Deaths-Head Revisited

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"Deaths-Head Revisited"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.Season 3
Episode 9
Directed by Don Medford
Written by Rod Serling
Featured musicStock
Production code4804
Original air dateNovember 10, 1961 (1961-11-10)
Guest appearances
Oscar Beregi, Jr.: Captain Lutze (Mr. Schmidt)
Joseph Schildkraut: Alfred Becker
Karen Verne: Inn Keeper
Robert Boon: Taxi Driver
Ben Wright: The Doctor
Episode chronology
 Previous
"It's a Good Life"
Next 
"The Midnight Sun"
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 3)
List of episodes

"Deaths-Head Revisited" is episode 74 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone . The story is about a former SS officer revisiting the Dachau concentration camp a decade and a half after World War II. The title is a play on the Evelyn Waugh novel Brideshead Revisited , and the SS "Death's Head" units who administered the camps. In Germany this episode was never brought to TV.

Contents

Opening narration

Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northwest of Munich... a picturesque, delightful little spot one-time known for its scenery, but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon perceive, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp—for once, some seventeen years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the SS. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time, he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis... he walked the Earth without a heart. And now former SS Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is awaiting him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas... of the Twilight Zone.

Plot

Gunther Lutze, a former SS captain, checks into a hotel in Dachau, Bavaria, under the name "Schmidt". The receptionist seems to recognize him, but he deflects suspicion by claiming to have served in the panzer division on the Eastern Front during World War II. He asks if a nearby camp is a prison. When the receptionist says that it was used as a kind of prison, he presses her for a further explanation, even though it soon becomes clear that he knows the exact purpose of the camp.

He ventures to the site, the now-abandoned Dachau concentration camp, to recall his time as its commandant during the war. As he strolls around the camp, he revels in the memory of the torment he inflicted on the inmates. He is surprised to see Alfred Becker, one of the camp's former inmates and a particular victim of Lutze's cruelty, and equally surprised that Becker seems unchanged by the intervening 17 years.

Lutze supposes that Becker is now the caretaker of the camp, which Becker confirms "in a manner of speaking." As they talk, Becker relentlessly confronts Lutze with the reality of his grossly inhumane actions, while Lutze insists that he was only following orders. Lutze tries to dismiss Becker's description of cruelty by saying that the war is over, and that he has moved on.

Lutze tries to leave, but finds the gate locked. Becker asks why he came back, given that he had changed his name and fled to South America. Lutze argues that he had hoped that with the passage of enough time, the world would have moved on and people would be willing to forget his "little mistakes of the past". Becker retorts that Lutze's actions were not mistakes, but crimes against humanity.

Becker and a dozen other ghostly inmates put Lutze on trial for his actions, which include ordering the deaths of over 1,700 innocent people without trial or due process, maiming and torturing thousands of human beings without provocation, the criminal experimentation on women and children, the murder of at least 14 people by his own hand, and calling and signing into effect orders calling for the gassing and cremating of one million human beings. Lutze screams and passes out.

Upon awaking, Lutze tells Becker he imagined the trial. Becker contradicts this, and informs Lutze of the guilty verdict. When Becker is about to pronounce the sentence to the court, Lutze mocks him as mad until he suddenly remembers that on the night American troops came close to Dachau 17 years before, he had personally killed Becker and several other inmates and attempted to burn down the camp.

As punishment, Lutze is made to undergo the same horrors he had imposed on the inmates in the form of tactile illusions, including being shot by machine guns at the gate, hanging by the gallows, and torture at the detention building. He screams in agony from the illusions and collapses. Before departing, Becker's ghost informs him, "This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God."

Lutze is found by local authorities, sedated by a doctor, and taken to a mental institution, since he continues to experience and react to his illusory sufferings. His finders wonder how a man who was perfectly calm two hours before could have gone insane so soon. The doctor looks around and says, "Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"

Closing narration

There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.

Episode and cast notes

Critical response

Gordon F. Sander, excerpt from Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man:

Serling meted out nightmarish justice of a worse kind in "Deaths-Head Revisited" (directed by Don Medford), Serling's statement on the Holocaust, written in reaction to the then-ongoing Eichmann trial, in which a former Nazi, played by Oscar Beregi, on a nostalgic visit to Dachau, is haunted and ultimately driven insane by the ghosts of inmates he had killed there during the war.

The introduction to the instrumental song "Intro to Reality" from the 1990 album Persistence of Time by the heavy metal band Anthrax featured dialogue spoken by the character Alfred Becker quoting, "We did as we were told." & "They just heard you offer the apology for all the monsters of our times." spoken to Lutze from this episode. The instrumental segues into the next song, "Belly of The Beast" which is a tribute to the story itself from Becker's Point of View.

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