User Reviews

You would think, that someone, who made it his goal to show how Auschwitz really was, would at least try to find out, well, how it really was and do some research, but no, not Uwe Boll. I'm a becoming history teacher, so forgive me, if I expect from a movie, that wants to show how it was, to actually show how it was.

So where do I begin, I just make a list of things, that were wrong. This list is not complete, but these things just stuck in my mind after seeing these "movie":

1. There is 0 indication from the movie alone (if we ignore its title), that it plays in Auschwitz. It could have been easily played at Majdanek for example) The only indication, that this plays in Auschwitz, is the presence of these wire net columns in the gas chamber, but of course, those things worked and looked completely different than in the movie and the gas chamber looked nothing like the real ones in Krema II or III. The size was wrong, the position of the wire net columns was wrong, their appearance was wrong, the door to the gas chamber was wrong, the walls were wrong, there was no ventilation system visible and so on and on.

2. The building with the gas chambers and the ovens looked nothing like any extermination facility in Auschwitz. If you don't want to build a whole crematory for your movie, than either don't produce such a movie or just show a different extermination facility, like Bunker I or II, which were farm houses that were transferred into gas chambers.

3. You got to be kidding me about the number of people, that were actually sent to the gas chamber in this movie. Was their a shortage of actors willing to act in this crappy movie? In reality, there was no room to even breath in these chambers. And why did they shoot the kids in front of the building and not gas them with the other victims? This not only makes no sense, but it's again far from the reality of Auchwitz. Yeah, I know, Boll just wanted to "shock" his audience.

4. The ovens looked nothing like the real ones. For Christs sake, is it to hard to look at the homepage of the Auschwitz museum or of the company "Topf und Söhne"? And one body at a time? In reality they cremated up to 4 or 5 bodies in one muffle at the same time.

I could go on forever.

If you are interested in how Auschwitz really was, watch the mini series "War and Remembrance" (which only made minor mistakes, but even rebuild a crematory and actually was a good series) or read Pressac book "AUSCHWITZ: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers", which is available online on holocaust-history.org for example.

If you want to see a good movie and don't care for accuracy, than also stay away from this piece of junk, since it fails as a movie too. In the first part we have a look at students who don't know anything about the holocaust, then we have scenes in which Jews were gassed, cremated and so on, and in the end we have students again, but this time they show at least basic knowledge. And that is it.

There is one (!) good scene, where two SS members talk about the extermination as if it was just some annoying bureaucracy (this scene is the reason for the 2 star review) and that is it. The rest is just plain boring. Yeah, an Auschwitz movie, that is boring. That is something, that is hard to accomplish. Congratulations!

This film not only was full of historical inaccuracies but at some points I felt that it even bordered on exploitative.

The baby killings I found obscene and unnecessary, but it is also just plain incorrect, you gain a sense that this was a routinely managed process upon arrival, which it was not, infants were killed, sometimes in ways much more inhumane than shooting, but there was not a managed process. My point is, the film is completely riddled with bad and obvious mistakes.

This 'film' promises both a documentary and dramatisation. It delivers neither. The viewer gains a very poor representation of the camp, this may be because of lack of research or budget limitations, but it simply does not deliver a convincing representation of the scale of Auschwits. The documentary also seems to have been compiled by some monkey and the result is a very uninteresting second half of the movie to match the equally mundane first half.

Please do not watch this film, it is really not worth your time.

First of all, I have to say in Uwe Boll's favor that I am completely against smear campaigns that discredit the entire body of work from a filmmaker only because he made 2 or 3 really bad movies. Unfortunately, "Auschwitz" comes close to that description too. The film starts with Boll saying something about his film and also ends with it. I personally find this a very annoying watch and it has a narcissistic take in my opinion. This is just personal perception though, but I think this stuff should be on DVDs as commentary or something like that. What is not subjective is the fact that Boll delivers pretty much nothing of substance in his monologues and his English is also really bad. He should not have done it I think. Then there are two sequences of classroom action when we hear Boll ask questions about Auschwitz, the Holocaust and Nazis to German students. It becomes obvious that most of them are really not that educated on the subject. Some are, but most are not.

This is the premise that Boll uses as the motivation to make this film. The long middle sequence of the movie depicts the re-enacted action from the concentration camp in Auschwitz. It is very graphic, but that should not come as a surprise with Boll behind the film. We see people die in gas chambers. We see a young boy being shot in the head by a Nazi officer. Sadly, we do not really learn anything in this middle sequence. I am fairly certain there was nothing in there you would not know by now and I refuse to believe that students were really that limited in terms of knowledge about concentration camps. In my opinion, the interviews with the student were entirely or almost entirely scripted.

