Works Set In World War II / The Holocaust in Media

aka: Works About The Holocaust

A list of works that depict The Holocaust, the genocide committed by Nazi Germany and some of its allies and collaborators on Jewish people and several other minorities in Europe during World War II.

See also Works Set in World War II and Judaism and Jewish Culture in Media.

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Anime & Manga

• Adolf
• Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conqueror of Shamballa

Comic Books

• Block 109: In this Alternate History comic book, due to Nazi Germany surviving longer than it did in real life, Jewish presence has been totally wiped out from Europe. Hochmeister Zytek, one of Hitler's successors at the head of the state, has all the main Nazi leaders gathered in a room and has them machine-gunned for planning and allowing the genocide, as well as for the countless other real life war crimes the comics turned up to eleven.
• Chick Tracts: The Holocaust comes up in some strips, notably "Holocaust", and is usually portrayed as part of a Satanic conspiracy by the Vatican to destroy the Jews and suppress the Gospel.
• DC Comics Bombshells: The Jewish heroine Batwoman singlehandedly holds off both Nazis who've come to liquidate the Berlin Ghetto in 1940, and zombies.
• EC Comics: Stories like Master Race (art by Bernard Krigstein) and Desert Fox and many others.
• Judenhass, by Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus the Aardvark. It's a one-issue work that postulates that the Holocaust was the end result of a slowly-growing historical trend of anti-Semitism, and featured many recreations of photographs of the camps and their prisoners, done by Sim in the photorealistic drawing style he'd started working with in later issues of Cerebus.
• Maus, written by Art Spiegelman, tells the story of how his parents Vladek and Anja Spiegelman survived the Holocaust.
• X-Men: Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto is famously a Holocaust survivor and several issues by Chris Claremont deal with his memories in the camps. Despite being an Anti-Villain, Magneto detests Nazism and loathes the Red Skull.
  • Magneto: Testament explores Magneto's backstory as a Jewish Holocaust survivor.
  • The Holocaust shapes Erik Lehnsherr's personality in the X-Men film series as well, fueling his hatred of mankind. Both the first X-Men and X-Men: First Class open in 1944 with him being deported to Auschwitz with his family, with his metal-controlling powers starting to manifest as he is separated from his parents. First Class expands this part of his backstory as it is a Nazi scientist and mutant, Dr. Klaus Schmidt/Sebastian Shaw, who kills his mother, triggering his thirst of revenge. In X-Men: Apocalypse, Apocalypse transports adult Erik to the empty camp in The '80s to convince him to join his side. Erik ends up destroying the camp when his powers are amplified by Apocalypse.

