Einsatzgruppen Les Commandos De La Mort
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☆ New Release – Now Available ☆ Einsatzgruppen Les Commandos De La Mort A Film by Michaël Prazan France | 2009 | 180 minutes | Documentary English Narration & French, German w/ English Subtitles Beta; DVD Director/Writer: Michaël Prazan "Essential viewing." – Variety FESTIVAL SCREENINGS • West Coast Premiere - San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2010 (upcoming) • New England Premiere - Jewishfilm.2010 NCJF’s Film Festival • North American Premiere - New York Jewish Film Festival, Lincoln Center 2010 • Jewish Motifs Film Festival, Warsaw, Poland 2010 • Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival 2009 • Prix Italia 2009 • IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2009 DISTRIBUTION - PUBLIC PERFORMANCE SCREENINGS & DVD SALES: The National Center for Jewish Film Lown 102, MS 053, Brandeis University Waltham, MA 02454 [email protected] (781) 736-8600 WWW.JEWISHFILM.ORG Page 1 of 4 Einsatzgruppen / Les Commandos De La Mort A Film by Michaël Prazan France | 2009 | 180 minutes | Documentary English Narration & French, German w/ English Subtitles BETA; DVD Director/Writer: Michaël Prazan Part I: The Mass Graves (June-December 1941) Part II: The Funeral Pyres (1942-1945) “Essential viewing” – Variety From the producers of BEING JEWISH IN FRANCE (COMME UN JUIF EN FRANCE) Festivals & Broadcast FESTIVAL SCREENINGS • West Coast Premiere - San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2010 (upcoming) • New England Premiere - Jewishfilm.2010 NCJF’s Film Festival • North American Premiere - New York Jewish Film Festival, Lincoln Center 2010 • Jewish Motifs Film Festival, Warsaw, Poland 2010 • Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival 2009 • Prix Italia 2009 • IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2009 TELEVISION: • France: France 2 • Finland: YLE • Israel: Channel 1 Short Synopsis By the spring of 1943, the 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen--aided by local collaborators in each country-- had systematically murdered 1.5 million Jews, Roma, handicapped, partisans and Soviets. Prazan's definitive masterwork is one of the essential films documenting the Holocaust and features a powerful array of never- seen-before film and photographs. Who were the men who carried out mass murder at close range? Synopsis In June 1941, Nazi mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, were dispatched throughout Eastern Europe. By the spring of 1943, the 3000 members of the Einsatzgruppen, led by highly-educated officers and aided by local collaborators in each country, had systematically murdered over a million Jews and tens of thousands Roma, handicapped, partisans, Communists and Soviets. Who were the men who carried out mass murder at close range? Prazan’s definitive masterwork is one of the essential films documenting the Holocaust and features a powerful array of astounding, never-seen-before film and photographs (some in color) discovered by the filmmakers in Eastern European archives. Prazan interviews a slate of internationally renowned historians, including Christopher Browning, Christian Ingrao, Dean Martin and Ralf Ogorreck, along with Holocaust survivors, witnesses and perpetrators (several filmed using hidden cameras). The film’s scope is broad, treating the Einsatzgruppen’s leadership, rank-and-file and collaborators, the Page 2 of 4 machinations of their operations and the attempts soon after to dig up and destroy the evidence. The later part of the film explores efforts to bring members of the Einsatzgruppen to justice. Benjamin Ferencz, prosecutor of the Einsatzgruppen trial, is interviewed at length. Einsatzgruppen - Background Einsatzgruppen members were drawn from the SS, Waffen SS (military formations of the SS), SD, Sipo, Order Police, and other police units and they received assistance from German and Axis soldiers and other SS units. Einsatzgruppen often utilized local civilians and police in carrying out mass-murder operations. In contrast to the methods later instituted of deporting Jews from their towns and cities or from ghetto settings to killing centers, Einsatzgruppen came directly to the home communities of Jews and massacred them. Wherever the Einsatzgruppen went, they shot Jewish men, women, and children without regard for age or sex, and buried them in mass graves. Often with the help of local informants and interpreters, Jews in a given locality were identified and taken to collection points. Thereafter they were marched or transported by truck to the execution site, where trenches had been prepared. In some cases the captive victims had to dig their own graves. After the victims had handed over their valuables and undressed, men, women, and children were shot, either standing before the open trench, or lying face down in the prepared