May 9, 2000

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http://www.newsday.com/ap/international/ap287.htm

New Holocaust Documentary To Air

By JILL LAWLESS,
Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) -- The Holocaust emerged in a piecemeal, step-by-step way and not as the result of a single order from Nazi leaders, according to a new television documentary series.

The six-part series "Holocaust" claims to be the most comprehensive history of the Nazi genocide ever filmed. It was produced by Germany's ZDF television channel in collaboration with the U.S.-based History Channel and other broadcasters. "When I told people in Germany about the series, they were telling me, 'Not again,"' Maurice Philip Remy, the series' Munich-based producer and director, said at a news conference in London detailing the documentary's findings. "But there is still a deep interest in facts and background information on the Holocaust," he added.

The Holocaust emerged in a piecemeal, step-by-step way and not as the result of a single order from Nazi leaders, according to a new television documentary series.

U.S. historian Christopher Browning -- who served as an adviser to the series, along with academics from Germany, Britain and Israel -- said new evidence has shown that the emergence of the Holocaust was "a very complex development, and often quite ambiguous along the way."

The programs' researchers say they uncovered significant new historical material, including never-before-seen film footage and documents from Eastern European archives opened after the fall of communism.

The series, which will air early next year in the United States, draws on interviews with more than 500 witnesses to the Holocaust, including both victims and perpetrators.

Newly uncovered film footage, some of it in color, includes graphic images of life in the Jewish ghettos under Nazi control and scenes of Auschwitz prisoners being transported in open rail cars in midwinter.

Some of the series' most important new information centers on the summer and autumn of 1941, the period in which plans for the extermination of the Jews were taking shape. It includes minutes of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels' daily briefings, found in a Moscow archive.

The series tries to show the role played by senior Nazis, along with lower-level officials and ordinary people who allowed the genocide to unfold.

It also contains documentation of a little-known act of Jewish resistance, in which the prisoners of the Sobibor concentration camp staged a mass breakout in October 1943.

Website comment: Thus the version of Holocaust history given by the standard Holocaust theoreticians like Browning -- an expert witness at the Lipstadt trial -- gradually converges with the "heresies" propounded by David Irving, who stated that there was no central order issued by Hitler or anybody else. It is a pity that Professor Browning, who was paid nearly £50,000 by Mr Irving's opponents at the trial, could not bring himself to state in the witness box in February 2000 what he has stated in this documentary film, which he was evidently making at the same time. Scholars live by different standards.