Einsatzgruppen Les Commandos De La Mort

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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

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. The crews, in turn, suffered the same fate.

The documentary theorizes that the almost inconceivable brutality of the Einsatzgruppen experience led directly to one aspect of the death camps: Many Einsatzgruppen officers suffered traumatic reactions that made them unfit for duty; the mechanical efficiency of gas chambers and crematoria thus salvaged "fragile" SS sensibilities.

(Documentary -- France) A KUIV-Michel Rotman production with the participation of France 2 and Planete, with the support of Region Ile-de-France. (International sales: Carrimages, Paris), Produced by Rotman. Directed by Michael Prazan. (French, English, German, Russian, Latvian, Ukranian, Lithuanian, Hebrew dialogue), Camera (color/B&W, DV), Nicolas Eprendre; editor, Christian Girier; sound, Benjamin Haim, Robert Sullivan. Reviewed at New York Jewish Film Festival, Jan. 20, 2010. Running time: 180 Min. Page 4 of 4 EINSATZGRUPPEN & GRUBER’S JOURNEY

Distribution: Claus Mueller, New York Correspondent The National Center for Jewish Film New York Jewish Film Festival, January 13-28, 2010 (781) 736-8600 www.jewishfilm.org Though the Holocaust period provides an unlimited source of stories for features and documentaries, one is struck by new revelations coming to light. Among the premier Jewish Film festivals the New York Jewish Film Festival provided such insightful documentaries accompanied, by the superb Israeli films depicting problems and issues of contemporary Israeli society and restored films from the Jewish film history. Numerous of these films are co-funded through European sources, specifically the French-German ‘arte’ television ventures, standing in most cases for superior film making. To review all of the 32 features and shorts selected by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center is difficult, thus I single out some startling films.

GRUBER’S JOURNEY by the Romanian Radu Gabrea is significant since it is the first feature film covering the slaughter of Romanian Jews. The film gives a perfect yet subdued and lasting demonstration of what happened. One does not see the victims but only the pogrom blood of the walls being removed and hears the screams of Jews in closed railway cattle cars against the backdrop of dressed up Italian and German military officers. Yet this feature centering on Curzio Malaparta as the Italian war correspondent searching for a doctor, is as penetrating as Malaparte’s novels La Pelle and, Kaputt are, as it demonstrates evil through accents rather than broad brushes of the paint and as in his novels we share in this film the perspective of the doomed.

The three hour French documentary EINSATZGRUPPEN: THE DEATH BRIGADES by Michael Prazan was the most Impressive production shown at the festival. Based on meticulous research this extraordinary documentary has incredible archival footage never seen before, including color films, and interviews with eye witnesses of and some participants in the systematic murder of Jewish populations in Eastern Europe accompanied by a matter of fact commentary. EINSATZGRUPPEN is the most comprehensive and analytic depiction of the development and application of Nazi mass murder techniques in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the second world war. As a learning experience the film offers an incredible amount of new information. Most of the leading officers of the SS Einsatzgruppen commanding the systematic slaughter of mostly Jews, Russian prisoners’ of wars, communists and other groups were well trained university graduates with doctorates. The killing was facilitated through voluntary cooperation of local auxiliaries and local police such as Ukrainian coming from areas with long anti-Semitic histories. Volunteers constituted up to 90% of the killing commandoes. German scientists and Nazi officials systematically refined and experimented with the methods of killing to generate the fastest and most efficient industrialized way of murder a large scale project to be carried at least expense to German manpower and material resources. Thus there was early experimentation by Einsatzgruppen with gas , drawing on mobile gas vans and rudimentary gas chambers as used in the government sanctioned mass murder program of euthanasia dating back to the late 1939 killings. Before the establishment of death camps, the Einsatzgruppen machine gunned or killed otherwise more than one million people and buried them in mass graves.

After opening the mass graves of about 22 000 Polish officers , intelligentsia and soldiers killed by Soviet units in the Katyn forest massacre and using the murder as a propaganda tool against Russia German authorities ordered, the evidence of the mass murders by EInsatzgruppen to be destroyed. Thus hundreds of thousands of bodies were exhumed and burned with the remaining bones ground down and valuables removed. These activities were mainly carried out by local auxiliaries and Russian prisoners of war who were killed afterwards. One mass grave in the Baltikum held more than 100 thousand corpses.

