The extermination camp of Treblinka was created by the Nazis to eliminate the huge captive Jewish population in occupied Poland and beyond. In a frenzy of mass murder lasting less than two years as many as 900,000 Jewish men women and children, including the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto, were murdered in this tiny camp hidden deep in the woods. No one liberated Treblinka - to be a survivor you had to fight your way out. In august 1943 a few hundred...

About one-third of adult European Jews survived the Nazis' Final Solution, but only seven percent of children. This program tells the stories of four people who, as children, survived the Holocaust: Yehuda Bacon, one of 28 survivors out of a group of 15,000 Czech children sent to Theresienstadt and now an artist living in Israel, who describes the incredible twists of fate that kept him alive; Sophie Reichman, hidden by a non-Jewish family, who describes...

World War II - Footage of Nazi massacre of Jews and others at Kiev

Fifty years ago, film crews for the Allied Expeditionary Force entered Nazi concentration camps to find atrocities beyond their imagination. Kept in a vault at London's Imperial War Museum since 1945, the film shows tragic images of the genocide including scenes of gas chambers, experimentation labs and the haunted, starving survivors. Some footage was filmed moments before the camps where liberated, as Nazi soldiers hurried to cover evidence.

The Allied High Command hides the true human cost of D-Day invasions, both for the allied soldiers and for French citizens. Canada's master of propaganda, John Grierson, explains why "withholding the truth" is not the same as spreading lies. Germany invites members of the International Committee of the Red Cross to tour a detention camp near Prague called Theresienstadt to quell rumors of mass Jewish extermination-a Nazi propaganda triumph. The firebombing...

In 1987, in a Viennese shop, hundreds of color slides from World War II were found. It turned out they had been made in the Lodz ghetto by a skilled amateur photographer named Walter Genewein, chief accountant on the ghetto council and a proud member of the Nazi party. In this documentary, filmmaker Dariusz Jablonski combines Genewein's disturbing images of ghetto life with the recollections of Dr. Arnold Mostowicz, the last surviving witness of the...

The story of Hana's suitcase, made into an award-winning radio documentary and children's book, tells the harrowing true tale of the owner of the suitcase, Hana Brady, who died at Auschwitz in 1944 at age 13. In 2000, the Tokyo Holocaust Education and Resource Center acquired the suitcase but no information about Hana came with it. Its director, Fumiko Ishioka, made it her mission to scour the world trying to find out more of Hana's story. In the...

Struggling to grasp the concept of 6 million Holocaust victims, the students at Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee decide to collect 6 million paper clips to better understand the extent of this crime against humanity. Because Norwegians invented the paper clip and used it as a symbol of solidarity against the Nazis, students started collecting them to help visualize such vast numbers of victims. As word spread online and in the media, paper...

Over a decade in the making, this monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Claude Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, and other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming SHOAH is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait...

While Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels infamously declared Berlin 'free of Jews' in 1943, 1,700 Jewish Berliners managed to survive in the Nazi capital. Claus Rafle's gripping docudrama traces the stories of four real-life survivors who learned to hide in plain sight.