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The 9½ hour program starred [[Fritz Weaver]], [[Meryl Streep]], [[James Woods]], and [[Michael Moriarty]], as well as a large supporting cast. It was directed by [[Marvin J. Chomsky]], whose credits included [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]]'s miniseries ''[[Roots (1977 miniseries)|Roots]]'' (1977). The [[teleplay]] was written by novelist-producer [[Gerald Green (author)|Gerald Green]], who later adapted the script as a novel.<ref>{{cite book|title=Holocaust |last=Green |first=Gerald|date=1978 |publisher= Transworld Publishers}}</ref> |
The 9½ hour program starred [[Fritz Weaver]], [[Meryl Streep]], [[James Woods]], and [[Michael Moriarty]], as well as a large supporting cast. It was directed by [[Marvin J. Chomsky]], whose credits included [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]]'s miniseries ''[[Roots (1977 miniseries)|Roots]]'' (1977). The [[teleplay]] was written by novelist-producer [[Gerald Green (author)|Gerald Green]], who later adapted the script as a novel.<ref>{{cite book|title=Holocaust |last=Green |first=Gerald|date=1978 |publisher= Transworld Publishers}}</ref> |
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Artworks seen during the series's closing credits were created by [[Lithuanian Jews|Lithuanian–Jewish]] artist [[[Arbit Blatas]].<ref>https://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/blatas_arbit_babi_yar.htm</ref> |
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The miniseries was rebroadcast on NBC from September 10 to September 13, 1979. |
The miniseries was rebroadcast on NBC from September 10 to September 13, 1979. |
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| Holocaust | |
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DVD cover
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| Genre | Miniseries Drama |
| Created by | Gerald Green |
| Written by | Gerald Green |
| Directed by | Marvin J. Chomsky |
| Starring | Joseph Bottoms Tovah Feldshuh Michael Moriarty Meryl Streep Rosemary Harris James Woods David Warner Fritz Weaver Sam Wanamaker George Rose |
| Theme music composer | Morton Gould |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language | English |
| No. of seasons | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 4 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer | Herbert Brodkin |
| Producers | Robert Berger Herbert Brodkin |
| Cinematography | Brian West |
| Editors | Craig McKay Stephen A. Rotter |
| Camera setup | Jimmy Turrell |
| Running time | 475 minutes |
| Production company | Titus Productions |
| Original release | |
| Network | National Broadcasting Company (NBC) |
| Release | April 16 (1978-04-16) – April 19, 1978 (1978-04-19) |
Holocaust (full title: Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss) (1978) is an American four-part television miniseries which explores the Holocaust from the perspectives of the fictional Weiss family, a family of Jews in Germany, and the perspective of a rising member of the SS, who gradually becomes a war criminal. Holocaust highlights numerous events which occurred both up to and during World War II, such as Kristallnacht, the construction of Jewish ghettos, and, later, the construction of death camps and the use of gas chambers.
Even though the miniseries won several awards, and it also received positive reviews, it was also criticized. In The New York Times, Holocaust survivor and political activist Elie Wiesel wrote that it was: "Untrue, offensive, cheap: As a TV production, the film is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived."[1] However, the series played a major role in public debates on the Holocaust in West Germany after its showing in 1979, and its impact has been described as "enormous".
The series was presented in four parts on NBC:
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This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise. (February 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
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Holocaust follows the fictional Jewish Weiss family - Dr. Josef Weiss (Fritz Weaver), his wife Berta (Rosemary Harris), and their three children - Karl (James Woods), an artist, married to a Christian woman named Inga (Meryl Streep); Rudi (Joseph Bottoms); and 16-year-old Anna (Blanche Baker). The series also follows Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), an "Aryan" lawyer who becomes a Nazi out of economic necessity.
1935 - Karl and Inga and their families celebrate their wedding in Berlin. Unemployed lawyer Erik Dorf joins the Nazi Party in order to get a job in the SS as right-hand man to Reinhard Heydrich (David Warner), a top-level Nazi.
1938 - Erik warns Dr. Weiss, who treated him as a child, to leave Germany, but Berta is adamant about staying. During Kristallnacht, Berta's father is attacked, while the Weiss family shelters at home. Erik impresses Heydrich by helping orchestrate the attacks and gets promoted. Karl is arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. As a Polish citizen, Dr. Weiss is deported and goes to work with his brother Moses in Warsaw. The Weiss family apartment and Dr. Weiss's practice are seized by a Nazi. Berta and the children are forced to move in with Inga's hostile, Nazi-supporting family. Rudi runs away.
1939 - Erik impresses his superiors and rises within Nazi society, as he helps Heydrich plan the transport of Jews to occupied Poland. Dr. Weiss serves as an Elder in the Judenrat (Jewish council) in Warsaw and works as a doctor in what soon becomes the Warsaw Ghetto. Anna is raped by SA stormtroopers. Catatonic afterwards, she is committed to the Hadamar Clinic, where she and others suffering mental illness are gassed under the Nazi Action T4.
