Almost 1 million people in 22 countries carried out the unprovoked murder of 11 million innocent men, women and children.
99% of those responsible were never prosecuted; most were never even questioned.
Despite the extensive cinema documentary coverage of the Holocaust to date, not one has explored in any depth the almost total lack of justice, statistically, towards the vast numbers of eagerly participating perpetrators who, at war’s end, simply walked away – untouched by justice. This film addresses this glaring omission.
The Allies knew what their crime was.
The Allies knew where a great many of the murderers could be found – Germany, Austria, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, and numerous countries in South America.
The Allies had an endless wealth of evidence to present to the courts.
The Allies unanimously agreed to prosecute those responsible when they drew up The London Agreement in August 1945.
But, after the late 1940s, these very same Allies did almost nothing.
Why?
Director David Wilkinson’s sole motivation for making GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER(S) was to find out precisely why so many were actively permitted to get away with their crime(s) – the crime of mass murder on an industrial scale.
A simple question.
He knew long before he began filming that the answer would be more than complex.
Wilkinson’s journey takes him all over the UK, then to Ireland, the USA, the killing fields of Lithuania, Latvia and Czechia, to the infamous deathcamp Auschwitz – Birkenau in Poland, Austria, France and, of course, Germany.
The narrative leads with interviews, including 100-year-old Benjamin B Ferencz who is the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Professor Mary Fulbrook, Dr Dan Plesch, Holocaust survivors Kitty Hart-Moxon, Malka Levine, Arek Hersh, Nazi hunter Stephen Ankier, British broadcaster and writer Robin Lustig, German prosecutor Jens Rommel, Holocaust educator and campaigner Philip Rubenstein and Holocaust memorial co-founder and humanitarian campaigner Dr James Smith.
30th September – 1st October 2021 is the 75th Anniversary of the sentencing of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg the only Trial to involve all the London Agreement’s joint-signatories. It reached its confident conclusion and meted out the specific justice that mankind had anticipated. However, only a very few of the perpetrators were put on trial. GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER(S) looks at what followed.
The film is unusually long at 175 minutes. But an unresolved truth demands the time needed to tell it.
Contributors
Ben Ferencz and Kitty Hart-Moxon have been in many Holocaust documentaries and even had films made about them.
The others who tell the story, Stephen Ankier, Mary Fulbrook, Winfried Garscha, Malka Levine, Robin Lustig, Dan Plesch, Jens Rommel, Philip Rubenstein and James Smith, are less well known in the world of film & TV but each is a leading expert in their field.
Locations
Filmed in the UK, Ireland, Poland, Czechia, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria, France, the USA and Germany throughout 2019 and 2020.