Eichmann ja kolmas valtakunta / Eichmann och det tredje riket.
CH 1961. PC: Praesens Film AG (Zürich). P: Lazar Wechsler, in association with Artur Brauner.
D+SC: Erwin Leiser, in association with Miriam Novitich. DP of new footage: Emil Berna. ED: Hans Heinrich Egger. Original length (Filmportal) 2460 m / 90 min. Finland: 2290 m / 84 min
A vintage 35 mm print, compilation quality with good definition in the new footage, with Finnish / Swedish subtitles by Aito Mäkinen / Bengt Pihlström.
Viewed at Orion, 26 May 2005.
Still an exceptional Holocaust movie focusing on one Nazi criminal. It starts in a Jewish cemetery to the sound of a Kaddish. We hear Hitler shouting that the day will come when the ten commandments, the curse of Sinai, will be replaced by the law of nature. The curse of so-called morality will perish in the immortal battle of the survival of the fittest.
Cut to Jerusalem in 1961: video images of Adolf Eichmann's trial. His career is tracked down from 1933 to the present. The anti-semitic propaganda of the Third Reich is documented in great detail. The Nazi euthanasia programme is documented. Eichmann's role in Austria after the Anschluss, in Czechoslovakia, and in occupied Poland is examined. He was the "Referent der Judenfrage", the expert of the Jewish question in the Gestapo.
Leiser handles with care the antisemitic Nazi propaganda imagery, the real story in the looks of the victims forced to pose for their tormentors. A great deal of the footage is little known even now; the images are both shocking and surprising. New footage includes bland video images from the Eichmann trial and good interviews with three survivors, from the Warsaw Ghetto Yitzhak Zuckermann and Zibia Lubetki, and from Treblinka, Jakov Wiernik.
To the end, Eichmann denies having been more than a little civil servant following the Führerbefehl. He could not even bear the sight of blood, he "had not the makings of a doctor". He was a new kind of murderer, one that kills by signature, an instance of transference of guilt on a world-historical scale. The film would deserve to be better known. Essential in the debate on Holocaust deniers, Holocaust evidence and Hitler's orders. He shouts his aim here loud and clear.
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