 1: ‘Transport with children from the east has arrived.’

Prisoner 4: ‘Transport?’

Hana Kaufmann: ‘Take your clothes of. Get undressed.’

Children [screaming]: ‘It’s gas, it’s gas, gas!’


Hana Kaufmann: ‘Stay! Stay here!’

Prisoner 5: ‘Gas! Gas!’

Prisoner 6: ‘You’re building a gas chamber!’

Nuit et Brouillard (FRAN 1955)

Part 1/3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8qTFuMcDLs (8:15 - 8:37)

First sight of the camp: it is another planet.

Under the pretext of hygiene, nudity strips the inmates of all pride in one stroke.

Part 3/3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sslfvBsLXj0 (2:00 - 3:19)

Killing by hand takes time. Cylinders of Zyklon gas are ordered. Nothing distinguishes the gas chamber from an

ordinary block.

Inside, what looked like a shower room welcomed new arrivals. The doors were closed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8qTFuMcDLs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sslfvBsLXj0


A watch was kept.

The only sign, but you have to know, are the fingernail scrapings on the ceiling. Even the concrete was

scratched up.

Judgment at Nuremberg (US 1961)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-BqHX8PDkM (1:49:06 - 1:49:49)

Col. Ted Lawson: ‘A witness at one of the executions at Dachau gave the following description. Inmates were

made to leave their clothing on a rack. They were told they were going to take baths.’

‘Then the doors were locked. Tins of Zyklon B were released through the specially constructed apertures.’

‘You could hear the groaning and the whimpering inside. After two or three minutes, all was quiet.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-BqHX8PDkM


Memorandum (CAN 1965)

http://www.nfb.ca/film/Memorandum (16:50 - 16:59)

Auschwitz tour guide: ‘Up ahead is one of the first gas chambers. It was used for children, so it wasn’t even

disguised as a shower room.’

(24:33 - 25:29)

German prosecutor: ‘This is such a devilish idea. I remember having seen a letter written by Himmler himself

who said, eh, we don’t have to take care so much of, eh, keeping this as a secret because if someone is going to

tell what he saw there, people won’t believe him.’

‘Eh, there was a witness from Jerusalem, a Jewish man who works now there at the university and he was

deported to Auschwitz when he was about fourteen years old and his job was to go, eh, with other comrades to

the gas chambers and pick up the ashes of the cremated bodies and, eh, scatter the ashes on the icy roads.’

’And he told us that they had permission from the SS-men in charge of one crematory to go down into the gas

chambers when they were not in action and warm up there.’

http://www.nfb.ca/film/Memorandum


The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUa5-8fhzCQ (1:23:03 - 1:24:22)

How to get maximum utilization of slave labor and maintain the camps at the lowest possible costs to the Third

Reich? Exact cost accounting methods determine each prisoner’s potential profit value to within a few marks.

For those unable to work, of no economic value to the Reich, there is another fate. As camps are crowded to

overflowing, greater selectivity is shown regarding a prisoner’s value. As the tempo of destruction accelerates,

the mechanics of death become increasingly scientific. German companies eagerly compete for contracts to

build gas chambers.

So successful are their efforts, that at one camp alone, Auschwitz, 34,000 people are exterminated in a 24-hour

period. Deception is the ally of the SS. As unsuspecting victims are herded into gas chambers disguised as

shower baths.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUa5-8fhzCQ


Holocaust (US 1978)

Part 19/59 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2FMr6Hoc3M

Part 46/59 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6P9vekCucM (2:06 - 5:48)

Part 51/59 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ61wGikCuU (6:08 - 9:15)

(19/59, Anna Weiss ‘treated’ at Hadamar mental institution.)

(46/59, Major Eric Dorf and a Nazi professor visit Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz to inspect gas chambers.)

Prof: ‘And this is the actual...’

Höss: ‘They’re told it’s the fumigating bath. A delousing shower.’

Prof: ‘Of course, for their peace of mind. By the way, what’s your daily output?’

Höss: ‘12,000. When all the furnaces are going and when I.G. Farben or some other outfit isn’t demanding Jews

to work for them.’