pit. The Einsatzgruppen following the German army into the Soviet Union were composed of four battalion-sized operational groups. Einsatzgruppe A fanned out from East Prussia across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia toward Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). It massacred Jews in Kovno, Riga, and Vilna. Einsatzgruppe B started from Warsaw in occupied Poland, and fanned out across Belorussia toward Smolensk and Minsk, massacring Jews in Grodno, Minsk, Brest-Litovsk, Slonim, Gomel, and Mogilev, among other places. Einsatzgruppe C began operations from Krakow and fanned out across the western Ukraine toward Kharkov and Rostov-on-Don. Its personnel directed massacres in Lvov, Tarnopol, Zolochev, Kremenets, Kharkov, Zhitomir, and Kiev, where famously in two days in late September 1941 units of Einsatzgruppe detachment 4a massacred 33,771 Kiev Jews in the ravine at Babi Yar. Of the four units, Einsatzgruppe D operated farthest south. Its personnel carried out massacres in the southern Ukraine and the Crimea, especially in Nikolayev, Kherson, Simferopol, Sevastopol, Feodosiya, and in the Krasnodar region. For more on the Einsatzgruppen, visit the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005130 Credits Director/Writer: Michaël Prazan Producer: Michel Rotman Executive Producer: Marie-Hélène Ranc Interviewees: Christopher Browning, Christian Ingrao, Ralf Ogorreck, Dean Martin, Benjamin Ferencz Original Music: Samuel Hirsch A Kuiv production with the participation of France 2 and Planète Director: Michaël Prazan Michael Prazan was born in 1970 and graduated with a degree in linguistics from the Sorbonne in 1996. He taught French literature before becoming a filmmaker. Prazan lived in Japan for several years while making his first two films The Nanking Massacre: Memory and Oblivion (2006) and Japan, the Red Years (2002), about the terrorist tendencies of some of Japan’s May ’68 children. He has written a book on the making of the Einsatzgruppen film, which will be published in France later this year. Page 3 of 4 Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades Einsatzgruppen, les commandos de la mort By RONNIE SCHEIB (Feb. 9, 2010) The harrowing two-part, three-hour documentary "Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades" exhaustively chronicles the lethal work of an SS band charged with exterminating Jews in Russia and the Baltic states before the establishment of the death camps. The Einsatzgruppen (literally, "intervention groups") were responsible for the deaths of a million and a half people, piled up and shot by the hundreds in mass graves. The campaign was so horrifyingly successful that, by 1941's end, the entire region was declared "Jew-free." Difficult, essential viewing, the docu abounds in hitherto unseen images of the killings and offers numerous present-day interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses, and even executioners. The documentary's first section, titled "The Mass Graves," covers the period from June to December, 1941. The mobile death squads, divided into four sections that spread over Eastern Europe -- each under highly cultured, educated leadership -- coordinated and oversaw the carnage, leaving most of the actual slaughter to the locals or to Soviet POWs, themselves also targeted for execution. The mission escalated gradually. At first the Einsatzgruppen incited neighborhood pogroms, watching and filming as everyday Ukrainian and Latvian citizens beat Jews to death. This footage, long inaccessible behind the Iron Curtain, is here unspooled in all its banal savagery. With native volunteers well established, the Germans were able to delegate mass shootings, first of men and later of women and children, while the SS troops themselves patrolled perimeters and shot the occasional survivor. This account of wholesale murder, broken down in component parts and still imprinted on the memories of witnesses, appears all the more horrific for having been being repeated in town after town. While the first part of Michael Prazan's docu fills little-known gaps in the history of Holocaust atrocities, the second part, "Funeral Pyres," deals with the bizarre aftermath of that first stage. In 1943, the remains of thousands of executed Polish officers were unearthed in the Katyn Forest (recently dramatized in Andrzej Wajda's "Katyn"), the Germans blaming the Russians for the murders and vice versa. In fact, it was Stalin who ordered the killings, but high-ranking Nazis, spooked by the loud public outcry that followed the discovery, apparently rethought their disregard of historical accountability. The Einsatzgruppen were then dispatched anew, this time to erase all traces of the earlier acts. They ordered crews of prisoners to revisit every mass grave site, exhume the bodies (removing anything of value, however grisly), burn the cadavers and grind the bones.