It dramatizes the Holocaust from the perspective of the Weiss family, fictional Berlin Jews Dr. Josef Weiss (Fritz Weaver), his wife Berta (Rosemary Harris), and their three children—Karl (James Woods), an artist married to Inga (Meryl Streep), a Christian woman; Rudi (Joseph Bottoms); and teenage Anna (Blanche Baker).
It also follows Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a fictional "Aryan" lawyer who becomes a Nazi out of economic necessity, rising within the SS and gradually becoming a war criminal.
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 has been widely credited with bringing the term "Holocaust" into popular usage to describe the extermination of the European Jews.
Erik Dorf gets a job in the SS as right-hand man to top-level Nazi Reinhard Heydrich (David Warner).
1939 — Dorf rises within Nazi society as he helps Heydrich plan the transport of Jews to occupied Poland.
He informs her that Anna’s problems are best left to professionals and arranges her commitment to the Hadamar killing centre, where she and others suffering mental illness are gassed under the Nazi Aktion T4.
Berta and Inga receive a letter from Hadamar falsely claiming they gave Anna every care; and that she died of pneumonia and malnutrition on June 3rd after a period of refusing food or medicine.
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.
1942 — Karl is transferred to the propaganda art studio at Theresienstadt, the paradise ghetto in Czechoslovakia, maintained by the Nazis to fool Red Cross and neutral observers.
After Heydrich's assassination, Dorf oversees construction of the death camps, choosing the pesticide Zyklon B for mass extermination.
[5] The 9½ hour program starred Fritz Weaver, Meryl Streep, James Woods, and Michael Moriarty, as well as a large supporting cast.
[9] Some critics accused the miniseries of trivializing the Holocaust, "turning genocide into a soap opera, and tragedy into popular entertainment".
[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.
Writing in The Observer (reprinted in his collection The Crystal Bucket), he commented: The German Jews were the most assimilated in Europe.
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.
[11]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 Reitz to Claude 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.
[13] During an introductory documentary, Final Solution, that preceded the first broadcast of the series in Germany, bomb attacks were made on transmission towers near Koblenz and Münster.
It argued against the portrayal of soldiers as Polish military who supervised transports of Jews and killed them during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Co-stars David Warner, Sam Wanamaker, Tovah Feldshuh, Fritz Weaver, and Rosemary Harris were all nominated for, but did not win, Emmys.
The series has been widely credited with bringing the term holocaust into popular usage to describe the extermination of the European Jews.
[2][3][4] Heinz Werner Hübner [de] of WDR stated that while many works had depicted the extermination ("broadcasters had filmed dozens of books ... [claiming that] the topic played no role in the media between 1950 and 1979 is simply wrong"), he was among the majority of Germans who before the miniseries did not know of the word as a name for the event.
[13] The Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache ranked the term "Holocaust" as the German Word of the Year for the publicity associated with it.
[4] The series is credited with educating many Germans, particularly what was then the younger generation, about the scale of common people's participation in the Holocaust.
[9] Der Spiegel stated that Holocaust "managed to do what hundreds of books, plays, films and TV broadcasts, thousands of documents and all concentration camp trials in three decades of postwar history had failed to do: to inform Germans about the crimes committed against the Jews in their name in such a way that millions were shaken".
[19] A survey at the time showed that fewer than half of all German school children had any knowledge of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
[9] The author Malcolm Gladwell has suggested that the airing of the miniseries was a tipping point for wider public awareness, discussion, and acknowledgement of the importance of The Holocaust.