Dachau - Death Camp

This must be some school project or something, 'cause it's one of the worst documentaries ever made. First, the editing and direction, awful! The survivors try to tell their stories, but they keep cutting it like they only tell punchlines. The music is straight out of b-horror movie and it doesn't fit at all, anywhere, and it also cuts all the time and occasionally there are some weird synth string build ups. Why? Also, some stories are told with fixed text on the bottom and some are scrolling on the bottom, with different font of course.

But what makes this even worse, is the American voice over. Pronounciations of places and names are grade F, and that means failure. Then there is the thing, where he "acts" these stories out, and it's like watching a documentary made for a South Park episode. Around 29mins in, he says "guinea pigs" like he was Randy March and it goes on and on with that horrible b-movie soundtrack.

There's loads of documentaries about WW2 and about the atrocities of Nazi Germany, but this so called "documentary" is just plain wrong on so many levels. It doesn't do justice to the victims, quite the opposite actually, 'cause it doesn't tell a single story in full and it's made like bad school project. Clip-cut-paste-add music-do a bad voice over, it almost feel like taking advantage of history and try to cash in.

Don't watch this! It's not educational at all and it's vary badly made, with some horrifying archive footage that we have seen in so many documentaries before.

My wife and I visited the camps at Auschwitz and Berkenau in January of this year in the freezing cold and it was in every way a truly chilling experience. We therefore felt duty bound to watch this fifty minute documentary which focused on another infamous concentration camp at Dachau.

I thought the brevity of the film somewhat strange however, in light of the seriousness of the subject to which I can perhaps only attribute to a lack of actual footage from the camp itself. Thus the narrative used the current device of very obviously recreating some imagined scenes played by actors which for me certainly jarred my sensibilities. The story also crossed over into other camps including Auschwitz / Berkenau as if to unnecessarily pad things out, plus some photographic images were repeated unnecessarily I felt.

The film was however unstinting I broadcasting the horrific and harrowing vérité footage of the treatment of the Jewish and other prisoners both on video and in photographuc stills and these are supplemented by latter-day interviews with several of the survivors and also the liberating Anerican soldiers, all of whom naturally still bear the scars of their experiences. However even some of these interviews seemed poorly edited with some of the interviewees' words at times randomly cut up between others.

Sadly this film had a correspondingly "cut and paste" feel to it which for me reduced the effect it should have had on me, but please understand my criticism is of the film-makers and not the film or participants themselves who deserve only our great respect and sympathy for somehow enduring what they went through.

How is it possible for the American voiceover artist, employed by a presumably 'professional' production company, to continually mispronounce the name of such an infamous concentration camp, without anyone attempting to correct the error before the documentary was released?

Beyond irritating. Ruins the viewing experience.

If they can't even get that part of this horrific story correct, should we just assume there are other factual errors elsewhere?

What a disgrace of a documentary for such a serious subject. It looks like it was made over the weekend. Original footage, bad reenactment scenes, terrible voiceover, many duplicate shots, interviews were basically one liners, seemingly slapped together without great care. Sometimes, the storyline changes to the general WW2 chronicle, but before you know it, it suddenly changes course again. The mispronunciation of non-English terms was also annoying (text to speech??). The original footage is the only reason you should watch this.

All in all, this documentary doesn't do any justice to its grave subject.

As the person above mentions, the constant mis-pronounciation of Dachau and Fascism ruins a potentially brilliant documentary.

I was getting ready to pull my hair out.