My thoughts on this so far...


I haven't finished this yet, but I am in the process of doing so.

I just wanted to say that although it is highly understandable what the Nazis did was horrible, when the interviewer was asking questions to the former Nazi the interviewer started bringing their personal beliefs/thoughts into it and basically arguing with the person and telling them what they did is wrong. I understand it may be hard for them not to say something, but this is a documentary and the filmakers/interviewers should not be throwing their morality into things and drilling somebody who is willing to talk about the things they did in WW2. Along with the way things are worded, so far it's not very inciteful onto how many so many people ended up so dedicated to the Nazi party. They just make it seem like they were stupid and evil, but I'm guessing in their minds they thought they were doing something that was right. (which in my opinion, wasn't right, but still).

Also, everytime the narrator says Auschwitz with her lisp drives me nuts. Ha. There's my 2 cents.

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[deleted]

It's worth seeing. I had no problem sitting through it. I love documentaries.

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[deleted]

Linda Hunt did hte narration on mine. I'll have to check out that documentary. Thanks.

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Actually there WERE homicidial gas chambers in Auschwitz. That is a historical fact - all of those "revisionist" (read: neo-nazi) claims that there wasn't or the nazis didn't have any genocial policy towards the jews have been refuted.

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[deleted]

I've just finished the first episode and was thoroughly impressed.

I agree with your comments about the interviewer. In the interview with Hans Friedrich, I thought she stepped over the line with: "What in God's name did the people you shot have to do with those people who supposedly treated you badly at home? They simply belonged to the same group! What else? What else did they have to do with it?"

I'd like to know what happened to Friedrich. Was he tried?

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Personally, I think that the interviewer was right to ask Hans Friedrich such questions. By doing so, she forced him to defend his attitude as it existed at the time. Note that the only reply he could summon-up was "They were Jews!"

It was similar to the questioning of former Hlinka Guard member Michael Kabac, when he was asked how he could participate in the deportations of the Slovakian Jews when he must have realized that they were to be killed. He offers up "What could I have done? I was thinking both ways," and takes it from there.

"An Archer is known by his aim, not by his arrows."
-Li Chen-Sung (Richard Loo) The Outer Limits

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You're looking at this the wrong way. It is not a question of an interviewer "throwing their morality into things"; it is not a debate and there is no doubt whatsoever about what the Nazis did to the Jews and others at Auschwitz. After the war some of the principals were executed for their parts in the Holocaust. It is not about someone's thoughts and beliefs, it is about the truth.

This is a documentary about Auschwitz; it is not a documentary of how people came to be dedicated to the Nazi party. There are plenty of sources for you to investigate that further, should you be so inclined.

So we're talking about one of the ghastliest episodes of twentieth century history, and you see fit to make a point of the narrator's lisp. Based on that, what you have written isn't worth even two cents.

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YES a must watch, especially if this interests you. I think everyone should see this especially when they are still developing their personality not 10 or younger, but junior high for sure. No I'm not a Jew, but this should be mandatory watch in school. Holocaust Deniers (well they piss me off) can't deny all the information that happened, I mean there are survivors & guards!!! How can that be denied? Besides most of those people are dying off, so their stories need to be told so this doesn't ever happen again.

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Yes, agreed. It takes a very brave man to refuse to carry out a military order, and in those days such a refusal would have meant a firing squad.

But as you say, the absence of remorse is what distinguishes these psychopaths from normal human beings. Under normal circumstances I have nothing but disgust for the death penalty but these men (and the occasional woman) deserve to be erased from the population however long ago these events took place.

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"It takes a very brave man to refuse to carry out a military order, and in those days such a refusal would have meant a firing squad."

This statement is totally incorrect: there are numerous accounts of members of the Einsatzgruppen/ Reserve Police Battalions who carried out the mass executions who did refuse the orders to kill and they were not tried, condemned or killed. They were simply reassigned.
Read the book "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland" by Christopher Browning (as an example of the literature available on this topic). The book relates in detail what they did, how they did it and the number of refusals to carry out orders. The question next question then becomes why then didn't more refuse to follow orders if there was no punishment? Many arguments can be put forward to answer this question such as anti-Semitic propaganda, Nazi ideological indoctrination, social pressure and peer pressure, all of which are equally true for the period but for me, still don't cut it.