The concern of the German high command with the impact of the mass murder on participating German soldiers led to a speed up of the development of stationary killing facilities. Thus large scale industrial murder through concentration camps with gas chambers was designed with the first experimental chambers tested on Russian prisoners of war. Heinrich Himmler requested towards the end of 1941 for a more human killing. In a cynical turn of events defying imagination, the German authorities argued that the military prowess of German troops involved in mass murder was threatened due to mental break downs, alcoholism, and sadism. Leaders of Einsatzgruppen like A.Nebe or the SS Supreme Commander of Central Russia Erich Bach-Zelewski had nervous breakdowns. Thus there was an official emphasis on minimizing contact between the executioners and their victims. Bearing responsibility for the slaughter of more than 1 million people, 25 high ranking officers of the Einsatzgruppen were tried in Nuremberg. 14 were condemned to death yet only five were executed. Sentences including death and life sentences were commuted and all released from 1951 to 1959. Fourteen years after the war none of the responsible killers were still in jail. Most of the lower charges returned to their former occupations, including frequently the police force.

…Admittedly, the productions are difficult to compare, to say the least. Yet the reflexive power of EINSATZGRUPPEN prevailed. The detached non-emotional commentary providing the narrative account of EINSATZGRUPPE is part of that documentary’s power as is its commitment to facts, thus one does not have the sense of a selective perception or bias frequently encountered in other documentaries. One does not see the speaker but what is said resonates. Thus there is one passing sentence I shall not forget. ”Killing the Jews through boiling water took two hours”. Overall this year’s superb selection for the festival is a compliment to the curators Aviva Weintraub and Richard Pena. EINSATZGRUPPEN &

GRUBER’S JOURNEY Distribution: th The 19 Annual New York Jewish Film The National Center for Jewish Film Festival January 13–28, 2010 (781) 736-8600 www.jewishfilm.org Nora Lee Mandel, Jan 16, 2010

True stories, whether fictionalized or in documentaries, stand out among the 32 features and shorts from 13 countries in this year’s edition, presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Here are the most highly recommended:

Inspired by the experiences of Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte in Nazi-occupied Romania, GRUBER’S JOURNEY quietly but devastatingly imagines the writer struggling to fulfill a special assignment for Il Duce on the Eastern front. His allergies are giving him a very bad day in July 1941, and a Bucharest doctor suggests he consult the allergist Dr. Josef Gruber in Jassy. The combined efforts of the friendly, elaborately uniformed Italian consul, the German commandant, and the Romanian police chief, who assiduously follows the Gestapo’s orders, can’t seem to locate Dr. Gruber. Malaparte uses up his petrol allotment, driving by smashed stores scarred with anti-Jewish graffiti. Cries are heard in the distance as he drives out to the train station, where he keeps searching for help with his sniffles. Even when he stands amidst a jaw-dropping scene of the absurd, no bureaucrat is let off easy as a buffoon. Malaparte went on to write Kaputt in 1944, one of the first literary exposés of the genocide of Romanian Jews. Director Radu Gabrea was born before World War II, so he wouldn’t be considered part of the Romanian New Wave of such cynical films as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Police, Adjective, but he effectively demonstrates a similar deadpan affinity for brilliantly eviscerating bureaucracy.

The pogrom and massacre at Jassy are among the well-organized events of mass murder thoroughly detailed by director Michaël Prazan’s EINSATZGRUPPEN: THE DEATH BRIGADES. It is made abundantly clear that whether in Romania, the Baltic countries, Ukraine, or other republics of the Soviet Union, police, militia, and other nationalistic local forces first set off the violent pogroms, then efficiently carried out the instructions of Nazi supervisors for a systematic elimination of their entire Jewish populations. Formal reports to Berlin, astounding archival film and photographs support very specific and descriptive interviews with local witnesses, the few scattered survivors, and a German veteran seen with a hidden camera.

