Keyword German History

A young boy wanders Eastern Europe during World War II.

In 1930s Berlin, Dr. Jakob Fabian, who works by day in advertising for a cigarette company and by night wanders the streets of the city, falls in love with an actress. As her career begins to blossom, prospects for his future begin to wane.

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?

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

In 1946, just after the end of World War II, a secret organization of Holocaust survivors plans a terrible revenge: since the Nazis have killed millions of Jews, they will kill millions of Germans.

Cem Kaya’s dense documentary essay celebrates 60 years of Turkish music in Germany. An alternative post-war history that is at the same time a musical Who’s Who – from Yüksel Özkasap to Derdiyoklar and Muhabbet.

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.

Driven by extensive archive material and interviews with those who know her, this is the astonishing story of how a triple outsider – a woman, a scientist, and an East German – became the de facto leader of the “Free World”, told for the first time for an international audience.

On February 26, 1920, Robert Wiene's world-famous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin. To this day, it is considered a manifesto of German expressionism; a legend of cinema and a key work to understand the nature of the Weimar Republic and the constant political turmoil in which a divided society lived after the end of the First World War.

The night of November 8, 1923, is arguably the most significant and transformative in the history of the twentieth century. A localised uprising in the Bavarian capital of Munich, led by a small man with a toothbrush moustache and a poisonous yet compelling grandiloquence, would have repercussions that would lead to the political shackling of an entire nation, the most abhorrent crimes of the century and a world war. You might say, Adolf Hitler came of age amid the smell of sweat and sawdust of a Munich beer hall. In the political chaos of 1923, he was a local irritant, gaining popularity among workers and soldiers, the ethos of his Nazi Party spreading like a virus. His first attempt at attaining true power came with an attempted putsch on the already separatist government of Bavaria, which left him imprisoned.

It is an unknown chapter of the German post-war history: On April 23rd, 1949, the kingdom of the Netherlands occupied German soil as a pledge for demanded war reparations. Part of the annexed territories was also the small municipality of Elten. While the people of Elten were initially afraid of the occupation, the time “with Holland” actually became a miracle of prosperity and economy about which many people from Elten still rave today. The occupation period ended with the largest organized smuggling in the history of the federal republic of Germany. The Documentary shows this in never before released 8 mm footage!

Sexual minorities were oppressed, imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis. Paragraph 175 criminalized homosexual men during the Nazi era – but the Nazis also discriminated against lesbians and trans people. They should be excluded from the national community. More than 50,000 queer people have been proven to have been persecuted. The documentary highlights three poignant fates in the context of Nazi terror.

Emma Freese is desperate when her husband Alfred falls ill at the Howaldtswerke in Kiel. How is the family supposed to get by without their wages? The war has scarred this generation, but now things are supposed to be looking up. The workers want their fair share and are fighting for an income that also gives them room to live. In October 1956, 34,000 metalworkers in the shipyards and factories of Schleswig-Holstein walk off the job to fight for justice and their dignity. This strike is still regarded as the toughest and longest in Germany. Employers and politicians stand in the strikers' way.

Documentary about Kurt Landauer, the long-time Jewish president of FC Bayern München, who led the club to its first German championship, was persecuted and forced out of office by the Nazis, and rebuilt the club after the war.

After numerous military operations, Major Müller can't find a way back into civilian life. Following his urge to communicate, the Major is looking for listeners and encouragement. He doesn't find either. Instead, the repeated monological memory of his own heroic deeds determines his present – with all the consequences. This 30-minute short film is based on the statements made by the mercenary Siegfried Müller in the documentary “The Laughing Man” (Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, DEFA studio for newsreels and documentaries, 1966), as well as records from the German colonial period in Africa. An intensive contribution to the necessary public debate about the consequences of military operations.

Documentary film with play scenes about the rise and fall of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 from the perspective of various well-known poets and writers who experienced the events as contemporary witnesses.

An aspiring young politician named Willy Brandt wants to become German Chancellor, but the current Chancellor Konrad Adenauer wants to prevent this at all costs and by any means necessary. Adenauer has the secret service and old alliances with a Nazi past on his side and has Brandt's election campaign spied on and torpedoed by informants in the party executive. He pulls out all the tricks to outdo the charismatic Brandt. The Federal Chancellor does not stop at damaging his reputation and defaming him - all in order to maintain his power and defeat the supposed communist "enemy".

Beneath the decadence of 1929 Berlin, lies an underworld city of sin. Police investigator Gereon Rath has been transferred from Cologne to the epicenter of political and social changes in the Golden Twenties.

Three people's fates are interwoven in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 A.D., during which Germanic warriors halt the spread of the Roman Empire.

This biopic profiles history's most spectacular madman, tracing his journey from humble roots to complete mastery of Germany.

"Löwengrube – Die Grandauers und ihre Zeit" is a German television series first aired between 1989 and 1992, created by Willy Purucker and directed by Rainer Wolffhardt. It is set in Munich and follows the lives of Ludwig Grandauer and his son Karl, both policemen, covering the years from 1897 to 1954. The TV show is based on Purucker's radio play series Die Grandauers und ihre Zeit (‘The Grandauers and their time’). The series’ main title "Löwengrube", meaning ‘Lions’ Den’, refers to the address of the Munich Police Headquarters inaugurated in 1913.

From the armistice of 1918, which marked the end of the First World War, to the declaration of war in September 1939, the beginning of the Second World War: an era during which there was an aspiration to create a new world, prosperous and at peace, but which provoked a new tragedy, seen through the destinies of thirteen people who were both actors and witnesses of the upheavals of the so-called inter-war period.

The village Schabbach experiences Germany's triumphs and tragedies from 1989 to 2000.

Shortly after the end of the Second World War: In 1945 and 1946, the men of the British "War Crimes Investigation Unit" drove through northern Germany on the hunt for Nazi criminals. One of them is Captain Anton Walter Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Anton Walter Freud fled to London with his family from the Nazis in 1938. Now an intelligence officer, he's back to track down killers on Allied wanted lists: hitmen in pinstripes, brutal SS henchmen, and ruthless doctors who conducted medical experiments even on children. The soldiers who witnessed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp months earlier are not squeamish about it. 24-year-old Freud is a free spirit known for his unorthodox methods. He knows how to make war criminals talk. So he comes across a crime that has hardly been known before, the murder of 20 children in Hamburg in the last days of the war.

Chronicle of the attack perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September in the Olympic Village during the 1972 Munich Summer Games.