After years in Soviet captivity, farmer Heinz Weimann returns to the village of Bärenweiler, in West Germany. His joy at returning home is clouded by news that US occupation forces intend to build an airfield on village lands, in preparation for a confrontation with the Soviet Union. The villagers are expected to move out. The villagers turn to the government and local bishop, but receive no assistance. Led by Heinz, they protest peacefully—but...

Berlin in the 1950s: divided, but not yet walled. Young artists, at the start of their careers and seeking a new lifestyle, frequented the East Berlin cafés and bars that were meeting places for intellectuals, as well as Cold War secret service agents and black marketeers. Former East Berlin bohemians gather at Ganymed, the legendary restaurant near Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. In the early 1990s, soon after the fall of the Wall, they recall...

Takes a critical look at the history of Western thought by examining the remains of Adolf Hitler’s private library. The dictator and mass murderer owned 16,000 books at the end of his life, 1,200 of which are kept in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C today. The documentary follows American historian Timothy Ryback, who studied these books for almost a decade. While many still confine racism and antisemitism to the ideological extremes in...

Originally banned by Communist Authorities, Heiner Carow’s semi-autobiographical film was not approved for final production. Officials argued it focused on an ordinary Nazi follower, rather than an antifascist hero, and that it was “contaminated with modernism.” The film, which includes clips from the Nazi propaganda film Kolberg (1945), was finally reconstructed and released in 1987. As the end of WWII is fast approaching, 16-year-old Günter,...

It is not widely known that a handful of prisoners in the Nazi death camps managed somehow to take clandestine photographs of the hell that was being hidden from the world. Director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs.

Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinz von Twardowski, two German actors, fleeing the Nazi regime, come to Hollywood to find work. Most of the time they are asked to play Nazi officers and are reminded all the time what they fled from. But you can never escape your accent. In a sense, they are ground up in the Hollywood system. Although they were stars who worked on the stage and in movies in Germany, in Hollywood they were minor character actors, completely...

At the Vienna Art Academy in 1994, an unidentified person painted over 27 works by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer in black. Rainer had become world-famous for his abstract art and, in particular, for his over-layering of photographs and overpainting of his own and other artists’ works. But who painted over the “overpainter”? Speculation rages: Did he attack his works himself? A year later, an unsigned letter surfaces claiming responsibility...

On a hot summer day, a girl named Pia is brutally murdered in a field of wheat by Peer, as his helpless friend Timo watches. Exactly 23 years later, another 13-year-old, Sinikka, is missing, her bicycle abandoned in the same spot, leading police to suspect the same killer may be at work again. Recently widowed detective David and his colleague Janna struggle to solve the mystery of these parallel crimes with the help of Krischan, the retired investigator...

About 1000 feature films were made in Germany in the years between 1933-45. Only a few were overtly Nazi propaganda films. But by the same token, even fewer of them can be considered harmless entertainment. What does cinema know that we don’t know? In his world-renowned and groundbreaking documentary, film historian and critic Siegfried Kracauer, developed the idea of cinema as seismograph of its context and origin – a bellwether for the cultural...

Veidt was a big star in German silent movies after his role as Cesare, the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Like many other artists in Nazi Germany, he fled in 1933. He became a star in British films as well, but when Germany attacked London, he emigrated to the United States, where, for the most part, he wound up playing Nazis—a fate that befell many German refugee actors. Veidt died of a heart attack on a golf course in Hollywood in...