1940 - Rudi reaches German-occupied Prague, where he falls in love with Helena (Tovah Feldshuh) and they decide to run away together.
1941 - Berta is transported to the Warsaw ghetto. Reunited with Dr. Weiss, she becomes a schoolteacher. Inga travels to Buchenwald, where family friend Müller (Tony Haygarth) is an officer. In exchange for transferring Karl from the quarry, where he is being worked to death, Müller forces Inga to submit to sex. Heydrich and Erik order the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen to Russia to begin massacring the Jews. Erik oversees the mass murder and finds himself forced to participate in an execution. After one of Dr. Weiss's nurses is executed for smuggling food for the ghetto's children, his brother Moses joins a Zionist resistance group. In occupied Kiev, Rudi and Helena witness the Babi Yar massacre, along with Erik. Dr. Weiss and the ghetto elders learn from a spy that the Nazis are exterminating the Jews and decide they must resist. As Erik and his family enjoy Christmas around Berta's stolen piano, they find Weiss family photos hidden in it. Erik tells his daughter to burn them. Müller tells Karl, now working in the camp art studio, he is being transferred to Theresienstadt, the paradise ghetto in Czechoslovakia.
1942 - Heydrich and Erik convene the [[[Wannsee Conference]], at which the "Final Solution", the extermination of the Jews in death camps, is planned in detail. Rudi and Helena join up with Jewish partisans.
After a feud with SS field officers who resent Erik's orders, they send an anonymous letter to Heydrich, accusing Erik of having Communist sympathies. These accusations stunt his career. After Heydrich is assassinated in 1942, Erik is put in charge of major extermination operations at Nazi death camps. Erik continues to follow orders, and commits horrific war crimes while covering them up.
When an attempted ambush of German troops fails, Rudi's partisans are annihilated and Helena is killed. Rudi is sent to Sobibór death camp. He meets Leon Feldhandler and Alexander Pechersky, and escapes with them during the Sobibór uprising in October 1943. He decides to try to find his family in Europe.
Meanwhile, in the Warsaw ghetto, the Weisses try to save lives in any way possible. Josef uses his position as a doctor to rescue Jews from the trains by claiming they have contagious illnesses. Moses and others stockpile weapons bought outside the ghetto. Eventually, Josef is caught and he and Berta are deported to Auschwitz.
On Passover of 1943, Moses and the others revolt against the Germans entering the ghetto for a last action, so they can determine their own deaths. Although they have some success, the SS eventually overwhelm the defenders, crushing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and burning down most of the buildings. When Moses and the other survivors surrender to SS forces, they are killed by firing squads.
At Theresienstadt, Karl is commissioned as an artist. Inga sacrifices her freedom in order to join Karl. Theresienstadt is kept as a showplace to fool Red Cross observers, but Karl begins secretly drawing the reality of the concentration camps. The SS learns of the art when one of the artists sells several works. SS, including Erik, and Theresienstadt officials, need to find out if more of these drawings exist, as they threaten their subterfuge. The artists are severely tortured but refuse to confess. Karl, the sole survivor of the arrested artists, is deported to Auschwitz, after learning that Inga is pregnant.
Both of Karl's parents are killed in Auschwitz shortly before the liberation of the camp. Berta is last seen entering a gas chamber. Josef had been working on a road crew, but Erik reminds his superiors that Jews should not be used for slave labor when non-Jewish prisoners are available. Josef is also killed in the gas chamber. Karl is found dead in his barracks, after one final sketch.
After the war ends, Erik is captured by the United States Army and told that he will be tried for war crimes. Erik protests, saying that he was mostly an observer, and that Nazi actions were legitimate. Confronted by evidence to the contrary, Erik commits suicide by taking a cyanide pill.
Rudi meets Inga after Theresienstadt is liberated, having learned about the deaths of his parents and Karl. Inga says she had their baby and named him Josef, after her father-in-law. She plans to return with the baby to Berlin, but says she will not stay there. Rudi is commissioned with smuggling Jewish orphans into Palestine. Karl's drawings, which had been hidden from the SS by Inga, are given to a museum in Prague as a permanent record of the Holocaust.
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Holocaust was produced by Robert Berger, and it was filmed on location in Austria and West Berlin. It was broadcast in four parts from April 16 to April 19, 1978. The series earned a 49% market share; it was also well received in Europe.[citation needed]
The 9½ hour program starred Fritz Weaver, Meryl Streep, James Woods, and Michael Moriarty, as well as a large supporting cast. It was directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, whose credits included ABC's miniseries Roots (1977). The teleplay was written by novelist-producer Gerald Green, who later adapted the script as a novel.[2]
Artworks seen during the series's closing credits were created by Lithuanian–Jewish artist [[[Arbit Blatas]].[3]
The miniseries was rebroadcast on NBC from September 10 to September 13, 1979.
In the U.S., Holocaust was released as a Region 1 DVDbyParamount Pictures and CBS Home Entertainment on May 27, 2008. The release of the Region 2 DVD followed on 15 August 2010. A disclaimer on the DVD packaging states that it may be edited from the original network broadcast version and it is shorter at 446 mins. The Region 4 DVD is unusually in native NTSC format, not having been converted to PAL. No information about the cut in footage has been released.