Dorf: ‘Major Höss has a most sensitive job professor. Not only special handling, but keeping it quiet.’

Prof: ‘Believe me, I know. I won’t tell a soul about this visit. Secrecy is our watchword.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2FMr6Hoc3M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6P9vekCucM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ61wGikCuU


Höss: ‘Maybe the professor can figure out some way of cutting down the stench from the chimneys. The Polaks

can smell it for miles around. Ha, some secret.’

Prof: ‘And, eh, the fumigating agent?’

Höss: ‘Through that hole in the ceiling there. Zyklon B crystals. When they hit the air they vaporize. It’s over in

minutes. But the stuff deteriorates, so we had to organize our own distribution system. Even set up a holding

company for the shipment and sale and stuff. But only the big wheels in Berlin get to hold shares. Professor. [To

Dorf] Coming?’

Prof: ‘How wonderfully quiet they are...’

Höss: ‘We’ve got it worked out to a factory system. But I’m still behind schedule. They undress, we take the

valuables, we take them to the showers, we burn them and bury the ashes.’

Prof: ‘Absolutely ingenious.’

SS-man to Höss: ‘Ready sir!’

Höss: ‘Go ahead.’

SS-man to prisoners: ‘Come!’

SS-man: ‘You see, it’s only a shower. Just for five minutes. It will clean you up and kill the lice.’

Höss: ‘There’s a viewing hole professor if you’d care to look.’

Prof: ‘Look? Me? Eh, major Dorf. Perhaps you would want to...’

Dorf: ‘I have already seen it.’

Prof: ‘Fantastic! Absolutely fantastic! Like, like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. And those sounds! Almost like

they’re wailing in the synagogue.’


(51/59, Berta Weiss taken to the gas chamber.)

Kapo: ‘Clothes off! Take your clothes off! You’re going to the showers. You will be back in ten minutes.’

Weiss: ‘You needn’t lie to us. I’m Berta Weiss. My husband is dr. Josef Weiss. He and this woman’s husband

Franz Lowie are with the people who’re building the road. Please tell them what has happened.’

Woman Kapo: ‘Move on. Come on.’

Kapo: ‘Mothers with children, hold them close and tell them to breath deeply. It is good for them.’

SS-man: ‘The disinfecting takes ten minutes. Form a line! Come this way.’


Les Uns et Les Autres (FRAN 1981)

(52:40 - 53:45)

Au Nom de Tous les Miens (FRAN 1983)

(12:00 - 15:45)


Shoah (FRAN 1985)

The testimony of Filip Müller (member of Sonderkommando at Auschwitz) is illustrated with images which

Lanzmann shot at Auschwitz (part 1/4, 2:13:40 - 2:26:02)

Lanzmann: ‘Filip, on that Sunday in May 1942, when you first entered the Auschwitz crematorium, how old

were you?’

Müller: ‘Twenty. It was a Sunday in May. We were locked in an underground cell in Block 11. We were held in

secret. Then some SS men appeared and marched us along a street in the camp. We went through a gate and

around 300 feet away, 300 feet from the gate, I suddenly saw a building. it had flat roof and a smokestack. I saw

a door in the rear. I thought they were taking us to be shot.’

‘Suddenly, before a door under a lamp in the middle of this building stood a young SS man who told us: “Inside,

filthy swine!” We entered a corridor. They drove us along it. Right away the stench, the smoke, choked me.

They kept on chasing us and then I made out the shapes of the first two ovens. Between the ovens, some Jewish

prisoners were working. We were in the crematorium’s incineration chamber in Camp I in Auschwitz. From

there they herded us to another big room and told us to undress the corpses. I looked around me. There were

hundreds of bodies all dressed. Piled with the corpses were suitcases, bundles, and scattered everywhere strange,

bluish-purple crystals. I couldn’t understand any of it (...).’

The same occurs when Müller’s testimony continues in part 2/4 (18:36 - 26:05)


‘One night an SS man came from the political section. it was around 4 AM. The whole camp was still asleep.

