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The Professional as a Symbol: 30 Years of Filmic Representation of Business, Industry, and Professionalism in the Holocaust

by Cameron Davis, 2024 Business Fellow

Art is a critical lens through which we can observe society's values and perspectives on challenging topics. World War II and the Holocaust have captured the imaginations of artists for more than eighty years. Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five uses time travel to semi-autobiographically represent post-war psychological trauma. The Ramones’ 1976 lead single “Blitzkrieg Bop,”, which evokes the Germans’ “lightning war” tactic, was sung by a Hungarian Jew whose parents survived the Holocaust.1 Half of the highest-grossing war movies of all time take place during World War II;2 Steven Spielberg, the highest-grossing director in history,3 has directed ten different movies set in the time period; and eight films about the war or Holocaust have won the Academy Award for Best Picture.4

While these films run the thematic gamut of war, violence, tragedy, and redemption, a particularly common theme is complicity. To what extent did figures outside traditional military actors play roles in harmdoing and heroism alike? As the war in Europe—and the tremendous toll of the Holocaust—both pulled in unprecedented numbers of civilians and noncombatants, the role of everyday people regularly features in these films. Outside of Hollywood, too, as time has passed so has our interpretation of civilian involvement and possible complicity. In academic genocide studies, debate has pushed the traditional three-category framework (victims, perpetrators, and bystanders) to account for more “outsider” roles (including profiteers and helpers).5 Significant national debates over perpetration and victimhood during World War II, and the Holocaust, continue to affect politics and society in countries such as Germany and Poland.6

Thus, this analysis will examine the interpretation of the business professional and professional complicity in the Holocaust through an analysis of three decades of film, represented by six movies released from 1993 to 2023.

Why films from this timeframe? As we discussed in classroom sessions and at Nazi-era historical sites during FASPE, much of the post-war 20th century was defined by collective willful ignorance, and it wasn’t until the 1980s with the Dig Where You Stand and other largely student- and youth-led movements that tangible acceptance of Nazi misdeeds began coming to light.7 At the same time, the Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) in the late 1980s brought debates around the question of German responsibility in the Holocaust to the forefront of the national mind.8 Similarly, the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“struggle of overcoming the past”) flared during the years leading up to and following German reunification.9 Thus, the 1990s give the sense of the first modern decade of collective reappraisal, where Westerners began coming to terms with the Holocaust and its connection to the Nazi mission and World War II more broadly.

My thought process led me, then, to six films: Schindler’s List (1993), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008), Defiance (2008), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Son of Saul (2015), and The Zone of Interest (2023). These movies have a collective box office of $800 million dollars and were nominated for 27 Academy Awards, 11 of which they won. They collectively represent thirty years of Holocaust memory culture through the eyes of Western filmmakers and filmgoers. Each also deals with the issue of professionalism.

The Professional as Hero: Schindler’s List
It would be impossible to begin an analysis of the filmic perspective on professional complicity in the Holocaust with anything but Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster hit Schindler’s List. The movie took the world by storm—it earned more than $320 million worldwide (over 15 times its budget), was nominated for ten Academy Awards, and won seven including Best Picture. As we saw in person in Krakow, it also kickstarted a considerable amount of tourism to Poland specifically focused on where it was filmed and where the events it depicts took place. The neighborhood of Kazimierz is a prime example. It was the Jewish quarter before the war, and since 1993 has been awash in tour groups and trendy cocktail bars. How a 170-minute black-and-white Holocaust movie was able to capture the global imagination has to do with its choice of protagonist and representation of professionalism in the Holocaust.

The film opens with a Kiddush spoken as candles burn down to nubs. Expository text tells us about Poland in 1939. As Jews gather in a town square, their names recorded on Nazi officials’ typewriters, we watch a man get dressed in fine clothes, put on a swastika pin, and head to a fancy club. His presence and comportment are noticeably different than those of his Nazi peers at the club; as they shout at cabaret performers, overeat, and share grotesque stories about Jews, he’s gentlemanly, refined, and transparently less nationalistic, turning down a German Riesling in favor of a 1929 French bottle from the cellar. It isn’t until the man has won over all his comrades and is the centerpiece of the revelry that we learn, in hushed tones between SS officers, that he’s none other than the Oskar Schindler, a wealthy German businessman.

