Movies Similar to What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy

From Where They Stood(2023)

A handful of prisoners in WWII camps risked their lives to take clandestine photographs and document the hell the Nazis were hiding from the world. In the vestiges of the camps, director Christophe Cognet retraces the footsteps of these courageous men and women in a quest to unearth the circumstances and the stories behind their photographs, composing as such an archeology of images as acts of defiance.

Eva: A-7063(2018)

As a 10-year-old “Mengele Twin,” Eva Kor suffered some of the worst of the Holocaust. At 50, she launched the biggest manhunt in history. Now in her 80s, she circles the globe to promote the lesson her journey has taught: Healing through forgiveness.

Olympia: Part One – Festival of the Nations(1938)

Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. This first half of her two-part film opens with a renowned introduction that compares modern Olympians to classical Greek heroes, then goes on to provide thrilling in-the-moment coverage of some of the games' most celebrated moments, including African-American athlete Jesse Owens winning a then-unprecedented four gold medals.

Olympia: Part Two – Festival of Beauty(1938)

Commissioned to make a propaganda film about the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, director Leni Riefenstahl created a celebration of the human form. Where the two-part epic's first half, Festival of the Nations, focused on the international aspects of the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin, part two, The Festival of Beauty, concentrates on individual athletes such as equestrians, gymnasts, and swimmers, climaxing with American Glenn Morris' performance in the decathalon and the games' majestic closing ceremonies.

Night and Fog(1959)

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

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.

Goering's Catalogue: A Collection of Art and Blood(2021)

For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.

Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary(2002)

Documentarians Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer turn their camera on 81-year-old Traudl Junge, who served as Adolf Hitler's secretary from 1942 to 1945, and allow her to speak about her experiences. Junge sheds light on life in the Third Reich and the days leading up to Hitler's death in the famed bunker, where Junge recorded Hitler's last will and testament. Her gripping account is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Zeitgeist(2007)

A documentary examining possible historical and modern conspiracies surrounding Christianity, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the Federal Reserve bank.

Secrets of the Nazi Criminals(1963)

Documents the major trial of the Nazi war criminals and the violent acts that they were accused of.

Stanisław Lem: Autor Solaris(2016)

An account of the life and work of the Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006), a key figure in science fiction literature involved in mysteries and paradoxes that need to be enlightened.

Resistance: They Fought Back(2024)

We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him(2005)

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

Nazis L'origine du Mal(2005)

The Smuggler and Her Charges(2016)

A captivating and personal detective story that uncovers the truth behind the childhood of Michaël Prazan's father, who escaped from Nazi-occupied France in 1942 thanks to the efforts of a female smuggler with mysterious motivations.

Francisco Boix: A Photographer in Hell(2000)

In 1939, just finished the Spanish Civil War, Spanish republican photographer Francesc Boix escapes from Spain; but is captured by the Nazis in 1940 and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, a year later. There, he works as a prisoner in the SS Photographic Service, hiding, between 1943 and 1945, around 20,000 negatives that later will be presented as evidence during several trials conducted against Nazi war criminals after World War II.

The Rape of Europa(2007)

World War II was not just the most destructive conflict in humanity, it was also the greatest theft in history: lives, families, communities, property, culture and heritage were all stolen. The story of Nazi Germany's plundering of Europe's great works of art during World War II and Allied efforts to minimize the damage.

1944: Should We Bomb Auschwitz?(2019)

In 1944, two prisoners miraculously escaped from Auschwitz. They told the world of the horror of the Holocaust and raised one of the greatest moral questions of the 20th century.

Hitler's Jurassic Monsters(2014)

This is the untold story of a Nazi vision, that went far beyond the military conquest of European countries. As part of their crazed dream to create a thousand-year Reich they developed detailed blueprints for Aryan settlements and vast hunting parks for ‘Aryan’ animals. Goering and Himmler employed Germany’s best scientists to launch a hugely ambitious programme of genetic manipulation to change the course of nature itself, both in the wild and for domestic use. In a fascinating blend of politics and biology, Hitler's Jurassic Monsters is the true and asthonishing story of how the Nazis tried to take control of nature and change the course of evolution.

Victory in the West(1941)

A Nazi propaganda film about the lead up to World War II and Germany's success on the Western Front. Utilizes newsreel footage of battles and fell into disfavour with propaganda minister Goebbels because of it's lack of emphasis on Adolf Hitler.