Dresden: The Inferno (2006)
Director: Roland Suso Richter, 180 minutes, Color, German
The first fictional film made in Germany to face the ongoing debate, Inferno Festival in fall 2006, then aired on Ger- was screened at the Berlin Film Dresden: The man TV in March 2007. While it portrays horrendous suffering among the city’s civilians, it also shows Dresden to be the home of a major Gestapo headquarters and a poison-gas factory, and a key supply hub for the Eastern Front. A love story (a downed British pilot is hidden by a German nurse) threads the scarifying narrative (people leaping from burning buildings, old women begging soldiers to shoot them, Nazis shooting looters and overseeing concentration camp prisoners during the post-bombing cleanup). Costing $11.9 million, Dresden: The Inferno is the most expensive German TV film ever produced, and will be marketed to worldwide audiences.
Originally published in the June 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