Schindler’s status precedes him (as does his stature; he’s played skillfully by Liam Neeson, whose 6’4” figure stands out among throngs of shorter German soldiers and Jewish workers alike). The next day, he cuts a seemingly endless line at the Judenrat, the Jewish administrative body of the city, looking for an accountant named Itzhak Stern (a perfectly cast and understated Ben Kingsley). Their meeting is immediately tense; Schindler is looking for a way to get richer, while Stern is faced with the administrative deportation of his Jewish community. Schindler sees financial opportunity in the future, while Stern lives in the present. Schindler is a salesman. Stern is not.

But Stern reconsiders offscreen after the Jews are evicted from their homes and forced into ghettos. He introduces Schindler to two wealthy merchants who could provide the capital he needs upfront. Schindler drives a hard bargain, taking advantage of the Jews’ underclass status; when the potential investors splutter, “Money’s still money!” to reject a lowball offer, Schindler coolly replies, “No, it’s not. That’s why we’re here.” But there’s no question he has a heart of gold somewhere deep down. When the investors note that they won’t be able to trust him since contracts between Jews and Germans are unenforceable, Schindler firmly yet comfortingly counters: “I said what I’ll do. That’s our contract.”

In the same vein, Schindler maintains a hard exterior while beginning to help Jews. He justifies his decision to hire Jewish workers to Stern based on cost alone, dismissively saying, “Poles cost more. Why should I hire Poles?” while nonetheless actively helping forge papers for older Jews, academics, and children, designating them as “essential workers” and saving them from the day-to-day misery of the ghetto. Later, Schindler disguises his real appreciation for Stern’s help by couching it in a businessman’s lighthearted invocation of fraud, saying, “You need three things in life: a good doctor, a forgiving priest, and a clever accountant.” But when Stern doesn’t unstiffen and repeatedly rejects Schindler’s offers of celebratory drinks, Schindler’s softer center emerges again: “Just pretend, for Christ’s sake. I’m trying to thank you.”

Soon, though, the viewer confronts the overt and savage violence of the Nazi regime in the person of Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes). An SS officer, Göth runs Płaszów, a forced labor camp, with psychopathic cruelty, killing prisoners at random, massacring whole bunks of people for one resident’s infraction, and forbidding anyone from questioning his authority. Schindler must enter an uneasy alliance with Göth to continue using his Jewish workforce while keeping on with his small acts of kindness to oppressed Jews. This approach works until 1944, when as the war becomes more obviously unwinnable and the prisoners are scheduled to die, Schindler’s heart of gold, long glinting through the layers but finally shining fully, realizes what must be done. Despite huge financial losses and business inconveniences, he relocates more than 1,000 of his Jewish workers to a new factory in his hometown, saving them from certain death. Although it’s not good business, it’s the right thing to do. Stern, shiny-eyed and having completed the film’s eponymous document of names of people to save, says, “The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.”

In the film, business is a powerful, if ambiguous, source for good. The negative side is undeniable. First, it is a conduit of control. One of the earliest mentions of the Nazi government’s authoritativeness is in a Catholic church, where Schindler meets Jewish merchants who covertly barter under the guise of attending mass. Their inability to work is a central aspect of the government’s control of their lives. Business’ methods of control extend to forced labor camps, which Göth pitches to Schindler as a valuable addition to the normal private sector. In fact, the Nazi explains, “The SS will manage certain industries itself inside Płaszów, but it’s private industry like yours that stands to benefit the most.” The film later shows Göth visiting a metalworks factory in Płaszów and timing a worker’s speed at making door hinges; when the test reveals the worker’s underproduction, Göth nearly kills him, underscoring production as a life-or-death method of control. The profiteering motive of the forced labor camps is a justification for Jewish extermination; when Schindler complains about one of his workers being murdered, Amon laughs: “We are going to be making so much money that none of this is going to matter!”

Seen otherwise, the role of business is also one of euphemism and over-administration. As discussed at length during the FASPE trip, professionals often couch difficult topics in euphemisms.10 In Steven Zaillian’s script for Schindler’s List, we see this fact on display throughout. At Auschwitz, Schindler asks Rudolf Höss11 to release some of his workers sent there accidentally. Sitting in a darkly lit room, Höss obscures his words just as much as his shadowed face and defers responsibility to another officer. Words such as “task”, “processes”, and “down here” all obfuscate shared meaning. Schindler adapts this euphemism when speaking with other Nazis, such as when he outlines the rules at his factory in Czechoslovakia to SS officials. This approach cuts both ways. “There will be no interference of any kind in production,” he shouts, using “interference” as a stand-in for the arbitrary killing of Jews that plagued Płaszów.

