Mengele Factory Workers

Identifier
irn1005026
Language of Description
English
Alt. Identifiers
  • 1996.166
  • RG-60.5074
Dates
1 Jan 1985 - 31 Dec 1985
Level of Description
Item
Languages
  • German
Source
EHRI Partner

Creator(s)

Biographical History

Claude Lanzmann was born in Paris to a Jewish family that immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. He attended the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. His family went into hiding during World War II. He joined the French resistance at the age of 18 and fought in the Auvergne. Lanzmann opposed the French war in Algeria and signed a 1960 antiwar petition. From 1952 to 1959 he lived with Simone de Beauvoir. In 1963 he married French actress Judith Magre. Later, he married Angelika Schrobsdorff, a German-Jewish writer, and then Dominique Petithory in 1995. He is the father of Angélique Lanzmann, born in 1950, and Félix Lanzmann (1993-2017). Lanzmann's most renowned work, Shoah, is widely regarded as the seminal film on the subject of the Holocaust. He began interviewing survivors, historians, witnesses, and perpetrators in 1973 and finished editing the film in 1985. In 2009, Lanzmann published his memoirs under the title "Le lièvre de Patagonie" (The Patagonian Hare). He was chief editor of the journal "Les Temps Modernes," which was founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, until his death on July 5, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/claude-lanzmann-changed-the-history-of-filmmaking-with-shoah

Scope and Content

Lanzmann talks to German workers and peasants in the present-day Mengele family factory in Günzburg, Germany. The workers are unresponsive, saying things like, "Auschwitz was part good and part bad." Or that "it's all in the past." Most of them only admit to a vague idea of who Josef Mengele was. FILM ID 3887 -- Shoah Sequence Mengele // image + mixage Color sequence prepared by the editing team in June 1985 possibly for television distribution following the identification of Mengele's body on June 6, 1985. Opening shots of Karl Mengele street signs and farm equipment with the Mengele name. Interviews with workers bringing up Josef's name. Pull back from the tower to the town square in Günzburg. FILM ID 3631 -- Mengele Factory Workers 1 -- prise 1,2 (audio only) FILM ID 3632 -- Mengele Factory Workers 2 -- prise 1,2,3,4,5 (audio only) FILM ID 3633 -- Mengele Factory Workers 3 (audio only)

Note(s)

  • Claude Lanzmann spent twelve years locating survivors, perpetrators, and eyewitnesses for his nine and a half hour film Shoah released in 1985. Without archival footage, Shoah weaves together extraordinary testimonies to render the step-by-step machinery of the destruction of European Jewry. Critics have called it "a masterpiece" and a "monument against forgetting." The Claude Lanzmann SHOAH Collection consists of roughly 185 hours of interview outtakes and 35 hours of location filming.

  • Paper label on Film ID 3887 reads - 'Shoah' Sequence Mengele couleur 16mm LTC le 17/Juin/1985. This looks like a sequence had been edited together and printed to a color positive print with a polyester sound mix possibly for a double system screening. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/12/world/body-is-mengele-s-his-son-declares.html

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Genre

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