User reviews

EIN SPEZIALIST, a montage of original footage from the 1961 Jerusalem trials of Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann, is a horrifying film. That a man who is seemingly so normal could have been the "specialist", who organized one of modern history's greatest crimes is so disturbing that it leaves one thinking what, if anything, really separates us humans from animals.

This documentary is supposed to be fake to express the falseness of Eichmann's trial - it was a 'show trial' to hold Nazi war criminals to account.

He was kidnapped and taken to Israel - thought to be home for all Jews and put on trial there even though his crimes were against humanity and committed all over Europe.

Although the outcome of his execution was irrefutably right, the process of getting to it was not.

If you are interested in this you should read a book by Hannah Arendt called 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' to find out more.

Always keep an open mind - sometimes lies need to be told to get to the truth.

The IMDb guidelines do not allow me to display the URL to this article. You know how to find it. :)

"The Spielberg archive took six years to point out presumed defects in the film, and that indicates the extent of the archive's efficiency," said director Eyal Sivan in response to the complaints against him. "The archive betrayed its role as the body responsible for preserving the Eichmann trial materials." Sivan says that when they began work on the film, the archive offered them 68 hours from the trial. Only after searching did the production team find the rest of the materials, "which were stored in the bathroom of the Hebrew University law faculty. I personally worked for seven months cataloging all the reels we found. We saved all the materials, at our own expense, transferred them to a digital format, and even gave the original copy to the state. Spielberg's people accuse us of editing and of taking things out of context. It's strange that people who betrayed their role are raising such a claim."

Sivan replies to the complaints against "The Specialist" in four words: "We made a film," with everything that implies - editing and adding effects. "After the film was screened for the first time at the festival in Berlin, we emphasized our cinematic work, both in the press and in the book we published afterwards. All the materials we used underwent treatment. We added lighting. We touched up the picture. And still, the claim that we added external laughter to one of the scenes is a lie. The film's sound was taken from the audio tapes of the trial."

In regard to the witness who did not reply to the question "Why didn't you resist?" while in the original another witness was asked about that, Sivan says: "Most of the witnesses were asked the same question. It's true that there's editing here, but it's a film. Hausner's opening speech lasted for three days, and in the film there's only one minute. Did we commit fraud here as well? 'The Specialist' is not the Eichmann trial, it's a film from the archives of the Eichmann trial." And why were Hausner's shouts at Eichmann placed in the wrong context? "The Eichmann trial lasted for nine months, whereas the film lasts for 123 minutes," replies Sivan. "Spielberg's people have to remember that their job is not to make movies, and our job is not to do archival work."

Regarding the blurring of the picture in order to create a similarity between Eichmann and Hausner, both with their backs to the camera, Sivan says: "Did I place them next to one another? Is it my fault that they were both bald and dressed in black? Moreover, had I not presented this scene, would the Spielberg people still have asked why I cut the scene? Of course not!"

In the same language, Sivan also replies to the question as to why he cut short Meyer's testimony, in which he mentions Eichmann's coarse manner of speaking. "Had we presented only the part where Eichmann is a rude man, the Spielberg archive would have asked why I didn't use the scene in which Meyer testifies that he was a nice man."

Regarding the claim that Freudiger's testimony is an editing of two meetings, Sivan says: "That's an outright lie. The Spielberg archive has an old ideological approach, according to which memory is more important than history. It's more important to them to show the witnesses than to discuss the past. Freudiger's testimony at the Eichmann trial is extraordinary because the audience in the courtroom came out against Freudiger and accused him of collaboration."

This film is wonderfully topical. Eichmann is riveting in his ordinariness. He repeats over and over his conviction that he obeyed orders, and he prides himself that his superiors had nothing to complain about in the efficiency with which performed his duties. He also says it would have been futile to resist. He might easily have held an MBA from one of our finest business schools today, or a law degree from one of our foremost law schools. One goes along to get a along. What adds to his topicality is that today the American government is proceeding against Erik Snowden and Bradley Manning on what it seems to take as the self-evident principle one should always obey orders--especially if one is in the armed services or is an employee of the government. Eichmann does not lose his temper and is not irrational. On the contrary, he is wonderfully consistent. He functions therefore as a kind of terrible wake-up call indicating what one can come to if one will go all the way with the notion that orders from superiors relieve one from moral responsibility.