Fan Works

• Heimatfront
• If I Was Your Nazi

Films - Animation

• Charlotte (2021)
• Where Is Anne Frank

Films - Live-Action

• All My Loved Ones
• Amen
• Angry Harvest
• Anne Frank Remembered — documentary about the famous teenaged diarist who died in Belsen
• Au revoir les enfants
• Bent
• The Big Red One
• Black Book — A Dutch Jewish woman sees her family being gunned down by German occupiers and goes into hiding then works for the Resistance..
• The Boat Is Full
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• Butterflies Do Not Live Here — Documentary short about 4,000 drawings left by children in the Theresienstadt ghetto, found after the war.
• Come and See — 1985 Soviet film about the Nazi plunder of Belarus and the resistance of the partisans.
• Conspiracy — Fictionalization of the 1942 Nazi conference that planned the Holocaust.
• The Counterfeiters
• The Day the Clown Cried
• De Nuremberg à Nuremberg — 1989 French documentary chronicling Nazi Germany from its rise to its fall, with the Holocaust making up about half the screentime.
• Defiance
• Denial — about the libel trial between Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt (and her publisher) and Holocaust denier David Irving
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• Escape from Sobibór
• Europa Europa — A German Jewish teen manages to survive by pretending to be a non-Jew.
• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — The lead-up anyway, ends with the Jews of Ferrara being rounded up for deportation
• Genocide — 1981 documentary
• God on Trial
• Goebbels and Geduldig
• The Great Dictator — At the time it was made, the death camps had not yet been created, but it still deals with Nazi mistreatment of the Jews, including a concentration camp.
• The Grey Zone
• Hidden in Silence
• In Darkness — A Pole in Lviv hides twelve Jews in the sewers after the ghetto is liquidated.
• In the Presence of Mine Enemies
• Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport — documentary about the rescue of German children to England in the months between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of war.
• Jacob the Liar — 1975 East German film
  • Jakob the Liar — 1999 Hollywood Foreign Remake with Robin Williams
• Jojo Rabbit
• Judgment at Nuremberg
• Kapò — A teenaged Jewish girl escapes Auschwitz only to become a despised "kapo" (prisoner guarding other prisoners) in a different labor camp.
• The Last Days — documentary about the Holocaust in Hungary, perpetrated by the Germans in the last year of the war.
• Der letzte Zug (The Last Train)
• Life Is Beautiful
• The Long Way Home
• The Man with the Iron Heart — Depicts the life of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust
• Miracle at Midnight
• Les Misérables (1995)
• My Führer — Adolf Hitler needs the services of a Jewish speech coach and has him taken out of a concentration camp to that end.
• Night and Fog
• The Ninth Circle — a Christian family in Yugoslavia attempts to save a young Jewish woman by marrying her off to their son
• None Shall Escape
• Olga
• Operation Finale — the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the "Architect of the Holocaust".
• Phoenix (2014) — a Holocaust survivor is the protagonist; she tries to go back to her Gentile husband after the end of the war, only to discover he was the one who sold her to the Nazis.
• The Pianist — Biopic about the struggle to survive of pianist Władysław Szpilman during the war in Poland's ghettos.
• Re;member
• Rescuers: Stories of Courage
• Resistance (2020) — Biopic about the life of Jewish mime Marcel Marceau during the war and how he helped saving French Jewish children from deportation.
• The Revolt of Job
• Rosenstrasse — Non-Jewish women gather in protest outside the Rosenstrasse detention center, after their Jewish husbands are mass-arrested, in preparation for sending them to the concentration camps.
• Sarah's Key
• Sandra
• Schindler's List — Biopic about German industry baron Oskar Schindler, who managed to save the lives of hundreds of his Jewish employees.
• Shoah — Documentary by Claude Lanzmann.
• The Shop on Main Street
• Shutter Island
• Son of Saul
• Sophie's Choice
• The Sorrow and the Pity
• Sterne
• The Stranger
• Sunshine (1999)
• Toyland
• The Unborn
• Visas and Virtue — about a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who issued thousands of entrance visas to Jewish refugees from Poland
• Woman in Gold
• X-Men — Erik Lensherr/Magneto was a young Jewish boy who was deported to Auschwitz during the war. His powers over metal first manifested under the stress of being separated from his mother at the camp's entrance.
  • X-Men: First Class — Erik was experimented on in Auschwitz by Klaus Schmidt (who killed his mother, and changed name as Sebastian Shaw after the war) and hunted the latter after the war.
• The Zone of Interest is set on the outskirts of Auschwitz in the 1940s.

Literature

• The Anglo/American – Nazi War
• Bondi's Brother
• The Book Thief
• The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
• Briar Rose
• Death Is My Trade: Fictionalized biography of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant in charge of Auschwitz.
• The Devil's Arithmetic
• The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank's autobiography.
• Fatherland
• The Final Solution
• The Footprint of Mussolini: The Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews are a major theme during the World War II segments.
• Götz and Meyer
• Horrible Histories — the book about World War II has a chapter on the Holocaust largely devoid of humour.
• If This Is a Man: Written by Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who survived Auschwitz. Adapted into the one-man teleplay Primo by Antony Sher, broadcast on HBO and The BBC.
• Making History: A Holocaust survivor and a history student attempt to change history to prevent the Holocaust. Events at Auschwitz have a major impact on the plot.
• Night: Written by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz.
• The Odessa File: The plot is kicked off by the suicide of a concentration camp survivor, and follows a German reporter who tries to track down an ex-Nazi officer who figures heavily in the diary the survivor leaves behind.
• Otto: Autobiography of a Teddy Bear: A children's picture book about the odyssey of a teddy bear that belonged to a young Jewish boy before, during and after World War II.
• The Reader
• Rose Under Fire: A novel about a young American woman who ends up in a concentration camp.
• The Winds of War/War and Remembrance
• The Zone of Interest

Live-Action TV

• Anne Frank: The Whole Story: A miniseries and Bio Pic based on the life of Anne Frank.
• Band of Brothers — One episode has Easy Company stumble across the concentration camp of Kaufering, a sub-camp of Dachau.
• The Cherry Queen — Persecutions of Jews (and other people such as homosexuals) after the Nazis take power in 1933. The Jewish woman protagonist goes into hiding during World War II, and her older sister perishes in a Death Camp.
• Holocaust — This 1978 miniseries portrays the events of the Holocaust through the eyes of two German families, one Jewish and the other non-Jewish. Notably, the series is often credited for popularizing "Holocaust" as the most common name for the Nazi genocide.
• Hunters
• NUMB3RS — The third season episode "Provenance" that deals with a stolen painting that was once owned by a Holocaust survivor's (Gena Rowlands) family before the Nazis came and the legal battles that soon followed.
• Nuremberg
• The Outer Limits (1995) — The episode "Tribunal" revolves around a time traveller and the son of a Holocaust survivor trying to bring an old Nazi to justice.
• A Small Light — Focuses on the Dutch couple who helped Anne Frank's family to hide.
• Soviet Storm: World War II in the East — The Soviets, during their advance into Poland, discover several concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): The episodes "Deaths-head Revisited" and "He's Alive" both involve the Holocaust.
• Under the Roman Sky
• Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter
• The World At War

