Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 75 Years Later

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel

October 1951 •English

The life and career of Erwin Rommel and his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

La SS : L'État barbare

July 2019 •French

Agente Sicre, el amigo americano

June 2014 •Spanish

Leningrad. Stimmen einer belagerten Stadt

January 2024 •German

It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.

Men Behind the Sun

December 1988 •

The film is a graphic depiction of the war atrocities committed by the Japanese at Unit 731, the secret biological weapons experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The film details the various cruel medical experiments Unit 731 inflicted upon the Chinese and Soviet prisoners at the tail-end of the war.

Inside Chernobyl with Ben Fogle

March 2021 •English

Ben Fogle spends a week living inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, gaining privileged access to the doomed Control Room 4 where the disaster first began to unfold.

Night Will Fall

June 2014 •English

When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".

Obliging Collaborators

August 2014 •Latvian

The code to unlocking this feature documentary is 1949, the year the director was born, and also the year of the return of Soviet repressions to Latvia. The film tells a very personal story against the background of less visited historic events – the death of director’s father due to the KGB repressions, which is closely linked to the devious game Soviet Latvia’s KGB played against Swedish-British-American spy agencies.

Food Will Win the War

July 1942 •English

World War II propaganda film on the importance of American farming. A morale booster film stressing the abudance of American agricultural output.

Out of the Frying Pan Into the Firing Line

July 1942 •English

Documentary short film demonstrating the process by which waste fats from the kitchens of American homes can be transformed into the raw materials for explosives for the war effort.

Songs That Won the War

May 1994 •English

Wartime sweetheart Vera Lynn presents this documentary which sets archive footage and newsreel film from World War Two to the popular sounds of the day. Artists featured include Flanagan and Allen, Gracie Fields, George Formby, Bing Crosby, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Andrews Sisters and the Mills Brothers.

The Greatest Raid of All Time

March 2007 •English

Jeremy Clarkson tells the story of what’s been called ‘the original Mission Impossible’ – the audacious Commando raid on the German occupied dry dock at St. Nazaire in France on March 28th 1942. Operation Chariot, as the raid was codenamed, had a simple aim – to destroy the dry dock and thus deny the German battleship Tirpitz a safe haven on the Atlantic coast of France. There were many who thought the mission too risky, but the Chief of Combined Operations, Louis Mountbatten, pushed forward. This programme explores the story around March 26th 1942, when Commandos in Cornwall boarded their floating bomb and set off to see if the element of surprise really could overcome all the odds.

An American Piano

January 2014 •Japanese

The true story of a young Japanese girl who played the piano for POWs during World War II and how it affected their lives. It is a story of humanity, compassion and the universality of music in helping to heal the rifts between wartime rivals.

Olga

August 2004 •Portuguese

Based upon the true story of Olga Benário, the German-born wife of Brazilian communist leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945) she was arrested and sent to Nazi Germany, where she was put to death in a concentration camp. After World War II began, Vargas decided to uphold the Allies.

Struma

September 2001 •Romanian

Romanian documentary about the Struma disaster in 1942.

Shoah

April 1985 •French

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.

Undermining the Nazis: Paris' Secret Tunnels

January 2022 •English

Two men show extraordinary courage by secretly mapping Paris' underground during the 1940 German occupation.

Shameless Propaganda

July 2013 •English

This feature documentary examines its own genre, which has often been called Canada's national art form. Released in the year of the NFB's 75th birthday, Shameless Propaganda is filmmaker Robert Lower's take on the boldest and most compelling propaganda effort in our history (1939-1945), in which founding NFB Commissioner John Grierson saw the documentary as a "hammer to shape society". All 500 of the films produced by the NFB until 1945 are distilled here for the essence of their message to Canadians. Using only these films and still photos from that era, Lower recreates the picture of Canada they gave us and looks in it for the Canada we know today. What he finds is by turns enlightening, entertaining, and unexpectedly disturbing.

March 1945: Duel at the Cathedral

March 2015 •English

Cologne is the largest city that the G.I.s will take during the war. Nazi propaganda has declared the city to be defended to the last cartridge. Witness the US troops first hand on their advance from the outskirts of the city to the banks of the Rhine and the fascinating research of the Cologne journalist and film historian Hermann Rheindorf.

The Wannsee Conference

December 1984 •German

A real time recreation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which leading SS and Nazi Party officals gathered to discuss the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Led by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, the Wannsee Conference was the starting point for the Jewish Holcaust which led to the mass murder of six million people.