I don't believe they were psychopaths either: I think they were just exploiting that power they had of life and death over others in a situation that presented itself during the war. They most certainly showed the banality of evil. Many of these perpetrators came from lower class backgrounds and had lower levels of education which in that society, meant you were relegated to a position without power until the Nazis came along. I am in no way saying that low socio-economics means you are going to be a killer but it was a way to exploit others. They were often not young either: men in their 30's up into their early 50's, so not the youth of Germany brainwashed by the Nazis.
They didn't carry out such behaviours after the war: they killed arbitrarily because they could and then relied on the standard defence of "I was just following orders" and many got away with it.
At the Nuremberg Trials, 24 defendants of the Einsatzgruppen were tried, 14 were sentenced to death but only 4 were executed, as the others had their sentences reduced. (Some were tried by other nations). The West German Central Prosecution Office of Nazi War Criminals only charged about a hundred former Einsatzgruppe members with war crimes but the vast majority of these men got away with their crimes.

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I thought the aspect you didn't like was amazing. Finally, people on film admitting they killed, they were Nazis, sometimes smiling creepily as they relive it, etc. Now Nazis aren't some never-shown demon. They're avg people who talked themselves into doing horrible things. And they're still alive.

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<< I thought the aspect you didn't like was amazing. Finally, people on film admitting they killed, they were Nazis, sometimes smiling creepily as they relive it, etc. >>

Yes, this was a really remarkable aspect of the series. I would have liked to have seen those interviews be longer. For instance, one of them says something like, "I could never forget what they did to us when I was growing up," and while the narration shifts to anti-semetic propoganda from that region, I would have liked the interviewer to asl what, specifically, this man remembered being "done" to his town by his Jewish neighbors.

I don't recall the interviewer getting overly emotional. Discussing the German that was suffocated on the train by six Jewish prisoners, she asks one of them, "But, you did murder this man." It seems like she is wanting to clarify something he is avoiding, which is a reasonable techniqe. I don't remember the "What in God's sake did these children have to do with anyone else" question mentioned earlier. I don't recall her phrasing it that way....but maybe I can recheck.

The interviwed subjects don't seem put off by the interviewer...but of course, we don't see ALL the footage they shot. Hopefully, it did not make them less forthcoming, because these filmed interviews are very rare. Especially given the subjects' age, and the amount of time they've had to reflect on their role in things.

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I agree, the journalists and interviewers should at least pretend to be neutral, so that the person whom they interview, even an ss soldier speaks without pressure.

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Journalists and interviewers take on various roles depending on context. There is no hard and fast rule about "neutrality", nor should there be.

It's easy to see how the approach and POV vary according to situation. Your local TV news anchor better not have an opinion beyond gratitude for an overdue rain shower - not in the job description. But a national anchor of a news/interview show with a stated POV can still conduct a dynamite, professional, respectful quizzing of a guest while wearing their world view on their sleeve. An on-the-scene crime reporter can ask a cop "Why would this guy have pulled a gun on a kid?" without an obligatory disclaimer that guns pulled on kids might be a good thing, might not be.

In the interview you cited, the interviewer gave voice to the millions of people post-WW2 who expressed horror and an inability to understand what the hell a murderous German camp worker was thinking. She had no obligation to acknowledge that some small subgroup might think that what he'd done was A-okay. She spoke for the perceived audience, the vast majority of whom will never have the chance to look a living Nazi in the eye and say "What the hell were you thinking? How could you have done that?".

Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey earned the respect of millions of viewers doing exactly the same thing: giving voice to the audience. Were they doing it wrong?

TL:DR version: not all interviews/interviewers serve the same purpose, and holding them to a false rule of "neutrality" serves neither them nor their audience.

And yes, I'm a professional journalist and interviewer, who performs my job on national and local stages in all kinds of ways depending on the venue, audience, and purpose of the interview.

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I know the interviewers are asking the questions that we, the audience, would like to ask. I can understand that. We can't resist asking those questions.

But something that occurs to me now is how the people who've posted on this thread over the years have reacted to the answers given -- say, by the SS guard at Auschwitz. People want that guard, or other former Nazis, to express remorse. And some folks are quite upset that these old men being interviewed don't feel sorry for what they did.

Upon reflection, this now strikes me as very odd. Would saying 'Sorry' suddenly make it all better? If Hitler somehow came back and said he was sorry and asked for forgiveness, would that make any difference at all?

I know we feel compelled to ask certain questions of the perpetrators. But the answers may never explain anything.

A lot of Jewish writers on the Holocaust seem to place this event on a level of horror and atrocity so great that it is really beyond words, or beyond meaning or comprehension. Our normal way of understanding, of making sense of history does not apply here. I think I'm almost starting to see what they mean.

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I had no problem with the ex Nazi being put on the spot with the tone of the questioning, or for that matter, the actual questions. Every documentary maker has a slant that they bring to the table. If some of their own perspective does not creep in when the questions are asked, it almost always does during the editing phase. I have yet to find a documentary yet that was 100% impartial.

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