OK so here's a little idea for all the family to join in with. Basically I am proposing we make a little list of films that indirectly mention, cover or reference the holocaust. Not the obvious candidates necessarily, such as Schindler's List, but those which on the face of it are about something else but where the holocaust makes an appearance by rearing its ugly head into the plot. Or films that have a stronger plot link to the holocaust but may be are not so well known to all us here.
The rule is to mention the film's name, give a brief description and then talk about the holocaust element and if possible give a picture of the DVD cover or poster.
I'll start the ball rolling.
The Reader
Story about an Auschwitz female guard who is trying to get on with her life after the war in Germany but the past catches up with her in the form of one of the court cases. Kate Winslet is the star. She cannot read and finds a young lad to read to her when it all starts unraveling. A stunning film that is elevated to another level by the casting of Bruno Ganz.
Remember
With the aid of a fellow Auschwitz survivor and a hand-written letter, an elderly man with dementia goes in search of the person he believes to be responsible for the death of his family in the death camp to kill him himself. Christopher Plummer's last film I believe and what a cracker! There is a twist in this that is truly brilliant.
Inside Man
A police detective, a bank robber, and a high-power broker enter high-stakes negotiations after the criminal's brilliant heist spirals into a hostage situation. Denzel Washington, Clive Owen. It's a bank job heist movie, or is it... An obtuse angle which lasts only a short while brings the holocaust into view as a bank deposit box or two contains holocaust/Hitler/jewish truth.
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Of the four million jews under German control, six million died and five million survived!
There are so many. I believe there have been over 20 Oscar-nominated ones, and that is of course only a subset.
Re: Kate Winslet, you might get a kick out of these Ricky Gervais clips.
My "favorite" Holocaust-related movie is probably Marathon Man from 1976 which is a Jewish revenge fantasy about a Mengele-like dentist who's hiding out in America.
...and these are just those which are about the Holocaust, specifically. This does not include any of the thousands more that focus on it or upon 'evil Nazis' indirectly (I searched for "Indiana Jones", to no avail).
...and these are just those which are about the Holocaust, specifically. This does not include any of the thousands more that focus on it or upon 'evil Nazis' indirectly (I searched for "Indiana Jones", to no avail).
Most is B-movies though... Although there are several that are counted as A-class. Swindler's List is perhaps the most famous... Ironically it implicitly denies the 'gas chambers'.
I’ll share a scene from a film that I saw before I decided to look into the flimsiness of the mainstream Holocaust narrative. This scene involves discussion about the Holocaust but stuck out to me because it appeared to be inorganically inserted, and felt out of place. It’s an awkward clip that interrupted the narrative flow of (an already terrible) movie.
This movie has a short scene that attempts to define and portray Holocaust denialism—but given that the Holocaust narrative is unraveling as we speak, it is not aging well.
The movie BlacKkKlansman (2018) tells the story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who successfully infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan through a combination of phone conversations and inclusion of a white male stand-in. John David Washington plays Stallworth, who establishes contact with Klan leader David Duke over the phone, while his white Jewish colleague, Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver), assumes Ron’s fictional identity at in-person events for undercover operations.
The film tries to embrace an edgy and provocative style, with every scene overflowing with epithets and slurs. It feels so excessive that the screenwriter seemed less interested in storytelling than in testing the audience’s threshold for discomfort. I appreciate realism and unfiltered dialogue, but BlacKkKlansman comes off as juvenile—like a script penned by a teenager with turrets eager to rattle off the most incendiary language possible for 90 minutes.
At the time I expected to enjoy this movie and learn about a little-known moment in Black American history. Instead, I found myself completely hating it. BlacKkKlansman doesn’t feel like an authentic expression of the black experience—it feels like it was written by a jewish guy in a West Hollywood condo, filtering both the black community and the KKK through a condescending, West Coast, white male lens. The film’s perspective is performative, more concerned with indulging in exaggerated caricatures than offering a nuanced or compelling take on history.
Movies like this are examples of how Hollywood has the veneer of progressivism, inclusivity, and giving voice to marginalized communities—however their films always turn out pathetic and out-of-tune. Black, LGBTQ and other movies about marginalized communities greenlit by Hollywood are consistently terrible. They aren’t authentic stories told by members of these communities, and they’re always tragically sorrowful. Frankly, they’re cringe and exhausting. These movies portray very little joy, humor, cleverness or optimism. They’re attempts at Oscar-bait.
But let’s get back to the scene where Flip (Adam Driver) is attending a Klan meeting at someone’s house. One of the group members, Felix, brings Flip down to the basement in order to surprise him with a “Jew lie detector test” (Felix actually says that). Felix wants to see if Flip is secretly Jewish or sympathetic to Jewish people.
The scene wants to portray to the audience an example of Holocaust “denialism,” how batshit crazy it is supposed to be, and to show how Flip artfully and deftly dances around the denialism by quick-wittedly shifting the narrative under the duress of being subjected to a lie detector test.
