Holocaust

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Over the span of four nights, between April 16 and 19, 1978, approximately 120 million Americans watched at least some of an NBC miniseries that graphically portrayed the genocide of six million Jews during the Nazi era. Commercial prime-time television may have seemed an unlikely venue for this kind of subject matter, but Holocaust appeared during a moment in American network history when more serious subject matter threatened to get a toehold in prime time. The phenomenal and unprecedented success the year before of the miniseries Roots paved the way for Holocaust. In fact, NBC gave the production its go-ahead during the week that Roots aired. That series' record-breaking Nielsen numbers apparently gave the network confidence that if American viewers were willing to sit through night after night of brutal, realistic depictions of slavery in America, then those same viewers might also brave the images of genocide.

Producer Herbert Bodkin, director Marvin Chomsky (who had directed an episode of Roots), and writer Gerald Green did not want to just produce a Jewish Roots, however. They managed to avoid some of the production issues that were problematical in Roots. While Roots was shot entirely on the Hollywood back lot, Holocaust was filmed in Europe. The Matthausen concentration camp in Germany stood in for Auschwitz, thus giving camp scenes a chilling sense of verisimilitude. Also eery were some responses to the project during its production. In Gemany and Austria, many local technicians declined to work on the shoot. Swastikas occasionally appeared on sets. Officials in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia refused permission to film in their countries, arguing that the script contained "Zionist" elements.

Holocaust also differed from Roots in that it avoided filling its cast with highly recognizable stars. The producers didn't want viewers to be distracted by the star power of performers, but rather to accept the actors as the characters they played. Holocaust's cast included then little-known players as Meryl Streep, James Woods, and Michael Moriarty.

Like Roots, Holocaust used the family melodrama genre to tell its sweeping tale of human misery and survival. The series focused on two German families: the Weisses, who were thoroughly assimilated German-Jews; and the Dorfs. Most of the Weisses are sent to concentration camps. The artist son (James Woods) finds himself in Tereisen, the Nazis' "model" camp for high profile Jews, especially those with artistic talent. The narrative focuses on the utter squalor and horror of the place and the attempt by artists to document their experience there. The Weisses' daughter (Blanche Baker) is raped and then put into a hospital for the mentally ill, where the Nazi policies toward "mental defectives" ensure that she is quickly killed. Mr. and Mrs. Weiss, along with their Catholic daughter-in-law (Meryl Streep), end up in Auschwitz. A particularly graphic scene portrays the supposed "showers" the women were to have; the audience views a portrayal of them being gassed. Only the youngest son (Timothy Bottoms) survives. He escapes a concentration camp and joins Jewish partisans fighting the Germans. The Dorf family includes Erik (Michael Moriarty), an unemployed lawyer, and his ambitious wife, who persuades him to take a job with the Nazi security forces. Dorf rises quickly through Nazi ranks, becoming an aide to top architect of the Final Solution, Heinrich Heydrich (David Warner).

The miniseries received many of the same criticisms heaped on Roots. It took one of history's greatest human horrors and turned it into a soap opera. It made the unimaginable too easily accessible. It gave audiences only abject Jewish passivity on the one hand and heroic, active Jewish resistance on the other hand. Other critics praised the production for not flinching from brutality. There was no turning away from scenes of mass murder, torture, and death camp ovens. The realism proved too much for some midwestern NBC affiliates, who found scenes of naked women driven to the gas chambers too graphic and asked NBC to delete the offending scenes in their markets. Critics also complimented the series for not portraying the Nazis as boot-clicking, saluting caricatures. Instead, the actors played their characters as ordinary people who too easily followed the instructions of a fascist regime. Notably, the actors did not attempt German accents.

While Holocaust was a success in North America, it became a phenomenon of historic proportions when broadcast in West Germany in January 1979. Nearly half of the population watched at least some of the series, the vast majority responding to it positively. Germans had been exposed to relatively little information about the Nazi period or the Holocaust since the end of the war. The broadcast of Holocaust may have broken that silence. The miniseries was preceded by the showing of documentaries and followed by television debates and phone-in programs. Almost overnight, Germans, especially younger ones, demanded discussion of Germany's Nazi past. In the political arena, the showing of Holocaust may have also been instrumental in influencing the Bundestag to vote to discontinue a policy of statute of limitations for Nazi war crimes.

In North America, Holocaust demonstrated that network television could tackle weighty issues of human tragedy. In Germany, the miniseries might have caused an entire nation to reflect seriously on its historical demons.