Max and Helen | |
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Based on | Max and Helen by Simon Wiesenthal |
Screenplay by | Corey Blechman |
Directed by | Philip Saville |
Starring | Treat Williams Alice Krige Martin Landau Jonny Phillips Adam Kotz Jodhi May |
Composer | Christopher Young |
Country of origin | United States United Kingdom |
Original language | English |
Production | |
Producer | Steven R. McGlothen |
Cinematography | Elemér Ragályi |
Editor | Skip Schoolnik |
Running time | 100 minutes |
Production companies | Turner Pictures Citadel Entertainment |
Release | |
Original network | TNT |
Original release |
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Max and Helen is a 1990 American drama film directed by Philip Saville and written by Corey Blechman. It is based on the 1982 book Max and Helen by Simon Wiesenthal. The film stars Treat Williams, Alice Krige, Martin Landau, Jonny Phillips, Adam Kotz and Jodhi May. The film premiered on TNT on 8 January 1990. [1] [2] [3]
Based on the fact-based novel by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal based on his 1962 prosecution of the head of a German factory whom he learns was a murderous labor camp commandant. To be able to take him to justice, he must find witnesses who can help him. This leads him to Max Rosenberg, a still tormented individual who lost his wife, Helen, in the camps. Initially Max refuses to cooperate, but gradually his story unfolds beginning before the Holocaust. Venice, 1944, Max, a Jewish student, is captured by the Nazis. Hélène, his French fiancée, pretends she is Jewish as well, so they both get deported to Poland. They get married on the train from where they escape, only to be captured again and separated. Max survives a firing squad and flees to Poland where he joins the resistance. Hélène will stay behind in the concentration camp to become the victim of the sadistic German officer, Koeller. In 1960, after surviving the War and the Soviet Gulag, Max finds out that Koeller killed Hélene and starts chasing him to get his revenge. During his manhunt, he meets Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, who is also trying to catch Koeller.
Karl-Otto Koch was a mid-ranking commander in the Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany who was the first commandant of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. From September 1941 until August 1942, he served as the first commandant of the Majdanek concentration camp in occupied Poland, stealing vast amounts of valuables and money from murdered Jews. His wife, Ilse Koch, also took part in the crimes at Buchenwald and Majdanek.
Josef Rudolf Mengele, also known as the Angel of Death, was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II. He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
Alois Brunner was an Austrian officer who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) during World War II. Brunner played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust through rounding up and deporting Jews in occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia. He was known as Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is a Jewish human rights organization established in 1977 by Rabbi Marvin Hier. The center is known for Holocaust research and remembrance, hunting Nazi war criminals, combating anti-Semitism, tolerance education, defending Israel, and its Museum of Tolerance.
Karl Josef Silberbauer was an Austrian police officer, Schutzstaffel (SS) member, and undercover investigator for the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst. He was stationed in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during World War II, where he was promoted to the rank of Hauptscharführer. In 1963, Silberbauer, by then an inspector in the Vienna police, was exposed as the commander of the 1944 Gestapo raid on the Anne Frank House Secret Annex and the arrests of Anne Frank, her fellow fugitives, and two of their protectors, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman.
A Nazi hunter is an individual who tracks down and gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, and Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust, typically for use at trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prominent Nazi hunters include Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Serge Klarsfeld, Beate Klarsfeld, Ian Sayer, Yaron Svoray, Elliot Welles, and Efraim Zuroff.
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp, the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Eduard Roschmann was an Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmführer and commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943. He was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities. As a result of a fictionalized portrayal in the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its subsequent film adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the "Butcher of Riga".
The Odessa File is an 1974 thriller film, adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, about a reporter's investigation of a neo-Nazi political-industrial network in post-Second World War West Germany. The film stars Jon Voight, Mary Tamm, Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell and was directed by Ronald Neame, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was the only film that the Schell siblings made together.
Operation Reinhard in Kraków, often referred to by its original codename in German as Aktion Krakau, was a major 1942 German Nazi operation against the Jews of Kraków, Poland. It was headed by SS and Police Leader Julian Scherner from the Waffen-SS. The roundup was part of the countrywide Aktion Reinhard, the mass murder of Polish Jews in the so-called General Government under the command of SS und Polizeiführer Odilo Globočnik.
Karl-Friedrich Höcker was a Nazi war criminal, German commander in the SS and the adjutant to Richard Baer, who was a commandant of Auschwitz I concentration camp from May 1944 to December 1944. In 2006, a photo album created by Höcker, with some 116 pictures from his time at Auschwitz, was given to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, sparking new interest in his activities as a concentration camp administrator.
The Kreisky–Peter–Wiesenthal affair was a political and personal feud in the 1970s, fought between the then Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, arising from Kreisky's ministerial appointments and the SS past of Freedom Party leader Friedrich Peter, which had been revealed by Wiesenthal.
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness is a book on the Holocaust by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, in which he recounts his experience with a mortally wounded Nazi during World War II. The book describes Wiesenthal's experience in the Lemberg concentration camp and discusses the moral ethics of the decisions he made. The title comes from Wiesenthal's observation of a German military cemetery, where he saw a sunflower on each grave, and fearing his own placement in an unmarked mass grave. The book's second half is a symposium of answers from various people, including other Holocaust survivors, religious leaders and former Nazis. The book was originally published in German by Opera Mundi in Paris, France in 1969. The first English translation was published in 1970.
Michael Seifert was an SS guard in Italy during World War II.
Janowska concentration camp was a German Nazi concentration camp combining elements of labor, transit, and extermination camps. It was established in September 1941 on the outskirts of Lwów in what had become, after the German invasion, the General Government. The camp was named after the nearby street Janowska in Lwów of the interwar Second Polish Republic.
Otto Adolf Eichmann was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. He participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Following this, he was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and Nazi extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. He was captured and detained by the Allies in 1945, but escaped and eventually settled in Argentina. In May 1960, he was abducted by Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. Eichmann subsequently stood trial with the Supreme Court of Israel. The highly publicised Eichmann trial resulted in his conviction in Jerusalem, following which he was executed by hanging in 1962.
Aribert Ferdinand Heim, also known as Dr. Death and Butcher of Mauthausen, was an Austrian Schutzstaffel (SS) doctor. During World War II, he served at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Mauthausen, killing and torturing inmates using various methods, such as the direct injection of toxic compounds into the hearts of his victims.
Remember is a 2015 drama thriller film directed by Atom Egoyan and written by Benjamin August. Starring Christopher Plummer, Bruno Ganz, Jürgen Prochnow, Heinz Lieven, Henry Czerny, Dean Norris and Martin Landau, it was a co-production of Canada and Germany. The plot follows an elderly Holocaust survivor with dementia who sets out to kill a Nazi war criminal in retaliation for the death of his family and was inspired by August's consideration that there were fewer parts for senior actors in recent years.
SS-OberscharführerFranz Wolf was a German Nazi senior squad leader serving with the Action T4 forced euthanasia program, and later, at the Sobibór extermination camp in occupied Poland during the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, codenamed Operation Reinhard. Leading a normal life in West Germany for the next twenty years, along with thousands of war criminals protected by Konrad Adenauer, Wolf was arrested in 1964, and indicted during the Sobibór trial with participating in the murder of 115,000 Jews. On 20 December 1966, the court in Hagen sentenced him to eight years in prison for taking part in the mass murder of "at least 39,000 Jews".