Auschwitz - The Project
The French Émile Weiss, director, shows in the French film documentary Auschwitz Project (German: Auschwitz - The Project ), from 2017, in one hour, an overview of the NSDAP Schutzstaffel project, which was largely realized from 1939 to 1945, in one hour (SS) in southern Poland . A model town for the further settlement of the conquered East is to be built near the hitherto relatively unknown Oświęcim : with schools, hospitals, barracks and a huge slave army in a tight network of concentration camps and forced labor centers in industry and agriculture. The exploitation of the prisoners' labor force (men and women) forms their financial basis. The film tries to explain these functions of the various parts of the concentration camp and the planned SS model town using aerial photographs of the remains of the building that are still visible today.
Content
The first pictures belong to the civil town of Oświęcim. Then the film approaches the striking places of horror in the three large camps , but also largely unknown test laboratories in the wider area right into the buildings, with many aerial photographs . Outlines of the buildings or assemblies in the landscape photos are repeatedly drawn in white to illustrate the briefly formulated comments.
The structure of the film is essentially based on the chronological order of the structural extensions of the first concentration camp. Of the three main camps, the first was the concentration camp Auschwitz I (often called main camp A. because of the central administration ), then Auschwitz II - Auschwitz-Birkenau (the most famous Nazi concentration and extermination camp after the war), and Auschwitz III - the third Monowitz concentration camp (with the work slaves for the Buna plant). Around it there was the so-called area of interest of the SS , a restricted area with several SS-owned and other factories, farms, research centers, concentration camp expansions and a comprehensively planned urban development project. Only in the film section about the sub-camps and the information about the agricultural and industrial operations is there a separate section outside the chronology. Its headline could be the exploitation of slave labor by the SS.
At this place in this region, which has been redesigned by the Germans, almost all elements of the National Socialist racial ideology, which is also an extermination policy , the territorial policy ( living space of the German race in the east ), the industrial, agricultural and research policy of the NS are filmed and explained State by the Nazi ideologues, recognizable. Today's building remains and ruins only partially show this.
Technical details
Fri, 2017, 56 min. German synchronic version: 57 min.
The TV premiere ran in both countries via arte.tv on Jan. 30, 2018
Director
Weiss is the director of other documentaries around the Auschwitz memorial: Hourban (Destruction) , a trilogy of documentation from 2010, 2013, 2015 (including about the prisoner special command ). And the documentary Criminal Doctors, Auschwitz (France, 2013, 54 min.)
Web links
- Information about the documentation at programm.ard.de
- Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah : Reviewed on January 30, 2018 ( Ce film a reçu le soutien de la Fondation pour ... )
- Le Monde ; the review by Alain Constant from Jan. 30, 2018. He praised the calm camera work. Aerial photos show the neighboring city of Oswiecim, the three main camps, the factories, the test laboratories, farms and the large model town construction project of the SS. Contemporary witnesses are cited to match the respective picture. (Daily recommendation. Pas de musique, seulement le bruit du vent. Des images aériennes… ; French)