There wasn’t a sound in the camp. We were again taken out of our cell and led to the crematorium. There, for

the first time, I saw the procedure used with those who came in alive. We were lined up against a wall and told:

“No one may talk to those people.” Suddenly the wooden door to the crematorium courtyard opened and 250 to

300 people filed in. Old people, and women. They carried bundles, wore the star of David. Even from a

distance, I could tell they were Polish Jews, probably from Upper Silesia, from the Sosnowitz ghetto, some 20

miles from Auschwitz.’

‘(...) Then a sudden silence fell over those gathered in the crematorium courtyard. All eyes converged on the flat

roof of the crematorium. Who was standing there? Aumeyer, of the SS. Grabner, the head of the political

section. And Hossler, the SS officer. Aumeyer addressed the crowd. “You’re here to work, for our soldiers

fighting at the front. Those who can work will be alright.” It was obvious that hope flared in those people. You

could feel it clearly. The executioners had gotten past the first obstacle. He saw it was succeeding (...).’

‘(...) “We need all of you! But first, undress. You must be disinfected. We want you healthy.” I could see the

people were calmer, reassured by what they’d heard and they began to undress. Even if they still had their

doubt, if you want to live, you must hope. Their clothing remained in the courtyard, scattered everywhere.’

As in Memorandum (1965) – and again as illustration to Müller’s testimony – Lanzmann utilizes the model by

Mieczysław Stobierski to represent the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In the same segment the gas chambers are

represented by their ruins (part 3/4, 49:40 - 1:01:05).

‘Before each gassing operation the SS took stern precautions. The crematorium was ringed with the SS men.

Many SS men patrolled the court with dogs and machine-guns. To the right were the steps that led underground

to the undressing room. In Birkenau there were four crematoriums. Crematorium II, III, IV and V. Crematorium

II was similar to crematorium III. In II and II the undressing room and the gas chambers were underground. A


large undressing room of about 3000 square feet and a large gas chamber where one could gas up to 3000

people at a time.’

‘Crematorium IV and V were of a different type in that they weren’t located underground. Everything was at

ground level. In IV and V there were three gas chambers with a capacity of at most 1800 to 2000 people at a

time. Crematorium II and III had 15 ovens each. Crematorium IV and V had 8 ovens each.’

‘As people reached the crematorium, they had seen everything, this horribly violent scene. The whole area was

ringed with SS men. Dogs barked. Machine-guns. They all, mainly the Polish Jews, had misgivings. They knew

something was seriously amiss. But none of them had the faintest of notions that in three or four hours they’d be

reduced to ashes. When they reached the undressing room they saw that it looked like an International

Information Center! On the walls were hooks and each hook had a number. Beneath the hooks were wooden

benches. So people could undress more comfortably, as it was said. And on the numerous pillars that held up

this underground undressing room there were signs with slogans in several languages. “Clean is good!”, “Lice

can Kill!”, “Wash Yourself!”, “To the disinfection room!”. All those signs were only there to lure the naked

people into the gas chambers. And to the left, at a right angle, were the gas chambers with its massive door. In

crematorium II and II, Zyklon gas crystals were poured in by a so-called “SS-disinfection squad”, through the

ceiling, and in crematoria IV and V through side openings. With five or six canisters of gas, they could kill

around 2000 people.’

‘This so-called “disinfection squad” arrived in a truck marked with a red cross and escorted people along to

make them believe they were being led to take a bath. But the red cross was only a mark to hide the canisters of

Zyklon gas and the hammers to open them. The gas took about 10 to 15 minutes to kill. The most horrible thing

was, once the doors of the gas chamber were opened, the unbearable sight. People were packed together like

basalt, like blocks of stone. How they tumbled out of the gas chamber. I saw that several times. That was the

toughest thing to take. You could never get used to that. It was impossible (...). ’


In part 4/4 there are again such shots accompanying the testimony of Müller (26:48 - 34:16)

Escape from Sobibor (UK 1987)

(44:07 - 46:38)

Jewish boy: ‘Sgt. Bauer wants me.’

SS-man: ‘What are you doing? You are not allowed in here.’