See the clip here:
Some scene notes:
At the beginning, Flip slyly brings up “candles” and “lampshades” to Felix. This is a smart yet disingenuous move by the screenwriter, because it reminds the audience the trope of human remains in candles and lampshades—even though that has been thoroughly debunked. The Holocaust narrative benefited by referencing these things in an offhand comment, all while the movie technically did not lie to the audience.
Felix says: “Concentration camps? Never happened.” I didn’t realize how stupid this line was at the time, but through the lens of revisionism, it’s patently absurd. Clearly there are buildings and remains of buildings from concentration camps. This line reinforces to the audience that Holocaust denialism is a fringe and patently false conspiracy theory. Somebody watching this movie might think “how can they say Auschwitz doesn’t exist, I visited it last year when I was in Europe!” The audience would never consider that even though the camps obviously existed, what we were told occurred at the camps may not line up with what actually happened.
To save his butt, Flip turns the tables by proclaiming the Holocaust was indeed real, but argues it was a good thing. He says to Felix “You have a whole race of leeches you have to get rid of. So what do you do? You starve them. You burn them. You get rid of them.” Huh?! Flip is missing some key details there. Why didn’t Flip say “you gas them” or “you send them to death camps?” The word choice in this line seems extremely deliberate. Flip isn’t saying anything technically incorrect. Many Jews were indeed starved, burned (through Allies firebombing or in normal crematoriums after dying of Typhus), or were “gotten rid of” through deportation. However a lot of the carnage occurred because of Allied actions, not because National Socialists were as wantonly genocidal as we learned in school.
Flip’s verbal dance annoys me. If I went out and did man-on-the-street interviews right now, asking people what occurred in the Holocaust, pretty much everyone would say “6 million Jews died in gas chambers at death camps in WWII.” Yet the screenwriter deftly knew to avoid referencing alleged gassings in the script. For shame. Either stand by the fictional narrative you’ve woven for many decades, or tell the fucking truth.
Felix then wants to look at Adam Driver’s penis to see if it has been circumcised. He says “I hear you Jews do something funny with your dicks. Some weird Jew shit.” Setting aside discussion of the Holocaust, how does this character not know about circumcision, which has been widely practiced across the USA for a long time? This whole three-minute scene is just so bonkers.
Funny enough, the lie detector test gets interrupted. Flip is never actually compelled to answer about the Holocaust in a truthful manner. The scene attempts to say “the Holocaust is so unquestioningly real that you can’t help but tell the truth about it in a lie detector test with a Klansman,” but the test doesn’t even occur! This scene creates the illusion that discussing the veracity of the Holocaust stands up to a lie detector test, but the test is never actually administered!
Clearly the idea of revisionism or valid forensic inquiry doesn’t exist in this movie’s universe. Honestly I hope this scene survives as a film artifact 200 years from now. It is a clear demonstration of Hollywood attempting to shape and control narrative around an exaggerated historical atrocity. I can’t blame people for being programmed by media moments such as this.
As a general rule, people like to be kind, sympathetic to the vulnerable, and to remain in good standing with society. This clunky, bizarre movie scene wanted to make discussion of Holocaust historical accuracy a third-rail topic and to make polite people run far away from discussion about it. People who haven’t given Holocaust history much thought beyond Hollywood movies or past trips to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C. would be led to believe that only friends of David Duke or neo-Nazi trash would ever entertain the notion that the mainstream Holocaust narrative isn’t unquestionably ironclad.
AreYouSirius wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2025 9:36 pm
I’ll share a scene from a film...
This scene is truly awful, thanks for sharing... It plays out much the same way as the South Park playbook. Eric Cartman is the vehicle to deliver edgy and shallow racism or anti-semitism that a 13 year old would fine hilarious, but 1 millimeter under the surface, the Cartman character itself is the punchline.
"Ruthless People is a 1986 American black comedy film directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker and written by Dale Launer. It stars Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Judge Reinhold, Anita Morris, and Helen Slater, with Bill Pullman in a supporting role in his film debut. The film is the story of a couple who kidnap their ex-boss's wife to get revenge and extort money from him. They soon realize he does not want her back and was planning to kill her himself. Meanwhile, the boss's mistress plans a blackmail attempt on him, which also fails to go as planned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthless_People
Bette Midler mentions "death camp cuisine" and "gas" while imprisoned in the cellar.
Tootsie
"Tootsie is a 1982 American satirical romantic comedy film directed by Sydney Pollack from a screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal and a story by Gelbart and Don McGuire. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, and Charles Durning. In the film, Michael Dorsey (Hoffman), a talented actor with a reputation for being professionally difficult, runs into romantic trouble after adopting a female persona to land a job." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tootsie
Dustin Hoffman delivers this line:"So when all hell broke loose and the Germans ran out of soap and figured, "What the hell? Let's cook up Mrs. Greenwald!" who the hell do you think stopped them?"
He shouts the word soap.
