TV Alert — Auschwitz: Inside The Nazi State

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:54 PM Eastern on 22 Jan. See below.)

For reasons beyond my meager capacity to understand, PBS saturated the media — cyber, broadcast, and print — with promos for their airing of a Ken-Burns-predictable documentary concerning some obscure black boxer, and made nary a mention of their airing, two episodes at a time, of a monumental, six-episode documentary titled, Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, the first two episodes of which aired this past Wednesday (the remaining two-episode airings will follow on the Wednesday of each of the next two weeks).

I almost missed this film because of PBS's lack of promotion, and the film is not something that ought to be missed by anyone. No ordinary Never-again! Holocaust documentary this six-part series. It uses first-rate dramatizations, interviews with perpetrators and survivors, and computer technology to narrate and examine not only the history of Auschwitz itself, but the even today almost unimaginable Zeitgeist and mentality that made an Auschwitz possible.

As writer/producer Laurence Rees put it:

[This documentary film] is not really just a series about Auschwitz. We're using Auschwitz as the way to tell a larger story. The series uses Auschwitz as a prism to try and understand the whole of the extermination process and something of the mentality of the people who committed the crime.

We're looking at the killings on the eastern front. We're looking at the deportations across Europe. We're looking at the course of the war as it affected this place. It's a much bigger canvas. Auschwitz has a physical beginning in May 1940 and a physical end in January 1945. What happens in Auschwitz and the decisions made by people running Auschwitz actually mirror the bigger decisions which are being taken elsewhere.

[...]

What has not been done to my knowledge on television before [in such documentaries] is to explore in this detail the decision-making process of the Nazis — to try and make people understand how it was possible that people actually sat down in various stages and made key decisions which ended up with the killing of six million men, women, and children. This did not happen by accident. It didn't happen because people were insane. These were, to a large extent, rational human beings who made a series of decisions which ended up with this crime.

And that — that it was "rational human beings who made a series of decisions which ended up with this crime" — is what makes this film and the events it depicts and chronicles so utterly dismaying and chilling; so utterly dismaying, and so utterly chilling, that I, no easily dismayed or chilled sensitive soul, had to several times stop watching my tape of the first two episodes for an hour or two each time in order to gain some "breathing space" for myself, and regain some semblance of rational perspective — or, rather, regain some semblance of rational perspective to the extent that rational perspective is possible when confronted, even in the safety and comfort of one's own armchair, with horrors such as Auschwitz and the Nazi state that made an Auschwitz possible even in imagination.

This harrowing, six-part documentary is a brilliant accomplishment, notwithstanding its superfluous and annoying "intermission feature" shown after each episode with Linda Ellerbee (whom I ordinarily love) interviewing some academics on the "meaning and importance" of the episode just seen.

Ink this series into your TV schedule. It's a not-to-be-missed documentary film.

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Update (5:54 PM Eastern on 22 Jan): I just had a chance to view that Ken Burns PBS documentary of the "obscure black boxer" sneeringly referred to above. Turns out the obscure black boxer was none other than the alternately celebrated and reviled first black world heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, and the documentary itself, chronicling Johnson's amazing but troubled career and its place in America's shameful racial history, was first-rate.

I don't feel too stupid.