Jewish boy: ‘Sgt. Bauer ordered me here, sir.’

SS-man: ‘Wait here!’


Triumph of the Spirit (US 1989)

(21:36 - 24:14)

SS-officer: ‘Things will be better now. First you will be going into the bathhouse, where you will shower and be

disinfected. Then, you will go into the camps, where your families will join you.’

[The crowds applauds.]

SS-man in undressing room: ‘Remember your numbers so you can pick up your clothing later. Please tie your

shoes together and place them on the floor under your number. Please hurry, we have a lot to do. Soon you will

enjoy a hot shower.’


(44:50 - 45:00)

(1:05:35 - 1:07:55)

Kapo: ‘Your duties begin here. Everything of value is shipped back to the Third Reich. Schneller!’

Kapo: ‘As soon as it is safe you will take out the bodies and wash the room That is all. Follow me! You will get

plenty to eat. Even vodka. Now, you go to the front of the furnaces. There you see what you will be doing.’

Avram: ‘I won’t do it.’

Schindler’s List (US 1993)

(2:25:14 - 2:31:30)



The Last Days (US 1998)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtKhjry_nGs (0:34:08 / 0:40:43)

(0:41:45 - 0:43:55)

Survivor Dario Gabbai: ‘They selected some of the Greeks to go to work on crematorium. Now is my first day

there. I don’t know what was going on. I saw 2500 people, all naked, go into the big chamber which, eventually,

they take only 500 people, they were putting in 2500 people, so nobody could do anything there but stand up

there. Children... And fifteen minutes later, you know, after they close the chambers and the SS threw the gas

from these four openings, you know, they open up. What did I see? I see the people I saw fifteen minutes ago, I

see them all dead, standing up, there were children, black and blue, and I said to myself: what is going on? What

is going on here?’

‘There was a Polish guy that was there before and I said: where is God? He says God, God is where you have

your strength. There were four crematoriums, you know, and they were working 24 hours. And there were a lot

of big shots from Berlin coming and watching how the Jews were dying, you know, there was a hole in the, you

know, hermetically closed doors and they were looking there how the Jewish people were dying, you know, it

takes two to four minutes, depending on where you are.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtKhjry_nGs


Apt Pupil (US 1998)

(17:29 - 18:15)

Zyklon Portrait (CAN 1999)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfc8eWZZdrI

(1:10 - 2:35)

Zyklon is the commercial product name Degesch used from the 1920s for its hydrogen-cyanide disinfectant.

Degesch is short for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, or in English, the German Vermin

Combating Corporation. I.G. Farben controlled Degesch. I.G. Farben was Europe’s largest private corporation

between 1925 and 1945. Zyklon takes its name from the German word for ‘cyclone’. Blausäure is German for

‘cyanide’, literally ‘blue acid’.

Zyklon, when solid, is a blue, crystalline, substance. Zyklon kills insects, plants, and animals. It is much more

effective on warm-blooded animals than it is on insects. Zyklon comes in strengths ‘A’ to ‘E’. Zyklon B is

sufficient to kill humans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfc8eWZZdrI


(6:42 - 8:17)

In the summer of 1941, in the Netherlands, the Nazis declared beaches, swimming pools and parks out of

bounds for Jews. (...)

[Rudolf Höss quoted] The first small transports were shot by firing squads. We needed a more efficient method.

We tried a gas called Zyklon B, prussic acid. Zyklon B was used to disinfect prisoners and to exterminate lice

and vermin. There was always a supply on hand.

[Rudolf Höss quoted] The first gassing of people did not really sink into my mind. Perhaps I was much too

impressed by the whole procedure. I must admit openly, the gassings had a calming effect on me. In the near

future, the mass annihilation of the Jews was to begin. Now I was at ease. We were all saved from these blood

baths, and the victims would be spared until the last moment.

(8:36 - 11:15)

A room with dummy showers was supposed to trick people. An SS doctor supervised the medical technicians

who carefully poured the Zyklon B pellets into the gas chamber. The pellets instantly turned into gas, spreading

first at floor level, then rising to the ceiling.