All in all, it's not a complete failure of a film and I agree that it is certainly difficult to bring something new to the subject with the hundreds of films and documentaries that already exist about it, but it was still a very unrewarding watch. This is a bit of a shame as the cast was not entirely bad. I believe Arved Birnbaum for example is a talented actor. But he has little to work with here with Boll's script. So yeah, the best thing is probably that this film does not even run for 70 minutes, so it does not drag at least for the most part. The worst is probably the parts during which Boll elaborates in a cringeworthy manner on why he made this film very early. As a whole, not recommended.

What a shame, what a waste of time. Boring, boring and boring. Unrealistic, stupid, very bad acting. It make no sense at all. Maybe something to show in schools at 7-8 grade. Just to show how little young people knows about history from that period.I really don't know why he did this. Looks like he collected his family and some friends, he could not even fill up the gas chamber, some people smiled and looked into the camera. You maybe think "I must have to see for my self" but don't, really - move on with your life, and do you want to know about Auschwitch - Google or Youtube it. Tons of material with a lot more sense than this.

I'm still not quite sure what he is trying to say with this stink fest. I'm wondering if he did any research at all for this, the Nazis weren't shooting babies in the head and the interviews he conducted with what I'm guessing were supposed to be German youths were at best staged and picked, I'm sure, for their unique screen presence. The subtitles definitely didn't spell out all of what they were saying either. All I saw was an amateurish theatrical presentation of the "stereotypical" concentration camp story. I should have known.

The depictions of the gas chambers were on par with what you might expect to see from some kind of community theater act. Their effects were no existent unless they were using digital effects for a rather gratuitous head shot on a baby. Which as I stated earlier is of the most exaggerated portrayal of the Nazi camps.

The interviewer was certainly steering those kids in what he wanted them to say. And in some ways what they said was actually lending weight to the Nazi ideology weather intended or not remains to be seen.

With minimal budget, Boll tries to span a bow between our presence and the unbelievable past. It is not a precise documentary of history. It is a movie about dying in Auschwitz, how it came that Auschwitz is not only a name but a death symbol, and what children of today know about the backgrounds. In some ways it succeeds, in some ways it fails to fulfill its ambitions, with the succeeding part predominating.

First, school kids are asked about their knowledge of Hitler and the Jews and the Holocaust, and some do not know anything, or at least very little. Some of the older school kids of the second interview series are better informed.

Where the horror begins is in the fictive sceneries of the past, when a child mourns to its parents about its feet, while walking to certain death. Every father or mother have heard their child mourning like that during a long walk. But in this context it is simply unsettling.

Then, bringing the victims to their fate, is shown as a normal business process. Guards are bored, professional. Killing people on a daily base, like slaughtering cows or pigs. The victims obey, they don't know what comes. They think they are arrested, and so they are quiet and calm.

And then the gas chambers. We are watching naked people suffering death. At some point, Boll is afraid of his own courage and spares us from the full length of their suffering. That I see as a big mistake. Death by Cyclon-B is within 5 to 15 minutes.

However, we will also follow a basically uninteresting dialog between two officers, which is nearly as painful as the death scenes, because people are only numbers and not of more worth than insects. Problems with schedule and staff and holidays are discussed. There's a noise in the background, and later we learn what's the reason about. But the two officer's are so accustomed to this noise, they aren't realizing it.

There are some scenes of shooting small children, these scenes are not quite believable and are, of course, not explained. Shooting Babies in this scenery makes no sense, but, the whole scenery makes no sense at all. I would have abandoned these scenes, they are not made well.

Boll made a laconic comment about inhumanity and how we remember. No more, no less. He shows us, how much we tell our children about the backgrounds.

One of the girls is asked, why people participated in executing the Holocaust, and she answers, they were afraid of the others, or simply followers. Boll asks, how would you react in this situation (he means she and the others), and she answers, "exactly the same way". That alone was worth watching the movie.

P.S.: I know that most of the scenes and places aren't historically exact. The life and death of the Lager inhabitants is completely missing. The film doesn't show the real Auschwitz. The amount of people killed at once was much higher, etcetera. The movie itself isn't carefully prepared nor edited. But those aren't essential details. It's the meaning. In this case for real.

This is a difficult documentary to watch, mainly because of the portion of live re-enactment. I personally don't think this portion is necessary, because the rest of the documentary is much more compelling. The interviews with German teens is fascinating. Some of the students are very knowledgeable about WWII and the Holocaust, while others don't seem to know anything at all. What isn't clear is whether this difference is because some of the kids have had immersive study in the subject, while others are not. Several of the teens know quite a lot about the war and rise of Nazism, and are also able to contrast with other genocides and the ongoing wars in the Middle East.

I recommend watching this film, but fast forward through the re-enactment portion. The best part hasn't gotten as much attention as it should.

As for the other reviews that crank on Boll, that seems like a more personal ussue than reviews of this actual film. Ignore the cranks.