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1[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/holocaust_1978.jpg]]
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3''Holocaust'' is a 1978 American television {{miniseries}} written by Gerald Green, directed Marvin J. Chomsky, and featuring an EnsembleCast that includes Creator/MerylStreep, Creator/JamesWoods, Creator/MichaelMoriarty, Creator/JosephBottoms, Creator/TovahFeldshuh, Creator/FritzWeaver, Creator/RosemaryHarris, Creator/DavidWarner, Creator/SamWanamaker, Creator/IanHolm and Creator/NigelHawthorne. It was originally shown on Creator/{{NBC}} in four parts from April 16–19, 1978.
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5Taking place over a ten-year span from 1935 to 1945, the series tells the story of two German families. One is the Jewish Weiss family, consisting of patriarch Josef Weiss, his wife Bertha, and three children (Anna, Rudi, and Karl) as well as Karl's gentile wife Inga. The other is the Dorf family, consisting of Erik, Marta, Peter, and Laura. Unable to find work as a lawyer due to economic problems, Erik Dorf joins the SS, and goaded on by his ambitious wife Marta rises up through the ranks to help plan out UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust.
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7''Holocaust'' is often viewed as a SpiritualSuccessor of sorts to ''Series/Roots1977'', being another historical miniseries that attempts to depict a well-documented atrocity of the recent past viewed through the eyes of a family living through it, and even featuring some of the same crew, most notably director Marvin J. Chomsky. The series has also been widely credited with bringing the term "Holocaust" into popular usage to describe UsefulNotes/NaziGermany's attempted extermination of the European Jews and other "undesirables".
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10!!Tropes:
11* AllThereInTheManual: Gerald Green, the writer and the screenwriter for the mini, later wrote a tie-in novel where we learn what happened to the characters after the film's end:
12** Rudi is researching what's happened to his family and reading Dorf's diary, he and Uncle Kurt have maintained a correspondence, Kurt Dorf was honored by the Yad Vashem as a righteous Gentile, and Rudi has re-married and has two young sons while residing in Israel.
13** Inga and little Josef have moved to England and maintained contact with Rudi.
14* AnyoneCanDie: Oh so much; only a few of the main characters remain alive at the end of the series. And it's obvious that no one, not even children, are safe.
15* AwfulTruth: Uncle Kurt Dorf informs Erik's family that their father was a murderer and that he was captured by Americans and killed himself. Marta will not accept that he did anything wrong.
16* BittersweetEnding: Everyone's families have been torn apart by the war, yet Rudi and Inga face a brighter future ahead of them.
17* BookDumb: Rudi; he's not great at school, but he is a cunning member of the Resistance.
18* BreakTheCutie:
19** Poor Anna. We first see her happily playing at the wedding of her brother Karl to Inga, then she was just a cheerful girl concentrating on her schoolwork and playing the piano with her mother. Later, the stress of her father being moved to Poland and Rudi running away gets to her and she is later raped by policemen. Her sister-in-law tries to get her psychiatric help after she suffers a breakdown because of it, only for Anna be sent to her death in Hadamar after the Nazis start killing people with mental problems.
20** Berta was the comfortable and wealthy wife of a doctor who cared for her family and played the piano while entertaining the optimistic belief that the Nazis' hatred of the Jews will blow over in a while. Later, she deals with her husband being deported, her parents dying, her oldest son being taken to Buchenwald, her other son running away, and her daughter dying. All this before she faces her inevitable death.
21** Karl was an ambitious and sensitive artist that loved his wife/muse; he soon gets tortured, his hands damaged, finds that his parents died, and only made it to the liberation of the camp.
22* DeadGuyJunior: Karl and Inga's son is named after Josef, the boy's grandfather.
23* DiseaseBleach: Young Karl's hair is completely gray by the end.
24* EvilCannotComprehendGood:
25** Dorf demands to know why Josef hasn't fled Germany (this while he was reprimanding him for treating gentile patients) since the Weiss family is wealthy enough, Josef merely tells him that if all the Jewish doctors fled, there wouldn't be anyone to treat the very old and poor.
26** He fails to understand a priest calling for mercy and tolerance for the Jews in his sermon, with the interrogated priest telling him that the war they are waging is on unarmed citizens and that [[BadassPreacher he will follow his conscience and the teachings of Christianity, rather than the Nazis' dictates]].
27** Mueller cannot comprehend why Inga wouldn't just divorce Karl.