The characteristic of Zyklon B was the great ease with which it penetrates the mucus membrane of the mouth,

nose, esophagus, stomach, and lungs, and enters the bloodstream. When it is working, it does so with dramatic

suddenness, through the paralysis of the respiratory sensor of the brain.

Initial symptoms are: headache, dizziness and nausea. The body struggles to save the heart and brain. [Elida

Schogt’s mother:] ‘Those last moments you, you do not want to, to visualize.’ Within fifteen minutes,

sometimes as few as five, everyone in the gas chamber is dead. A fan is switched on immediately after each

gassing to disperse the gas and to speed up the clearing of the room. After a few minutes, the door can be

unbolted. [Schogt’s mother:] ‘My parents probably died in October ‘44 in Auschwitz.’ [Schogt:] ‘This is the

first time that we have discussed things like this. And I don’t know why I was so drawn to that particular side of

things.’ [Schogt’s mother:] ‘That’s alright, because that’s your way of looking at it. Everyone has their own way

of, of going back to what really happened.’

The Grey Zone (US 2001)

(05:16)

(09:42 - 10:18)


(16:27 - 17:10)

(17:10 - 18:50)

(22:50 - 24:40)

(25:29 - 26:18)

(40:37 - 41:39)


(49:03 - 50:19)

Amen (FRAN 2002)

(04:14 - 05:21)

(19:00 - 21:20)


Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (UK 2005)

(Part 1/6, 01:54 - 02:30)

And at Auschwitz, they journeyed down the long and crooked road of mass murder to create this, the building

which symbolized their crime. A factory of death.

Survivor: ‘There were people screaming. All the people, you know, they didn’t know what to do, scratching the

walls, crying, until the gas took effect. If I close my eyes, the only thing I see is standing up, women with

children in their hands.’

(Part 1/6, 32:20 - 34:12)

In 1939, Hitler had authorized a scheme, by which severely disabled children could be murdered.

Then, once the war began, this killing was extended to disabled adults as well. The selection was

straightforward. A doctor would examine a report on the patient and then if he thought they were suitable

candidates for the scheme, he would mark the form with a red cross. Two other doctors separately marked

identical forms and the majority vote decided the patient’s fate. The doctors met neither each other nor the

patient before reaching their verdict. Those selected to die were taken to special institutions inside Germany.


Like this one, the Sonnenstein clinic near Dresden. There were six centers like this spread throughout Germany

and in them, a new method of killing had been devised, using a subterfuge that would eventually be adopted at

Auschwitz. The disabled were told they were going to have a shower. They were taken into a room from which

hung pipes and showerheads.

But the pipes were not connected to water. They led out through the walls to bottles of carbon monoxide gas.

Once the room was sealed, the carbon monoxide was turned on and the patients murdered. Around 70,000

disabled people had been killed in this way by the summer of 1941.

(Part 1/6, 40:06 - 40:35)

This film is believed to show patients from a Soviet hospital being locked in a room which was connected to the

exhaust pipes of a car and a lorry. The Nazis had now developed a cheaper method of killing people with carbon

monoxide than that previously used in the adult euthanasia scheme.

(Part 2/6, 29:03 - 31:31)

Since September 1941, Höss and his colleagues had been experimenting with the use of Zyklon B – prussic acid

– to kill Soviet prisoners of war and the sick, in the crematorium of the camp, just yards from his office.

Next to the ovens of the crematorium was the mortuary. The SS used it as an improvised gas chamber.


A small number of Jews from the local area selected as unfit to work had also been killed here, beginning in the

autumn of 1941. But it was soon clear to Höss and his SS colleagues that this was not an ideal location to

commit mass murder. As Polish political prisoner Yusef Tachinski witnessed:

‘I went into the attic of that building. I stood on a crease or something. I lifted a roof tile and I could see

everything that was going on right there in front of me. And they were very polite with those people, very polite.

Undress, pack your things here, this here, that there. And then an SS man climbed onto the flat roof of the

building, he put on a gas mask, opened a hatch, and dropped the powder in.’

