What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy

Emil Skamene has written more than 250 scientific publications, won dozens of distinguished awards, and was even on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize. He is the founder of the Institute for Clinical Research at McGill University in Montreal, a member of the Czech Learned Society, and a Knight of the National Order of Quebec. Not so long ago, he discovered that he was someone completely different – he had devoted his whole life to unlocking the secrets of genes, and yet he had been unaware of his own identity for decades. His life was a history that changed the whole of Europe and the world. His story is full of unbelievable and completely absurd situations that can only happen in real life.

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.

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.

Examines documents and traces of the atrocities that took place at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Years after the end of the war, expert analysis of the remnants of these documents has helped shed light on the stories of prisoners.

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

Six million Jews died during World War II, both in the extermination camps and murdered by the mobile commandos of the Einsatzgruppen and police battalions, whose members shot men, women and children, day after day, obediently, as if it were a normal job, a fact that is hardly known today. Who were these men and how could they commit such crimes?

At the beginning of 1979, after more than 30 years of collective repression, a dramatized and emotional US television miniseries ensured that the German population was suddenly reminded of the terrible Nazi crimes against the Jews. What is now expressed with the hitherto unknown word Holocaust, hits many millions of people in the heart. The unexpected echo and the audience reactions were fierce. Even before the TV broadcast neo-Nazis blasted in vain transmitting towers in Germany to prevent this. From the creation and the shooting over the broadcast to the tremendous reactions, documentary filmmaker Alice Agneskirchner tells the story of this emotional television event, which led to a paradigm shift in the perception of German Nazi crimes.

It was arguably the deadliest conference in human history. The topic: plans to murder 11 million Jews in Europe. The participants were not psychopaths, but educated men from the SS, police, administration and ministries. The invitation to the meeting at Wannsee came from Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office. The Wehrmacht's campaigns of conquest in Eastern Europe marked the beginning of the systematic murder of Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union. In mid-September 1941, Hitler made the decision to deport all Jews from Germany to the East. Although there had been transports before, Hitler's order represented a further escalation in the murderous decision-making process. Persecution and discrimination had been part of everyday life since 1933. But as a result, the living conditions for the Jews in the Third Reich became even more difficult, among them the Berlin Jew Margot Friedländer, born in 1921, and the Chotzen family.

Faced with the relentless and unstoppable advance of the Soviet Red Army, from the spring of 1944 until the capitulation of the Third Reich in May 1945, the Nazis evacuated the labor, concentration and extermination camps, factories of pain and death which, during years of nightmare, they had established in the occupied eastern territories. Forced to travel enormous distances, thousands of people died along the way from hunger, thirst and exhaustion.

Survivors tell the story of the Babyn Yar massacre from WWII, where some 100,000 people were massacred by German forces.