Raul Hilberg

About the life and work of controversial American Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein.

This film by Johanna Heer and Werner Schmiedel represents a homage to a man revered internationally as one of the great humanitarians of the 20th century. Raul Hilberg and other intellectuals also perceive him as a philosopher, although his primary work for many decades was the investigation of Nazi criminals.

Claude Lanzmann directed this 9½ hour documentary on the Holocaust without using a single frame of archive footage. He interviews survivors, witnesses, and ex-Nazis (whom he had to film secretly since they only agreed to be interviewed by audio). His style of interviewing, by asking for the most minute details, is effective at adding up these details to give a horrifying portrait of the events of Nazi genocide. He also shows, or rather lets some of his subjects show, that the anti-Semitism that caused 6 million Jews to die in the Holocaust is still alive and well in many people who still live in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.