28* FaceOfAnAngelMindOfADemon: Marta Dorf is noted by their former doctor Josef and many of the Nazis that associate with her husband as a beautiful woman, yet she did push her husband into the Nazi Party.
29* {{Fingore}}: Karl gets both his hands broken while in Thesienstadt by the guards for secretly drawing the real conditions of the camps (which the SS had kept from the visiting Red Cross).
30* [[DadTheVeteran Grandpa the Veteran]]: Berta's father proudly proclaimed in the beginning that he served in the infantry under the Kaiser, and even has the Iron Cross.
31* HappilyMarried:
32** Josef and Berta Weiss along with their son, Karl and Inga.
33** Erik and Marta are this to a lesser extent.
34** It isn't for long, but Rudi and his girlfriend Helena became this.
35* HeelRealization[=/=]VillainousBSOD: Dorf experiences this in the final episode. After his excuses are torn up, he looks at the atrocities he helped to create and finally realizes that he has become a monster.
36* ItGetsEasier: At first, Dorf is unnerved at being involved with mass murders. He gets used to it though, with the prestige gained by his high position assuaging him.
37%%* JerkAss: Mueller
38* KickTheDog: Mueller rapes Inga and then mocks Karl about it.
39%%* LadyMacbeth: Marta Dorf.
40* LovableJock: Rudi, he is even asked to help smuggle some Jewish Greek children and is seen playing ball with them at the end.
41* TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: The American captain more or less delivers this to Dorf after he's been captured and interrogated for his crimes. After this, [[DrivenToSuicide Dorf takes a cyanide capsule]].
42* SensitiveGuyAndManlyMan: Karl, the artist, is the sensitive guy to the more rebellious Rudi's Manly Man. Both have a passionate nature in common.
43* SexualExtortion: Inga wants to help her husband Karl survive the concentration camp. She asks Mueller for help, but Mueller demands sex with Inga in return.
44* SkewedPriorities: Dorf of all people calls out Marta for being more concerned about his leadership and position than for the fact he's having women and children killed.
45* SlowlySlippingIntoEvil: Dorf initially works for Heydrich because he can't find anything else, and he seems reluctant to commit to Nazi ideology. He gradually becomes one of the architects of the Final Solution.
46* SomeoneToRememberHimBy: Inga Weiss tells Karl she is pregnant before he is sent to Auschwitz (and he dies there).
47* SonOfAWhore: {{Invoked}}. Nazi officials in Auschwitz make the Jewish prisoners call their parents pimps and whores while taking their personal details. Those who naturally object are beaten for it.
48* SpoiledSweet: Berta Weiss despairs over being the pampered wife of a Doctor and of [[TheOjou her background of wealth and servants]], yet she is a kindhearted woman who enjoys the piano and cares very much for the children she teaches in the Warsaw Ghetto.
49* TurbulentPriest: Father Lichtenburg openly defies the Nazis and is sent to Dachau for all his troubles. For more detail, look up at EvilCannotComprehendGood.
50* UngratefulBastard:
51** Josef at the start was treating Marta Dorf for a heart murmur... yet later on, she and Erik refuse to have anything to do with him.
52** Inga's brother is rescued by Rudi Weiss and his girlfriend during the bombing of Kiev, but when they take him to his comrades for safety, he turns them in as Jews, all before he finally gets bombed.
53* UsedToBeASweetKid: Karl remembered Dorf as the son of the neighborhood baker whom he treated for the chicken pox. Then he became a Nazi who targets Jewish people like the Weiss family.
54* WellDoneSonGuy:
55** Rudi sadly states that he and his brother must've let their Doctor father down, due to Karl being more of an artist and [[BookDumb Rudi being more of a jock that was, by his own admission, lousy at schoolwork.]]
56** This is more obvious with Josef and his brother, Moses, since Josef was considered more intelligent than his brother, who inherited the family pharmacy.
57* WhiteSheep:
58** Inga comes from a family of Nazis and anti-Semites, yet she is HappilyMarried to the Jewish Karl and devoted to her in-laws.
59** Dorf's Uncle Kurt is this to a lesser extent, as he works in the camp trying to keep as many Jewish people alive as possible.
60* YouAreWorthHell: Inga, a German Christian whose family is aligned with the Nazis, gives up her freedom to be together with her Jewish husband Karl in a concentration camp even after being warned that it would be [[{{Understatement}} "unpleasant"]], and this was after she was raped just so she could have written correspondence with him.

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