For much of the film, this euphemism makes it easier for Schindler to excuse Nazi violence. In an early conversation between the two men, Schindler lends a sympathetic ear to Göth. The SS man complains at length:

You’ve got to build the fucking thing, getting those fucking permits alone is enough to drive you crazy; then the engineers show up, they stand around, they argue about drainage, foundations, codes, exact specifications, parallel fences four kilometers long, 1,200 kilograms of barbed wire, 6,000 kilograms of electrified fences, ceramic insulators, three cubic meters of air space per prisoner! I’m telling you, you want to shoot somebody. I’ve been through it, I know.12

Of course, we know Göth has shot many “somebodies,” and it’s not because he needs to fill out so many purchase orders. But in defending the SS officer to Stern, Schindler sighs exasperatedly and explains as if defending the outburst of a colleague at work to a junior employee: “You have to understand. Göth is under enormous pressure. He's got this whole place to run. He's got a lot of things to worry about. And he's got the war, which brings out the worst in people; never the good, always the bad. But in normal circumstances he wouldn't be like this; he'd be all right.”

Euphemism reaches a peak when the Nazis begin shipping everyone to concentration camps, and words don’t adequately describe the process. Stern notes to Schindler how “preferential” and “special” treatment mean different things—one safe, one deadly—to which Schindler replies, half-jokingly, “do we invent a whole new language?” Stern answers solemnly, “I think so.”

On the whole, however, the arc of Schindler’s List demonstrates the belief that business professionals can do more harm than good, sometimes just as a lifeline. Schindler and Stern argue after a one-armed factory employee gratuitously thanks Schindler for saving his life; Schindler fears that the implication that his factory is a charity, rather than a “real” business, will put him in danger, and so he reprimands Stern. Later, a woman tells Schindler she’s heard that the factory is a “haven where no one dies,” and although Schindler initially snaps at Stern again, he ultimately bribes a camp officer to bring the woman’s aging parents to the safety of the factory.

In part to demonstrate business’ potential ethical value, Spielberg has Schindler meet with the only other character who is explicitly identified as a businessman. The man is also an industrialist with a heart of gold, as we learn from Schindler’s plea to his humanity: “Come on! I know about the extra food and clothes you give [your workers], paid for out of your own pocket.” Although the man is based on Julius Madritsch (who really did help his Jewish employees),13 it’s not representative; as we learned at the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center, businessmen who treated workers well were an infinitesimally rare exception, not the norm.

The most full-throated defense of business as an avenue for good comes after Schindler’s factory has been relocated. Now independent of Nazi management, Schindler suggests that the factory close early on Fridays so the workers can celebrate the Sabbath; he ensures that the military does not have oversight of the factory floor; and he tells his workers that no functional weapons should be produced by the factory, lest they actuallyhelp the German war effort. This last piece is true; as Ludmilla Page, one of the Schindlerjuden, describes, “All the production was faulty because we on purpose were sabotaging this, always was something flawed in those shells.”14 Schindler can use business to do good for the Jews only by running an intentionally nonproducing business. Schindler recognizes this fundamental tension during his climactic monologue after the war is over: “I am member of the Nazi Party; I'm a munitions manufacturer; I'm a profiteer of slave labor; I am a criminal.” He goes further afterwards, driving home the connection between the wealth he gained from his business success and his ability to save lives. As he bursts into tears, he says, “If I had made more money […] I threw away so much money. You have no idea. I didn’t do enough!” All his worldly possessions, including his car and his golden Nazi pin, suggest additional lives he didn’t “buy” from Göth. The powerful assurances of Stern and the other Schindlerjuden assuage Schindler, and we are left pondering his righteousness.

Schindler’s List, excellent as it is, showcases a celebratory view of the role of business and professionalism during the Holocaust. Its moral world is relatively black and white. This simple picture will be evaluated and complicated by the Holocaust films that followed.

The Professional as Family: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Although it did not reach the commercial and critical heights of Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas became the center of a similar Holocaust-film zeitgeist a decade later. The story was first introduced to the world in the 2006 novel by John Boyne. Boyne’s book was an enormous success, reaching the top of The New York Times Best Seller list15 and appearing on book club lists and high school reading curricula.16 As of 2022, it has sold more than 11 million copies in 58 languages.17 Despite buzz ahead of its publication, no major studio had purchased the film rights until director Mark Herman did pre-publication in 2005 and as a result was free to create an adaptation without the hurdles and challenges of studio executives and producers.18 He ultimately sent the script to Miramax, which provided big-budget backing.19 A Thanksgiving 2008 theatrical release in the US rode the wake of the book’s popularity and aligned with perhaps the single biggest year for Holocaust films in history (with The Reader, Valkyrie, and Defiance also released that year). Unfortunately, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas has a deeply questionable moral message about the role of the professional as family, which ultimately equivocates about the harm caused by the Holocaust.