In the U.S. and Canada, a 452-minute version was released as a 2-disc Blu-ray set on September 24, 2019.[4]
Some critics accused the miniseries of trivializing the Holocaust. The television format was believed to limit how realistic the portrayal could be. In addition, the fact that NBC made a financial gain as a result of advertising resulted in charges that it had commercialized a vast tragedy.[citation needed] The producers of the series rebutted these charges by stating that it educated the public by raising its awareness of the Holocaust. With the exception of films such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and The Hiding Place (1975), this was the first time in which many Americans had seen a lengthy dramatization of the Holocaust.
The television critic Clive James commended the production. Writing in The Observer (reprinted in his collection The Crystal Bucket), he commented:
The German Jews were the most assimilated in Europe. They were vital to Germany's culture—which, indeed, has never recovered from their extinction. They couldn't see they were hated in direct proportion to their learning, vitality and success. The aridity of the Nazi mind was the biggest poser the authors had to face. In creating Erik Dorf they went some way towards overcoming it. Played with spellbinding creepiness by Michael Moriarty, Erik spoke his murderous euphemisms in a voice as juiceless as Hitler's prose or Speer's architecture. Hitler's dream of the racially pure future was of an abstract landscape tended by chain-gangs of shadows and crisscrossed with highways bearing truckloads of Aryans endlessly speeding to somewhere undefined. Dorf sounded just like that: his dead mackerel eyes were dully alight with a limitless vision of banality.[5]
The historian Tony Judt described the series as "the purest product of American commercial television - its story simple, its characters mostly two-dimensional, its narrative structured for maximum emotional impact" and he also wrote that, when it is shown in Continental Europe, it was "execrated and abominated by European cinéastes from Edgar ReitztoClaude Lanzmann" and he responded to these negative reviews of the miniseries by noting that "these very limitations account for the show's impact", especially in West Germany, where it was aired over four consecutive nights in January 1979 and coincided with public interest in the Majdanek trials.[6] The viewership was estimated to consist of up to 15 million households or 20 million people, approximately 50% of West Germany's entire adult population. Judt describes the public interest as "enormous".[6]
After each part of Holocaust was aired, a companion show was aired in which a panel of historians answered viewers' questions by telephone. Thousands of shocked and outraged Germans called the panels. The German historian Alf Lüdtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" because thousands of angry viewers asked how such acts had happened.[7] Subsequently, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache ranked the term "Holocaust" as the German Word of the Year for the publicity associated with it.[8]
During an introductory documentary that preceded the first broadcast of the series in Germany, Peter Naumann, then a right-wing terrorist with two accomplices, tried to blow up the transmission towers of the ARD transmitters at Koblenz and near Münster (station Nottuln), to prevent the broadcast. At the Koblenz transmitter, the supply cables were damaged, and the transmitter failed for one hour. Several hundred thousand television viewers could not see the program during this time.[9] Naumann later became a politician with the NPD.
The Polish community in the United States found the miniseries controversial and inaccurate. It argued against the portrayal of soldiers as Polish military who supervised transports of Jews and killed them during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It noted that many Poles were also killed in the concentration and death camps.[10] Around the world, various unrepentant Nazis also raged against the miniseries: Ernst Zundel led a fierce and unsuccessful attempt to have the show banned from airing in Canada, and a group of American Nazis who were aligned with James K. Warner tried and failed to have NBC grant them a "right of response" which would have granted them equal prime-time coverage to present their "alternate" view of World War II events.
In 1982, during the rule of the military dictatorship of Chile, the series was censored by Televisión Nacional de Chile, beginning a row that ended when its programming director Antonio Vodanovic renounced the channel.[11]
Holocaust won Emmy Awards for Outstanding Limited Series, as well as acting awards for Meryl Streep, Moriarty, and Blanche Baker. Morton Gould's music score was nominated for an Emmy and a Grammy Award for Best Album of Original Score for a Movie or a Television Program. Co-stars David Warner, Sam Wanamaker, Tovah Feldshuh, Fritz Weaver, and Rosemary Harris were all nominated for, but did not win, Emmys. However, Harris won a Golden Globe Award (for Best TV Actress – Drama) for her performance, as did Moriarty (for Best TV Actor – Drama).
The series was watched by an estimated 120 million viewers in the United States when it was first broadcast in 1978.[12] In 1979, Holocaust was broadcast in West Germany and it was watched by an estimated 20 million people, then about one-third of the entire population of West Germany. The series is credited with educating many Germans, particularly what was then the younger generation of German people, about the scale of common people's participation in the Holocaust.[12] On its fortieth anniversary, the series was rebroadcast on German television in January 2019. A survey showed that fewer than half of all German school children then had any knowledge of the Auschwitz concentration camp.[12]
In 2020, Alice Agnes Kirchner released an 89-minute documentary, How the Holocaust Came To TV, describing the impact of the broadcast on the German audience in 1979.[13]
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Films directed by Marvin J. Chomsky
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