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Synopsis:
This film documents the first Auschwitz trial (Case number 4 Ks 2/63) held in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany from 1963 to 1965. In preparation for five years, this trial took place shortly after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.

The court heard 360 witnesses from 19 countries (including 211 survivors and 54 members of the Auschwitz-SS) in proceedings against 21 members of the SS and 1 prisoner, accused of having taken part in the mass murder of millions of people. In the courtroom, survivors of Auschwitz confronted perpetrators they had not seen for twenty years, many of whom had made comfortable lives for themselves in postwar West Germany.

On August 20, 1965, after an 18-month hearing, the verdicts were pronounced in one of the most significant trials in German legal history The whole world followed the dramatic proceedings which were commented upon by such leading intellectuals as the American playwright Arthur Miller and Swiss author Max Frisch.

This film is an unparalleled document of the Auschwitz Trial. The court proceedings were recorded on audiotape that were to have been destroyed after the trial. Filmmakers Bickel and Wagner located the 400 hours of material in the early 1990s that had languished in obscurity for decades. They evaluated these tapes together with extensive and exclusive original film material, original photos, and current interviews with witnesses and other people involved in the trial. The immediacy of the testimonies yields a historically precise and absorbing documentary.

Press Comments:
Rolf Bickel and Dietrich Wagner have produced a documentary which represents a cinematic and historic achievement that cannot be overstated. The filmmakers bring the historic trial to life again in its many overlapping voices, including those of the perpetrators, whose deviousness was exemplified for the world in these proceedings.

-- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

No single documentary film better captures the history of Auschwitz than Verdict on Auschwitz. Between the detailed eye-witness accounts by victims, the painstaking organization of evidence by prosecutors, and the chilling testimony by the killers themselves, this film reveals more about the workings, mindset, and logic of mass murder than any film I know. It is an invaluable teaching resource.

- Professor James E. Young Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The history of Auschwitz as it has never been told before.

- Prof. Rebecca Wittmann, Department of History, University of Toronto

The film... seems ragged and disorganized by the current standards of American documentaries, but that doesn't detract from its power. Instead, it enhanced it, serving as a reminder that Hollywood treatments of the Holocaust, as excellent as some of them have been, are no match for the unvarnished reality.

-The New York Times

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