Music

• In Kate Bush's "Snowed in at Wheeler Street", the Holocaust is implied to be the event in 1942 where the song's Star-Crossed Lovers meet the second time around; the narrator notes how they "were on different sides" and how she hid her lover under her bed, only for him to be found and taken away.
• The track "Dachau Blues" from Captain Beefheart's album Trout Mask Replica.
• "Dance Me to the End of Love" by Leonard Cohen was inspired by the Holocaust, regardless of what the title might imply, and details the use of inmate orchestras by the SS during mass executions. Cohen himself was Jewish, and was just 11 years old when the Holocaust was widely publicized in the wake of Germany's defeat.
• "Never Again" by Disturbed is a combination of a song about the Holocaust and an anthem about not letting something like it happen again.
• "This Train" by Indigo Girls.
• "No Love Lost" by Joy Division is a loose adaptation of the novel they took their name from, House of Dolls, detailing the Nazis' use of female concentration camp prisoners as sex slaves. The song's bridge even quotes a passage from the book.
• Several songs by The Monolith Deathcult, such as "Master of the Bryansk Forests" and "The Cruel Hunters".
• "Herb Girls of Birkenau" by cello rock band Rasputina.
• "The Final Solution" by Sabaton. "Inmate 4859" is also set during the Holocaust, and "Rise of Evil", about the rise of the Nazis, references it several times.
• "Belsen Was a Gas" by the Sex Pistols is narrated by an SS officer manning the titular extermination camp, and features a photo of concentration camp prisoners as its single cover. Frontman John Lydon went on to regret writing the song, stating in a 1996 interview that it shouldn't have been released.
• The songs "Angel of Death" and "SS-3" by Slayer from Reign in Blood and Divine Intervention respectively.

Sports

• This is the setting of Canadian figure skater Roman Sadovsky's long program from the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 competitive seasons, which features music from Schindler's List. His costume evokes the filth and blood of a concentration camp prisoner, and the jumps represent hard labour. It's the darkest program in the sport to date because Sadovsky maintains a haunting, grim tone throughout his performance. It ends on a hopeless note, as his character doesn't get rescued. His final pose consists of looking up to the sky (or the ceiling of his cell) with his arms outstretched as if pleading for help from the heavens, but the only response he receives is an ominous-sounding wind gust. It's Truth in Television because for nearly all victims of genocide, there is no happy ending.

Tabletop Games

• Charnel Houses of Europe: the Shoah, a supplement for Wraith: The Oblivion, outlines the Holocaust and describes its effects on the realms of the dead. It's worth a mention that the supplement, and all other mentions in other games of the World of Darkness, make it clear that the Holocaust was not part of any supernatural being's plot; it was all human madness and evil from start to finish.

Theatre

• And Then They Came For Me: A multimedia production, combining tapes of interviews with Anne Frank's friends who survived the Holocaust – Helmuth "Hello" Silberberg, now known as "Ed" and Eva Geiringer Schloss - live actors recreating scenes from their lives.
• Cabaret is set in Berlin around 1930. It ends before the Holocaust gets going, but the fact that the main characters are the kind of people likely to end up its victims is foreshadowed with more or less subtlety depending on the production.
• The Diary of Anne Frank

Video Games

• Call of Duty: WWII: The epilogue has soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division discovering both concentration and labor camps during their advance into Germany.
• KZ Manager: A very controversial game where you play as the director of a Nazi concentration camp.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order — Set in an Alternate History in which the Nazis won WWII, the player character is sent undercover to a forced labour camp, he mentions the camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka other examples of the place he is in.

Web Original

• Bedtime Stories (YouTube Channel) has the episode "Secrets of Celle Neues Rathaus", which features the titular Haunted Headquarters used by the SS to torture and conduct unethical experiments on Jewish prisoners.
• Wartime Stories has the "Depraved Doctors of the Third Reich" two-parter, discussing in detail the role Nazi Germany's SS doctors had in their systematic extermination of Jews and other "undesirables".
• World War II

Western Animation

• The Long Long Holiday

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