TV series proposal " The Auschwitz"

Few days ago I saw on youtube a video about a new CoD2 custom map about Auschwitz. The mission could have been the last episode of the series. What about a series about Holocaust mainly through the eyes of perpetrators ?
 
While interesting, I can understand why no company would touch it with a ten foot pole - it would be difficult to do right
 
While interesting, I can understand why no company would touch it with a ten foot pole - it would be difficult to do right

Yes, the difficulty is that it’s difficult to invest an audience in people whose day job is shoving trainloads of people into gas chambers.

Maybe a one-season miniseries adaptation of *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,* bringing Borowski’s recollections of life in the camp to the screen. By focusing on the forced laborers whose job was corpse-handling, you can avoid accusations of excessively humanizing the people who actually ran the camp.
 
Maybe a one-season miniseries adaptation of *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,* bringing Borowski’s recollections of life in the camp to the screen.

I just read this recently, and I think this would be great if a studio like HBO took it on!
 
I think it could be done - and maybe on one level, should be done. Keeping the Nazis and their co-conspirators as blithering lunatics is a nice thought, but historically wrong and morally dangerous. Anyone could be a guard at Auschwitz, just like any nation could elect a Hitler.

Having said that... no idea who'd write it, or who'd want to.
 
It would be an incredibly brave step...and one that would unleash outrage from the Jewish world. The only real-life comparison I can draw is "Holocaust" which was an American mini series from 1978 starring Meryl Streep and James Woods. According to CNN's "The Seventies" the reaction to the series was that the West German parliament decided to extend the search for Nazi fugitive:

 
It would be an incredibly brave step...and one that would unleash outrage from the Jewish world.
I knew someone who was Jewish, and he absolutely refused to consider trying to understand the German perspective. While I can see why that might be, you have to understand it. Understanding the origins of the Holocaust and discarding the image that everyone in Germany (and then occupied Europe) was a fanatically Jew hating, Hitler loving psychotic does not mean that the Jews somehow deserved what happened, or that you sympathize with their perpetrators, or otherwise lessen what happened.

The only real-life comparison I can draw is "Holocaust" which was an American mini series from 1978 starring Meryl Streep and James Woods.
Ah, yes. I remember the character who started as a decent enough guy wanting a job and then slowly but surely rose through the ranks of the SS and then the Final Solution. The truly unsettling thing is that a LOT of the people who would oversee the killing process also started that way.

According to CNN's "The Seventies" the reaction to the series was that the West German parliament decided to extend the search for Nazi fugitive:
Mostly because teenagers and twenty-something began asking a lot of awkward and uncomfortable questions of their parents and grandparents...
 
I knew someone who was Jewish, and he absolutely refused to consider trying to understand the German perspective. While I can see why that might be, you have to understand it. Understanding the origins of the Holocaust and discarding the image that everyone in Germany (and then occupied Europe) was a fanatically Jew hating, Hitler loving psychotic does not mean that the Jews somehow deserved what happened, or that you sympathize with their perpetrators, or otherwise lessen what happened.


Ah, yes. I remember the character who started as a decent enough guy wanting a job and then slowly but surely rose through the ranks of the SS and then the Final Solution. The truly unsettling thing is that a LOT of the people who would oversee the killing process also started that way.


Mostly because teenagers and twenty-something began asking a lot of awkward and uncomfortable questions of their parents and grandparents...

I don't think it will ever be understandable why the Holocaust occurred. Yes, of course there are an incredible number of books, films and tv series on the subject but I think the only person that could answer why Hitler hated the Jews was Hitler himself and he's burning in hell right now.

The only possible view I can offer and its not the strongest by far is that Germany's defeat in 1918 was its first as a nation and that there was a lot of shock, shame and anger within the country. Yes that doesn't and shouldn't mean that the Jews were responsible because they weren't. After any defeat a nation inevitably asks "why" and the blame culture runs rampant.
 
I don't think it will ever be understandable why the Holocaust occurred.
I think it could be understood WHY, as in the sequence of events and motivations. But as for understandable? No, I doubt it. I've always observed the irony of Holocaust denial is that that's probably the gut reaction when you first hear about the Holocaust - a modern first world nation slaughtered millions in mechanized mass death, and this was done in still living memory?! It couldn't have happened! And yet...

Yes, of course there are an incredible number of books, films and tv series on the subject but I think the only person that could answer why Hitler hated the Jews was Hitler himself and he's burning in hell right now.

The only possible view I can offer and its not the strongest by far is that Germany's defeat in 1918 was its first as a nation and that there was a lot of shock, shame and anger within the country. Yes that doesn't and shouldn't mean that the Jews were responsible because they weren't. After any defeat a nation inevitably asks "why" and the blame culture runs rampant.
It's a lot more complex than that, but that's also part of it. Kershaw's two volume biography on the man and Laurence Rees' recent one volume history of the Holocaust are pretty good for laymen. As for Hitler burning in hell, I don't accept the concept of the afterlife, so that's out at least for me.
 
I think it could be understood WHY, as in the sequence of events and motivations. But as for understandable? No, I doubt it. I've always observed the irony of Holocaust denial is that that's probably the gut reaction when you first hear about the Holocaust - a modern first world nation slaughtered millions in mechanized mass death, and this was done in still living memory?! It couldn't have happened! And yet...


It's a lot more complex than that, but that's also part of it. Kershaw's two volume biography on the man and Laurence Rees' recent one volume history of the Holocaust are pretty good for laymen. As for Hitler burning in hell, I don't accept the concept of the afterlife, so that's out at least for me.