In support of R.S.H. Tryster and his response to Eyal Sivan's defense, allow me to add this very latest scholarship and observation from a highly renowned university professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies, Deborah E. Lipstadt.

In her 2011 book "The Eichmann Trial,"(Next Book/Schocken, NY), she indicts this "putative documentary" for its fatal procedural flaws, describing how the filmmakers "spliced together different portions of the trial without letting their viewers know that they had done so. They mixed the audio from one portion and the visuals from another. They inserted laughter where there is none. They selectively quoted from witnesses' testimony, thereby distorting the import of their words. In so doing they created scenarios that never occurred." (Lipstadt provides a detailed example of this.)

"Most reviewers," Lipstadt continues, "unaware of the film's creative approach to the facts, took what they saw on the screen as a legitimate portrayal of the trial..." which it clearly as NOT.

The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive claims that large parts of this documentary about the Eichmann trial are a forgery. You can read an article about it here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/533873.html

Hillel Tryster, director of the Jewish Film Archive, spent hundreds of hours comparing this documentary to the original trial tapes.

(quoting from the Haaretz article) Tryster determines: "While I watched and made comparisons, it gradually became clear that the film 'The Specialist' was almost entirely a perverse fraud, ranging from radical editing to artificial dialogs that never took place." Tryster notes scenes where answers and reactions are grafted to questions which they did not follow, and even sounds such as canned laughter are added at points to change the implied mood in the courtroom.

The first thing that comes to mind after watching this, is that the whole judicial trial in 1962 was pretty much one sided. There didn't seem to a defense for Adolf Eichmann. One could look at this in a dark way and say that if he was tried today with O.J.Simpon's lawyer, he would have gotten away with crime against humanity...

This film doesn't try to portray a fair trial of a Nazi criminal, which it wasn't. All it intended to do was to document some of the proceedings in 1962. But nevertheless, even if Adolf Eichmann was guilty without a shadow of doubt, it would have been more satisfying to have seen the defense putting on a fight, and not seeing judges complaining about a witness' answer to a question as vague, when the question was itself vague.

Maybe I'm expecting too much... but the film does the legal system no justice.

The most interesting thing by far is seeing Eichmann's little nuances and behaviour as he sits back and listens to the prosecutor's statements and eye witness accounts. You can almost see the indifference in his eyes, there is no remorse and I would guess not much of a conscience.

The 350 hours (originally 500 hours, but most of it was not recovered) of film which this documentary was based on, is a historical 'document' and this should be of great interest to anyone who wants to learn more about one of the darkest times in man's history.

As a rebuttal to the old claims reposted last year by Topher-26, I would like to state that Eyal Sivan's claims that any of my claims about his forgeries are lies are themselves untrue. A reasonable reader will see how childishly irrelevant most of his reactions have been, but what even a reasonable reader will not see without being thus informed is that the six paragraphs containing his defence to my claims contain at least 14 factually untrue statements (which could easily have been checked by Haaretz reporter Goel Pinto before publication - but were not). These statements were brought up again by Sivan's defenders during the latest scandal he caused in the first half of 2007 and I rebutted them in detail in a number of frameworks, all easily found on the internet by anyone sufficiently hi-tech to have mastered use of a search engine. "The Specialist" is fiction, not documentary; his other statements render his claim not to have intended deception risible; he has been very untruthful about the technical work he claimed to have done - and not done - on the film, and this includes plagiarism; and he has slandered the institution that actually carried out the preservation of the tapes, for which he has falsely been claiming credit for the last decade or so. In the publicity for lectures I delivered on this subject this past January in Vienna and Beersheva (the Vienna lecture is available - in English - in Prof. Frank Stern's anthology "Filmische Gedaechtnisse," published by Mandelbaum Verlag) I described "The Specialist" and the publicity surrounding it as arguably the most comprehensive and meticulously planned deception in the history of the moving image. I stand by that description and consider it lamentable that most viewers continue to fall obliviously into the trap laid by Eyal Sivan's gross distortion of history in complete ignorance of the facts.

R.S.H. Tryster (former Director, Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive), Berlin