An investigation into the Nazi regime’s persecution and deportation of over 2,800 Christians from 14 European nations to the Dachau camp and the reasons why: Thursday 29 June prime time on Rai 3, Rai Documentari beats “Das Kreuz e la Svastica” before. a co-production of Rai Documentari, Iterfilm and Upside with the contribution of the Mic and the “Italy-France” bilateral fund, directed by Giorgio Treves, written by Luca Scivoletto and Giorgio Treves with the artistic participation of Margherita Buy, Massimo De Rossi and Stefano Dionisi.
Filmed in Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Vatican City, the documentary unfolds like a journey by the director Giorgio Treves, who, through the testimonies of some survivors and the reconstructions of historians, tries to understand the situation and shed light on the relationships between the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church and National Socialism. Personal research arises from the need for justice, respect and mercy towards all victims of Nazism, regardless of creed, ethnicity and nationality, and at the same time from the need to know to lift the veil on this dark area of history.
Why did Hitler deport Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Jehovah’s Witnesses to the camps in addition to 6 million Jews? Giorgio Treves begins his research starting from the secret archives of the Vatican, renamed the Apostolic Archives, where, at the request of Pope Francis, in 2020 the seals of the pontificate of Pius II World War II.
The documentary then gets to the heart of the rise of National Socialism, which will bring about the annihilation of the Jews with the Aryan paragraph, and finally questions the Vatican’s position. What could the Church have done? What might he have missed?
“The fate of Christians during the war seemed to be a gap in this historical narrative, especially evident in the country where I live, Italy, where nobody has ever heard of it,” says Giorgio Treves. “My goal is to offer a film that is insightful through its testimonies and archives, but also captures a sensitive, almost taboo subject. A story that contains parts that have long been deliberately kept in the dark.”
The reconstructions of Italian, French and German historians alternate with emotional moments: personal stories, memories, anecdotes of those who experienced this tragedy first hand – such as the statements by Simone Liebster and Emma Bauer about the tragic fate of the Orthodox and Jehovah’s Witnesses featuring unpublished material from archives including Bundenarchive, Les Ateliers Des Archives, Critica Past and Istituto Luce.
The tour ends in the long, tree-lined avenue of Dachau, with a finale depicting recent neo-Nazi demonstrations as a warning aimed at preventing similar atrocities from happening again.