‘When he did this, in spite of the fact that these walls were very thick, you could hear a great scream from

within, despite the thick walls. This took place at lunchtime, in the daytime. In order to stifle the screaming, they

had two motorcycles standing on a pavement near the crematorium, engines revved up as far as they could go, to

stifle the screaming. To cover up the yelling, they had these engines going, but they failed. They gave it a try,

but it didn’t work. The screaming lasted for fifteen or twenty minutes. It became weaker and weaker and then

went quiet.

(Part 2/6, 40:17 - 41:33)

And it was here in a remote corner of the site at Birkenau, two miles away from the main camp, that Höss and

other members of the SS had found a location for new makeshift gas chambers. In this field stood a Polish

cottage, which would come to be known as the little red house, or bunker one. Höss and het SS comrades saw


this as a step forward in the killing process at Auschwitz.

Two separate gas chambers were quickly improvised by bricking up the windows and door, and creating two

new entrances. Unlike in the crematorium in the main camp, people could be murdered here in relative secrecy.

In this shabby cottage, tens of thousands of people would be murdered. The manner of killing remained the

same. Jews would be told they were to take a shower, they would be locked in the room, and Zyklon B thrown

in through a hatch in the wall. Within weeks the Nazis had converted another nearby cottage – the little white

house – in just the same way.

(Part 2/6, 44:29 - 44:48)

After the gassing, Höss and the SS made other Jewish prisoners load the bodies onto trucks and wheel them

down a makeshift railway line towards giant pits.

(Part 2/6, 46:37 - 47:27)

During the new few months, Höss and his colleagues would overcome all obstacles, and create buildings like

this, where murder could be committed on a massive scale. And as they did so, the Nazis also began to scour the

whole of Europe for ever more people to bring here. And kill.

(Part 3/6, 29:40 - 31:55, Treblinka)

What would become the most deadly of them all, was situated here, sixty miles northeast of Warsaw. About

900,000 people were killed at Treblinka. It was second only to Auschwitz as the most murderous place in the

Nazi state. All that is left today is a clearing in a forest. This secret place was destroyed by the Nazis before the

war was over. But thanks to evidence from eyewitnesses, it’s possible to reconstruct the plan of the camp.


It was a place very different from Auschwitz Birkenau. Treblinka was by comparison tiny: 400 meters by 600.

Treblinka was small because it only had one purpose: murder. 99% of Jews were dead within two hours of

arriving at the camp. Poisoned by exhaust fumes in Treblinka’s gas chambers.

(Part 3/6, 43:03 - 44:12)

Survivor: ‘There were flowers planted on the ground and of course people couldn’t imagine where they were.

They painted the huts and put up all sorts of signs as if it was a real railway station. I remember that once, one of

them said these words. I’ll never forge these words... He said it in German: “Come quickly, because the water is

getting cold.” That is how far they went.’

‘The manner in which it worked it macabre. And it was a horrible thing to see.’ At the core of the camp, Stangl

helped create a huge new gas chamber complex, disguised as shower rooms. With the capacity to kill over 3,000

people at one time.

(Part 3/6, 45:01 - 46:30)

Because planners at Auschwitz had been working hard to change the function of new crematoria which were to

be built at Auschwitz Birkenau. (...) Over several months the plans were altered.

What had been conceived as basement mortuaries were converted. First a shoot designed to allow bodies to be


slid down into the basement was suddenly removed from the plans. Next extra steps were added at the side of

the building. A strange addition, since the original function of the basement was to hold the dead, not the living.

Then the doors into one of the large underground mortuaries were altered. First to open outwards and then

reformed as one single door, reinforced and made gas tight, and with a peephole added. This basement mortuary

was now to become a gas chamber.

(Part 4/6, 31:21 - 31:51, Sobibór)

Sobibór was a tiny camp, hidden in a forest. This is an impression of what it looked like. Several hundred Jews

were given a temporary stay of execution and forced to work here. Most sorting the belonging of those who had

been murdered in the gas chambers of the camp.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (UK/US 2008)

(1:25:00 - 1:30:10)


Auschwitz (GER 2011)



The Representation of Gas Chambers in Holocaust Films

Documents