“Part I: The Mass Graves (1941-1942)” doesn’t just forcefully show how identical procedures were followed for the round-ups, but it also examines the 3,000 Germans in this supervisory corps of highly educated officers. They seem very much like the nasty children grown-up from The White Ribbon. One was so proud of having multiple degrees that he insisted on being called “Dr. Dr.” even at his Nuremburg trial (most were never charged). “Part II: The Funeral Pyres (1942-1945)” could also be called “The Cover Up,” as these smart commanders foresaw that the Thousand Year Reich would reign shorter. They revisited every burial site, this time with disposable slave labor, and thoroughly destroyed the evidence.

Highlights of S.F. Jewish Film Festival

July 18, 2010

Gruber's Journey Romania, 100 minutes 7:30 p.m. July 25, Castro; 9:15 p.m. Aug. 1, Roda Director Radu Gabrea in Person

This is an exceptionally good film, from Romania, that sneaks up on the subject of the Holocaust in an unexpected and compelling way. It's set in Romania in 1941, at a time when the Germans and the Italians were occupying that country. An Italian journalist, with close ties to Mussolini, arrives in town suffering from what appears to be a bad allergic reaction. He has a reference to an allergist named Gruber, not to mention a real urgency to see him, but Gruber is a Jew, and his whereabouts are unknown - especially given the fact that only the day before, 5,000 Romanian Jews were rounded up and either killed or put on cattle cars. But this is in the background. Basically, we're just following this guy who's looking to get help, and because of the crazily subjective nature of movies, the Holocaust is almost something off to this side, secondary to our deeper concern, which is how to make this journalist stop sneezing. Needless to say, this is just the movie's subtle strategy, because ultimately there's a shift, both in our focus and in the consciousness of this journalist - a real-life writer named Malaparte, who soon ran afoul of Mussolini's regime. The climactic scene, though subtle, is quite moving. - Mick LaSalle

Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades France, 180 minutes Noon Aug. 8, San Francisco Jewish Community Center

This 180-minute film covers the extermination of the Jews during World War II in the Soviet Union, including the famous massacre at Babi Yar. How did 3,000 men carry out Hitler's plan for the final solution, including the use of POWs who became part of the Einsatzgruppen to save their own lives? Like so many documentaries from the Holocaust, we hear from the rare survivors (and you'll find out how rare indeed it was to survive these atrocities) as well as the executioners including the chilling testimony and bearing of German SS Gruppenfuhrer Otto Ohlendorf at the Nuremberg Trials. What also is disturbing is how few of the Einsatzgruppen actually were tried and received harsh sentences. - Leba Hertz

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

FESTIVAL REPORT S.F. Jewish Film Festival 2010

By Michael Fox | Jul 22, 2010

This may strike you as counterintuitive, but the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which begins Saturday, is perhaps not the ideal setting for continuing the sporadic discussion about the necessity and impact, at this late date, of films about the Holocaust. After all, the festival encompasses a much, much wider view of the Jewish experience than genocidal victimization, with dramas and documentaries that range from contemporary Israel and Russia to '70s Argentina, from baseball to klezmer to "Einsatzgruppen: gangsters. So it's somewhat unfair to the SFJFF (while The Death Brigades" feeding both stereotypes and Woody Allen-ish one-liners) to focus on the handful of films that revisit the Holocaust.

But, you see, I'm fascinated by the strategies and tactics filmmakers use in an attempt to get younger audiences to engage with history. At the same time, I'm continually struck by contemporary views of the Holocaust that are informed by a fresh willingness to confront both state complicity and individual moral gray areas.

The festival's most devastating take on the Holocaust, however, is unquestionably Michael Prazan's Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades, a horrifying and unflinching three-hour exposé of (among many heinous acts) the SS's enlistment of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, et al in the extermination of the Jewish populations in a sweep of Soviet republics. It's too late for justice to be served, and it's hard to make a case that knowledge of past genocides serves to prevent or stop the next one. But, just maybe, it's a kind of deterrent to would-be mass murderers that a filmic, historical record will be compiled, and will serve as their judgment for eternity.

EINSATZGRUPPEN

Distribution: The National Center for Jewish Film (781) 736-8600 www.jewishfilm.org