Oh, I agree its more complex. The Holocaust has generated a phalanx of media dedicated to the subject. The events and motivations are explainable as a pure recording exercise, who what, where etc. What I meant was that's impossible to justify. Germany in 2020 is as different to Nazi Germany as its possible to get in terms of politics and global status (*)


I hope I'm not offending anyone with my views.

(*Im aware that there are still some right wing groups in Germany such as AfD (Alternative for Germany)
 
(*Im aware that there are still some right wing groups in Germany such as AfD (Alternative for Germany)
I'm next door to Germany, so I'd like to point out that people fixating on AfD getting 11% of the vote forget that means 89% didn't vote for them. Thinking Germany is uniquely evil or itching to do it again is also unhelpful.
 
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I'm next door to Germany, so I'd like to point out that people fixating on AfD getting 11% of the vote forget that means 89% didn't vote for them. Thinking Germany is uniquely is uniquely evil or itching to do it again is also unhelpful.

I think we can take that as read.
 
I knew someone who was Jewish, and he absolutely refused to consider trying to understand the German perspective. While I can see why that might be, you have to understand it. Understanding the origins of the Holocaust and discarding the image that everyone in Germany (and then occupied Europe) was a fanatically Jew hating, Hitler loving psychotic does not mean that the Jews somehow deserved what happened, or that you sympathize with their perpetrators, or otherwise lessen what happened.

Yeah IDK why we might be a little reluctant to "consider the perspective" of the people who gleefully shoved our great-grandparents into ovens.

Germans may not have all be fanatical Jew-haters, but most of them did nothing while they steadily destroyed our civil and human rights and then started murdering us en-masse. And they knew what was going on. No fucking way they didn't.

What happened to Germany was fundamentally normal in a lot of ways. Germans aren't demons. But fuck man, I am going to be mad at them and the rest of the people who murdered the entirety of my family that wasn't already in North America, that effectively murdered the civilization I belong to, for as long as I fucking want.
 
Yeah IDK why we might be a little reluctant to "consider the perspective" of the people who gleefully shoved our great-grandparents into ovens.

Germans may not have all be fanatical Jew-haters, but most of them did nothing while they steadily destroyed our civil and human rights and then started murdering us en-masse. And they knew what was going on. No fucking way they didn't.

What happened to Germany was fundamentally normal in a lot of ways. Germans aren't demons. But fuck man, I am going to be mad at them and the rest of the people who murdered the entirety of my family that wasn't already in North America, that effectively murdered the civilization I belong to, for as long as I fucking want.
I don't recall saying "don't be mad." I said nothing of the sort. Please don't twist what I said into something I didn't.
 
Few days ago I saw on youtube a video about a new CoD2 custom map about Auschwitz. The mission could have been the last episode of the series. What about a series about Holocaust mainly through the eyes of perpetrators ?

No. You'd have to write something that shows, unequivocally, that what they're doing is fundamentally wrong on every moral scale. You'd be hard-pressed to find any way to really humanize any German characters. Oh, you'd be able to explain the "why" as in why it happened through a sequential event "this happened, which led to this, and this...". But to really explain why so many Germans did nothing or went along with it, I don't think you could ever truly explain. And I have no desire to see the murder of my people.

Maybe a one-season miniseries adaptation of *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,* bringing Borowski’s recollections of life in the camp to the screen. By focusing on the forced laborers whose job was corpse-handling, you can avoid accusations of excessively humanizing the people who actually ran the camp.

Maybe? It'd still be an incredibly difficult process to do and even more difficult to do right.
 
It might be possible if it were based in Auschwitz III, the forced labour camp?
(Several of the capos were German Criminals, who were not exactly there by choice, and then there are the workers from the Allied POW camp.)
 
Life in Auschwitz was unbelievably bizarre. While the prisoners were being treated like animals, the SS had access to a movie theatre, shooting range, sports club and tavern. From what I've heard, it was basically like a small town. There's also those pictures of SS men on break drinking and genuinely having a happy time when they weren't contributing to the worst excesses of human barbarity. There are even stories that children of concentration camp personnel would grow vegtables in the gardens around the camp and they would scrape off the ash that came from the crematoria if it landed on the food.



But, I just don't see how a TV show focusing specifically on the Nazis at Auschwitz would work. When Nazi characters are depicted in media, they are often juxtaposed with images of innocence. In high school, I had to read the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which is about the son of a fictitious commandant of Auschwitz being friends with a young prisoner at Auschwitz. The commandant is depicted as being cold, heartless and seeing his part in the extermination of innocent men, women and children as contributing to Germany's survival. Up until the ending (which I won't spoil), the commandant is a true believer in the Nazi cause. In a flashback, it's even revealed he had Hitler and Eva Braun over for dinner where he got the job at Auschwitz. The boy, whose name is Bruno, is depicted as being innocently blind to what his father is doing. That's what makes Bruno sympathetic. Unlike his father, he is not a true believer. He doesn't believe Jews are evil.

Another way you could make a Nazi character work is if you write him like John Smith in the Man in the High Castle TV show. A man who is not so loyal to the state as he is loyal to his family. He is rising through the ranks and committing these horrible deeds because it means his family get to enjoy the good life. He is not a 100% true believer, but he believes in the Nazi ideology enough to get the trust of the Reich.

But, you can't write Nazis at Auschwitz like John Smith because the Nazis at Auschwitz were hardcore to the bone true believers. Auschwitz was considered a premiere post by the SS. You don't get assigned to premiere posts unless you are 100% committed to what your organization and it's apparatus stands for. Once you were at Auschwitz, you were pretty much safe from being called into combat on the Eastern Front.

You can't write a story unless you can make the audience care about the characters in the story and I seriously doubt you'd be able to make someone care about Rudolf Hoss or Josef Mengele.
 
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