Getting Away with Murder(s) (2021) - Holocaust documentary

[CelestialAgent]

Guerrilla Films haven’t released a DVD in a long time, but they’re now releasing their first Blu-ray, the Holocaust documentary Getting Way with Murder(s). It had some limited Q&A cinema screenings in 2021, and was broadcast on Channel 4 a few days ago for Holocaust Memorial Day (the BBC broadcast a different recent documentary, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, distributed by Curzon), but I’m not sure how much of a release it’s had outside of that. The description seems to suggest it’s about complicity in the Holocaust and who was deemed to stand trial at Nuremberg.

Up to 1 million people in 22 countries carried out the unprovoked murder of well over six million innocent men, women and children in the Holocaust. 99% of those responsible were never prosecuted; most were never even questioned. The Allies knew what their crime was. The Allies knew where a great many of the murderers could be found - Germany, Austria, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, and numerous countries in South America and had an endless wealth of evidence to present to the courts. The Allies unanimously agreed to prosecute those responsible when they drew up The London Agreement in August 1945. But, after the late 1940s, these very same Allies did almost nothing. Why?

[CelestialAgent]

Per the back cover the extras are making of, unused scene and trailer (20 minutes total), the film runs 175 minutes and is presented in 1.90:1.

[McCrutchy]

Ben Ferencz: Last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor dies, aged 103

[billlythekid]

Nasty cover art, makes it look like some sort of gangster film.

[Darby1985]

Originally Posted by billlythekid

Nasty cover art, makes it look like some sort of gangster film.

That's rather the point - that these people shouldn't be historical artefacts studied by scholars but they were scumbags who went along with the greatest criminal enterprise ever, taking orders from their very own mob boss. The film is ABOUT remembering these were crimes and should be treated as such, not just academia and theory lost to history.

It's no accident.

[McCrutchy]

Nazi camp guard Josef Schütz dies at 102

I can't remember for certain if he was mentioned in the documentary, but I think he was.

[CelestialAgent]

Just dropped down to £12.99 on HMV/Amazon.

[Nitroes]

I don't have the Blu-ray but I have seen the film somewhere.

Stupid title.

Damn fine documentary though the inhumanity is really just the tip of the iceberg of the horror in Europe in WWII.

Made me feel rather hopeless with what was brushed under the carpet but I suppose we have to move on.

The latest war of Europe's horrors by the dictator Putin against Ukraine will never fully be known.

[CelestialAgent]

Originally Posted by CelestialAgent

Just dropped down to £12.99 on HMV/Amazon.

Now down to £7.99, so just over £6 with the HMV discount code, decided to pick it up.

Making of is actually a 10 minute director interview plus a 5 minute deleted scene and 2 minute trailer.

Shame about the David Baddiel pull quote on the back, not a big fan of his comedy or his writing.

[CelestialAgent]

Would strongly recommend this documentary, despite the Channel 4 broadcast and limited cinema release it’s flown under the radar somewhat - less than 200 people have logged it on Letterboxd. There have been many important Holocaust films in recent years like Misha and the Wolves, Final Account, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, Occupied City, Wesele, Filip, The Zone of Interest, One Life - and there continue to be more stories to be told. (Other good Holocaust documentaries include The Sorrow and the Pity, Voices from the List, Lover Other, Tovarisch I Am Not Dead, Numbered). I remember as a teenager in high school, on a school trip to the Topography of Terror, the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz feeling like I had a good grasp studying the Nazis in GCSEs/A-Levels, only to find as an adult I really didn’t. With the scale it’s impossible to, but it’s still important to confront accounts of the history. This makes a lot of sense as a dual format release, as sequences from the film could easily be used in secondary schools and universities as an educational resource, particularly during the tour guide sequences that explain the mechanism of genocide and interviews with survivors. There is also an exploration of how do we educate future generations, especially as both Nazi perpetrators and Holocaust survivors reach the end of their lives, and what we mark with the memorials and plaques that are built.

While the majority of the focus of the documentary is on the murder of Jewish people, there is still some attention paid to queer, Roma and Sinti victims, and the razing to the ground of several villages as retribution/show of force by the Nazis, the use of the Einsatzgruppen beyond just death camps, and the complicity of Austrians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians and the majority of occupied countries in carrying out mass murder.

One of the strengths of the documentary is it takes a broad focus, contextualising English antisemitic massacres in the Medieval period, the Armenian Genocide, destroying the myth that nobody knew anything about the Holocaust as it happened (and could have done more to prevent it rather than enable it), and in particular the war crimes trials (especially Nuremberg) after WWII facing up to the challenges of the Cold War and communism. A number of countries are visited including the US, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Poland, Lithuania - more were planned per the director interview if not for lockdown - with the inability of countries like Canada, Australia and Israel to prosecute the majority of Nazis interrogated. There are interviews with survivors, children of survivors, people involved in creating the cases against them and historians, with archival documents/images and footage from camps of corpses used frequently. It’s a important film not just for historians, but also for political and legal scholars, and for creating a framework for other genocide trials, that the closing narration reminds us are still going on.

While I’m generally against the death penalty, I’m not against it for war criminals, and it’s hard not to hear of how few people were imprisoned or executed (sometimes higher ups receiving punishment, sometimes only those lower down), with more extensive trials only happening more recently, or extradition requests denied. In particular, West Germany and Austria are shown to have maintained political continuity with the Nazi era, with many of the judges and lawyers still in place, homosexuality still prosecutable, jurors acquitting people or lenient sentences of only a few years’ sentence - living in wealth in retirement with military pensions, many Nazis living into their 60s-100s, or becoming naturalised citizens of other countries e.g. the US (including a Jewish community in Florida.) The film visits cities in the UK where Nazis (as war refugees) ran B&Bs, lived in council estates, acted as ticket collectors on the tube, and the press and government’s resistance to bring up history from 50 years ago from another country and using coded antisemitism. There are references to war criminals like Mengele, Ilse Koch, Lord Haw Haw and survivors like Wiesenthal, but much of the film is devoted to stories not heard before.

Though it puts the scale of murder into perspective, I’m not sure I agree with the rhetorical device of had the Nazis murdered the entire population of Yorkshire (with a population of under 6 million) the British would have done more against the Holocaust, considering it was committed against the whole of Europe and not just one county, and considering the Nazis did kill British civilians in the Blitz and held the Channel Islands. I would also push back on the historian that claims at least there’s Holocaust denialism rather than people that valorise the Holocaust, when there are certainly neo-Nazis that do.

The Blu-ray looks good and almost certainly better than the stream, although the historical content is more important than video quality (there is occasionally jagged lines on edges during drone shots and the odd interview).

The extras are brief but provide some context, with Wilkinson talking about wanting to make the film for two decades since the Q&A circuit with Taking Sides but being unable to get commissioned, how fascist symbols are still around and receiving antisemitic abuse and nobody doing anything despite being a gentile. The deleted scene talks about how lower ranking and higher ranking officials were prosecuted differently - including a teenage Polish speaker who participated in killings, and a Nazi who was acquitted of murdering his Jewish mistress.

The interviews run long although I wonder if there is even more interesting material on the cutting room floor, and despite being almost 3 hours long, it deserves its runtime and never feels too long considering the amount and the scale that is covered. I felt quite understandably emotional throughout.

An hourlong Zoom Q&A is available on YouTube.

Getting Away with Murder(s): Behind the Film - YouTube