The film opens with a quote from English Poet Laureate John Betjeman: “childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights before the dark hour of reason grows.” Immediately after, as if to hammer the point home, the audience is treated to a red blur, which a slow zoom out reveals to be a Nazi flag. We know this with our adult “reason,” but the German kids running and playing in a city square beneath it don’t. Making airplane noises as they run through the beautiful bustle of a sunny day in Berlin, they remain blissfully ignorant of the Jews being rounded up into buses just blocks away. One of the kids, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), peels off and arrives home to a gorgeous townhouse, where maids and cooks prepare for a party. He’s upset to learn, though, that the party is celebrating his father (David Thewlis) getting a new job, for which the family will have to leave Berlin. The decision is immediately framed as one of professional responsibility; Bruno asks, “He’s still going to be a soldier, isn’t he?” to which his mother (Vera Farmiga) responds, “Yes, just a more important one now.” His dad is an SS officer, and, although a grandmother figure criticizes Nazi aims at the party, the rest of the family and friends seem comfortable with the party’s ideas.

Everyone is less excited, though, when they reach the new home, which is a fortress-like concrete structure behind high gated walls. The staircase banister evokes the bars of a jail cell, and Bruno’s father immediately leaves on “work”. Indeed, the first line after they move into the house is “I have some business to take care of” before a door shuts behind him. Bruno, an adventurous boy whose dream is to become an explorer, feels trapped within the home, particularly since his bedroom windows are barred and the gates are locked to prevent him from meeting strange people on a faraway “farm”. It is, of course, a concentration camp.

As luck would have it, the lonely Bruno meets a Jewish boy, Shmuel, on the other side of the electrified fence. Bruno is confused by much of what Shmuel says and does—such as why they wear such strange “pajamas” or where the “animals” are on the farm. Shmuel doesn’t have many answers and is repeatedly called back by wardens. It bears remembering that this is a heavily fictionalized and potentially problematic version of Auschwitz—one in which there are not guard towers every hundred meters,20 obvious and extreme suffering visible everywhere you look, and few children because they’ve all been gassed immediately.21

Jobs do much to confuse the boys. Shmuel asks Bruno what kind of soldier his father is. “An important sort,” Bruno says. “He’s in charge of making everything better for everyone.” Bruno turns the question back to Shmuel about his father. He shrugs: “He’s a watchmaker. Or was. Now he mostly just mends boots.” The film draws our attention again and again to what it is people do and how that motivates them. This professional confusion carries over into a moment when Bruno scrapes his knee and receives medical aid from a Jewish servant, whom Bruno does not recognize as a doctor. The servant, tears welling up in his eyes, says, “I practiced as a doctor before I—before I came here.”

When Bruno’s mother hears about the incident, she thanks the doctor as sentimental piano notes swell in the background. Her kindness here reflects her broader goodness. We soon learn that Bruno’s mother wasn’t aware of the activities of the concentration camp, because it’s just his father’s job; she learns the truth only after a younger officer implies that the foul-smelling smoke beyond their house is burning Jews. This level of Nazi victimhood is deeply misguiding, especially towards the younger audiences that The Boy in the Striped Pajamas intends to educate.

The film also strongly implies that these men, including Bruno’s father, are dedicated professionals above all else. At dinner, Bruno’s father explains, “The Fatherland cannot be achieved without work such as this,” and his grandfather echoes the point: “The work your father is doing, Bruno, is history in the making.” Meanwhile, the women of the family unit are blameless. Bruno’s grandmother is the first to be critical of the Nazis (and dies offscreen in an air raid); Bruno’s mother becomes increasingly sullen and cynical after learning “the truth” of the concentration camps. Even the maid shows her disgust and disappointment in the family through knowing eye contact. The film frames Bruno’s 12-year-old sister, who becomes vocally antisemitic, as brainwashed by the children’s male, Nazi tutor.

