Den største forbrytelsen

Good story from wartime in Norway, that brings out a good story. Great acting and directed. It gives a good picture of what Norway looked like as well. Well told filmatic, definitely worth the watch.

Short review: Betrayed/Den største forbrytelsen tells the story about the deportation of Jews living in Norway during the Second World War. While it is not without flaws, the acting and production value is excellent for a local film, and it manages to capture the full emotion of this heartbreaking story. Once again, as a foreigner living in Norway, I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film industry in this tiny country. Highly recommend for anyone interest in Norwegian or World War II history.

The persecution of jews in Norway is a dark chapter in our Nation's history.

It was German soliders who killed some 35% of the Norwegian jews in World War 2, but it was Norwegians who helped them by rounding them up, disclosing their location, imprisoning them in Norway and sending them off with DS Donau enroute to Germany and then to the Arbeitslager death camps.

In the movie we follow the Norwegian-jewish family Braude, living in Oslo. The person gallery is built up in a solid manner in this movie, portraying an entire jewish family and also neighbouring jewish families and the persecution they experienced after Germany invaded Norway on 9th of April, 1940.

The movie's strongest features are the human factor and the movie contains strong scenes and believable acting.

Again are Jewish people who didn't have peace in Norway during the Second World War.

What a nightmare seeing Norwegian authorities collaborating with the Nazis. The actors did a great and respectable job. The sceneries and atmosphere were terrific. It was never boring.

God bless all the victims that lost their lives there and the few survivors. 7/10.

Some people confound the rating system with something existing to advance their ideas. A 10/10 would be the most perfect movie that ever existed, and this one sure isn't. I get the impression that the other reviewers have either a hidden agenda in giving extreme scores, or no idea about what a good movie is. Based on a real story, and going to some lengths with obvious CGI to show second world war locations, some of which don't exist anymore, as they were. The first part of the movie is rather boring character development, complete with a completely gratitious sex scene and frontal nudity that I would have cut and used the time for other scenes. The second half of the movie picks up both in pace and in content, showing what happened further during the war. It is commendable, seen from inside Norway, that the movie shows us that also little Norway, like everyone, had some not so nice characters working with the nazi occupation army. But just as my nephew starts to have the age where he is aware of war and nazi occupation past and starts asking questions about it, this movie will leave the viewer with as many questions. The background to the movie is not explained, there is no mention of anti-semitism in society and seemingly "all is well" for Jews in Norway before the war. So every antisemitic sentiment that characters might have further into the movie is totally out of the blue to the viewer, and understanding that puts the viewer in a position where he does need a lot of background information before watching this. Productionwise the movie has its high points but lacks in execution at places. Some places are on a boring made for TV level, while other scenes excel at underlining the story. Especially the scenes filmed in the prisoner camp are on par with far better productions like Sobibor(2018) in frightening the viewer as to how low a human can sink in treating others. Of course, resistance is scarcely talked about, and this is not a surprise given the source material authors second book about the resistance during the war, which is severly criticised for factual errors. As much as one needs to be able to recognise a Hird or Police uniform to identify which group side characters belong to in this movie when talking, one also needs to understand that the author of the source material has an axe to grind, and keep that in mind. The movie will appeal locally in Norway, because little has been produced on the subject, but I reckon internationally it is the same story that has been told from everywhere else - minus the ghettos and the inhuman conditions before the deportation, because these didn't happen in Norway.