Movies Similar to The Civilian Serves

Night and Fog(1959)

Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

World War Two: A Timewatch Guide(2016)

Professor Saul David uses the BBC archive to chart the history of the world's most destructive war, by chronicling how the story of the battle has changed. As new information has come to light, and forgotten stories are remembered, the history of World War Two evolves. The BBC has followed that evolution, and this programme examines the most important stories, and how our understanding of them has been re-defined since the war ended over 70 years ago.

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Tony Robinson's VE Day Minute by Minute(2020)

Tony Robinson’s VE Day: Minute By Minute will take a unique look at a pivotal day in the history of the modern world, delving into the key events that made VE Day such a momentous twenty-four hours. This is the story of what happened on that most celebrated and important day, including original interviews with historians and veterans who tell their stories and share their first-hand experiences. Using unseen archive footage and stills, plus never told accounts from veterans who were there, this one-off special will chart the moment the clock struck midnight, to 24 hours later, when fighting officially stopped across Europe. Up and down the country it was dawning on people that they were waking up not with fear or anxiety, but with relief and excitement. This was a Great Britain no one had experienced for six years. A Britain at peace. At almost no notice street celebrations were being prepared and tens of thousands were flocking to London and other city centres.

7.5

A Hole In The Head(2017)

A pig farm in Lety, South Bohemia would make an ideal monument to collaboration and indifference, says writer and journalist Markus Pape. Most of those appearing in this documentary filmed in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, France, Germany and Croatia have personal experience of the indifference to the genocide of the Roma. Many of them experienced the Holocaust as children, and their distorted memories have earned them distrust and ridicule. Continuing racism and anti-Roma sentiment is illustrated among other matters by how contemporary society looks after the locations where the murders occurred. However, this documentary film essay focuses mainly on the survivors, who share with viewers their indelible traumas, their "hole in the head".

6.3

Stalingrad - Stimmen aus Ruinen(2023)

Featuring excerpts from diaries and letters written by local residents and soldiers from both sides, the documentary tells the story of the Battle of Stalingrad through the voices of those who lived it.

7.8

Pope Vs. Hitler(2017)

In the darkest days of World War II, St. Peter's was shrouded in the shadow of the swastika. But even as the Führer surrounded him, the Pope was plotting a secret counter-offensive. Wartime Pontiff Pius XII has been derided for his public silence about the Holocaust. But evidence suggests his silence may have been subterfuge.

6.0

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33-45: The Channel's Superguns(2016)

In WWII, the English Channel was a vital passageway. Here, explore the previously untold story of the invaluable superguns that guarded it.

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Raoul Wallenberg: Buried Alive(1983)

A profile of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the film covers his role in saving the lives of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, as well as exploring the evidence that he may still have been alive in a Soviet gulag as late as the early 1980s.

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A Return to Memory(2024)

When Canada entered World War II, the National Film Board suddenly had an urgent new mission—and hundreds of women stepped forward, helping to create Canadian cinema as we now know it.

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Coal(2025)

CHARBON depicts how Europe was built on fossil fuels over the past 100 years. And how it was torn apart by wars that were the result of these same fossil fuels. During 3 trips to Ukraine, Italy and Iraq, filmmaker Manu Riche explains how he and his French-German family are inseparably connected to the fate of the Iraqi filmmaker and refugee Hayder Helo.

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The Dead Nation(2017)

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

6.5

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Westward Ho!(1940)

Wartime short promoting the evacuation if urban children to rural areas.

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Yesterday Is Over Your Shoulder(1940)

A wartime short encouraging workers to join free, government-organised engineering training schemes.

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The Day Hitler Died(2015)

The story of Hitler’s final hours told by people who were there. This special features exclusive forgotten interviews, believed lost for 65 years, with members of Hitler’s inner circle who were trapped with him in his bunker as the Russians fought to take Berlin. These unique interviews from figures such as the leader of the Hitler Youth Artur Axmann and Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge, have never before been seen outside Germany. Using rarely seen archive footage and dramatic reconstruction, this special tells the story of Adolf Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker.

6.8

All Against All(2019)

This richly illustrated historical documentary investigates the mechanism of nationalist feelings that radicalise. It shows how fascism was on the rise even a decade before the founding of the NSB, due to a number of anti-democratic initiatives led by a millionaire with a predilection for one-legged women, a market vendor, a cleric, and an artist. Historians, writers and collectors of fascist curios reveal how an initially marginal and fragmented movement grew into a radical populist party.

7.0

Death & the Maiden(2014)

Shortly after World War II, over 1,000 paintings were found in a cellar in southern France. The paintings were created by a young Jewish woman named Charlotte Salomon. She painted her turbulent life story in a unique creation called: ‘Life? Or Theater? – A Tri-Colored Operetta.’ Death and the Maiden unravels the story behind her creation.

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Memory of the Camps(1985)

In 1945, Allied troops invaded Germany and liberated Nazi death camps. They found unspeakable horrors which still haunt the world’s conscience. A film was made by British and American film crews who were with the troops liberating the camps. It was directed in part by Alfred Hitchcock and was broadcast for the first time in its entirety on PBS FRONTLINE in 1985.

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George Marshall and the American Century(1993)

He built the mightiest army in history and selected its leaders. Eisenhower, MacArthur and Patton all obeyed his commands. George Marshall was the only soldier ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

8.0

Reunion(1946)

Live footage from concentration camps after the liberation, and the complex transport and lodging of masses of prisoners of war and other deported people back to their home countries, at the end of World War II. A 45min 35mm print also exists (shown at Cinémathèque française in 2023).

6.8

Battle of Okinawa in Color(2017)

By mid-1945, Hitler is dead and the war has ended in Europe. Halfway around the world, however, the fighting is still going strong on a small island in the Pacific. Okinawa was the site of the last battle of the last great war of the 20th century, with a casualty rate in the tens of thousands. Through it all, military cameramen risked their lives to film the conflict, from brutal land combat to fierce kamikaze attacks at sea. See the footage they captured and experience this intense battle the way the soldiers saw it -- in color.

9.0