Throughout its runtime, the film hammers home the father’s role as a professional and soldier. Meanwhile, Shmuel is distraught by his own father’s disappearance, which he explains to Bruno: “Papa went on a work group and didn’t come back.” The central aspect of their father’s lives—their work—remains essential on both sides of the fence. Bruno suggests that they go looking for him together. Shmuel lights up. Bruno isn’t worried, because he sees his father watching a propaganda film that shows the inside of the camps as places of leisure, community, and play. Imagine his surprise, then, when he dons a spare set of “pajamas” from Shmuel, burrows underneath the fence, and joins the Jewish boy to look for his father. “I don’t understand,” Bruno says nervously. “I saw a film about the camp, and it looked nice!” (The irony of a film misrepresenting the realities of the Holocaust is apparently lost on the director, Herman).

Bruno’s “crossing over” is both literal, as he enters the camp, and figurative, as he effectively “becomes” an imprisoned Jew by taking on a Jew’s appearance and role. While they pack up to leave their home (having decided that its proximity to the camp is a bad place to raise children), Bruno’s family notices his absence. The worst dawns on them. As they run to the camp fence, Bruno and Shmuel become caught up among a group of Jews being ushered into the gas chambers. The boys are summarily gassed as the family stands, sobbing, in the rain.

This climax is unearned but returns to the same central question of the possibility of separating a family’s personal and professional wrongdoing from systemic evil. The last shot of Bruno’s father in the rain realizing that his professional actions have had consequences for him personally, reflects Boyne’s and Herman’s belief that yes, such separation is possible, and tragedy is deserved by no one. Just because the father was a Nazi, does not mean his tears are wrong or ridiculous. In my view, this conclusion feels hollow and unreasonably equates the Nazi’s pain with the never-seen pain of Shmuel’s already-murdered father, not to mention the pain of millions of other Jewish family members who never knew with certainty what happened to their children. No amount of supposed professional distance can earn this conclusion.

The Professional as Soldier: Defiance
Just a month after The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Defiance hit American theaters on New Year’s Eve 2008. Looking to replicate the same success as Valkyrie’s ($202 million box office after its release just a week prior), the film, directed by Oscar-winner Edward Zwick, adapted historian Nechama Tec’s 1993 book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans for the big screen. And despite not matching Valkyrie’s action-thriller audience draw, Defiance did very well commercially and critically, including snagging an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score a month later. As with the other films under consideration here, it takes an interest in professional conduct during the Holocaust.

Defiance opens on a Nazi salute, zooming out to historical footage of Adolf Hitler and typewriter-font exposition of the status of the war in 1941, when our story begins. The grainy black-and-white video cycles through other archival scenes before landing on actors portraying Einsatzgruppen’s evacuation and massacre of Jews in a Belorussian town in the western Soviet Union, filtered and edited to look original to the time. The seamless link between real footage and fiction pulls the viewer into the gruesome reality of the Nazi regime.

After the violence subsides, we meet the Bielski brothers, whose parents and other siblings have been murdered by collaborating Soviet police forces (Schutzmannschaft). The oldest, Tuvia (Daniel Craig), is also the natural leader; level-headed and compassionate yet forceful, he’s a successful local businessman thanks to his wife’s rich family. Zus (Liev Schreiber), his younger brother, is hot-headed and more reactionary; next come Asael (Jamie Bell), who is adolescent, tender, and nervous, and Aron (George McKay), barely a boy, whose encounter with mass graves leaves him traumatized. They escape together into the Naliboki Forest, a decision that’s almost second nature due to their backgrounds as Jews in Eastern Europe. While the brothers figure out their next move, they encounter other Jews hiding in the forest and quickly form a small community that forages for food and supports one another. Formalizing themselves as the Bielski Otriad (the Russian word for a partisan detachment),22 the community grows after word spreads of their survival.

Conflict arises surrounding the governance and purpose of the otriad as the community formalizes. Zus wants a core aspect of their mission to be killing Germans. Tuvia disagrees, finding military action too risky and contrary to the goal of saving Jews. He’s also worried on moral grounds that they’ll replicate the Nazis’ own rhetoric. “We must not become them.” While they undertake individual raids against German groups and Tuvia does make a trip to kill the police chief who murdered his parents, the men prioritize day-to-day survival for their increasing number of wards.

Aspects of the two men’s professionalism and the hierarchy of the community are core to the film’s plot throughout. Speaking to a romantic interest within the camp, Tuvia explains his backstory: “Before the war my wife—her father –had a business. I mean, before the Race Laws.” We know that Tuvia rented a mill after completing military service in the Polish Army and also ran his wife’s general store. In fact, he feared arrest in the late 1930s due to his “bourgeois capitalist” status.23 Defiance uses the brothers’ professional background and Tuvia’s financial success as a point of implied tension. When they discuss Tuvia’s wife sheltering in a different city early in the movie, for example, Zus laughs, “Your rich wife!” The role of wealthier Jews, especially from professional and elite backgrounds, is used as a plot point by Zwick. Zus derogatorily calls older and posher members of the forest community malbushim,24 and, despite Tuvia’s insistence on supporting them, he dislikes that “they’re precocious Jews, too weak and afraid to fight for themselves.” Moments like this one cement the movie’s theme of professionals hardening under the pressure of the Holocaust and their turning—both literally and metaphorically—into soldiers during wartime.

In the film, professionals’ roles are central to wartime life beyond just the two brothers. In an early scene, for instance, a collaborating Russian police officer is immediately marked as not only a bad person for his murder of the Bielski parents but also a bad professional for seizing a villager’s vodka and drinking while working. His job and character are intertwined, even when the job involves proliferating genocide. In a similar vein, he explains the new Nazi regime to the villager: “Our new bosses are very organized,” he says, “500 rubles for every [Jew] we turn in. The wife doesn’t like these long nights.” Writer Clayton Frohman’s script draws a clear line between traditional workplace complaints about rigid bosses and late nights and the labor done by the non-Germans helping the Nazis stay in power. When Tuvia confronts the officer for his murder of the Bielski parents, the officer meekly shrugs, “It’s my job!” Tuvia spits back, “And you like your job” before killing him.

Later, within the forest community, Defiance further explores how war carries out professional change. As new Jewish arrivals file into the Naliboki camp, an otriad member explains, “Everyone sacrifices for the sake of the collective.” Another member interviews arrivals, asking if there are any useful jobs, such as “carpenters, bootmakers, or seamstresses.”25 An older man announces himself to be a watchmaker, and Tuvia raises an eyebrow: “Can you repair guns?” The man responds in the negative before Tuvia hands him a rifle, asking if he can fix the gun’s trigger. Sure enough, the man inspects it, fixes it, and hands it back to an approving Tuvia, who nods: “You have a new profession!”

Despite this attention to professional change, the film does contain some broader missteps. A prime example is the recurring implication that more Jews could have, or should have, escaped Nazi killings and fought back. When the otriad meets a Soviet military leader, the Russian exclaims, “So the Jews do fight!” Tuvia replies sardonically, “These Jews do.” Later, Zus, frustrated by the lot of his community, mutters, “A Jew can’t drink—a Jew can’t fight—what can we do? Dying, that is what we are good at.” Exchanges like this feed into long-held confusion (which sometimes becomes an explicitly anti-Semitic trope) that Jews “went like sheep to the slaughter” during the Holocaust.26 Even though the rest of the movie centers Jewish resistance, exchanges like these are still unproductive.

Ultimately, Defiance is about everyday people—Jews, businessmen, professionals—rising to the occasion to become soldiers and resist oppression. It is fitting, then, that the film’s epilogue tells us that both Tuvia and Zus survive the war, move to the United States, and become successful businessmen in New York City, running a trucking and taxi company together for more than 30 years. Just as easily as the two men slipped from business management to revolutionary warfighting and survival, so they slipped back—a reminder of the mutability of professional identity in times of need.

The Professional as Insurgent: Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds holds a singular distinction among this list of Holocaust films: it’s “fun.” Such is director Quentin Tarantino’s approach to many hard topics; his whiz-bang auteurism is snappy, hyperviolent, and often fantastical. His entertaining brand of historical revisionism is on display everywhere from a gratuitous interpretation of slavery in the American South in 2012’s Django Unchained to a hypothetical alternative timeline of the Manson family murders in 2019’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. 2009’s Inglourious Basterds27 may be his most audacious film, following several plotlines during Nazi-era Germany. Although two performances tend to dominate popular discourse—Christoph Waltz as Colonel Hans Landa, a terrifying Nazi known as “the Jew hunter”, and Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine, a vigilante Jewish-American Army lieutenant in German-occupied France— the emotional core of the film lies with actress Mélanie Laurent as Jewish cinema proprietor Shosanna Dreyfus, whose arc highlights the role of professionals as insurgents with special opportunities for action.

We first meet Shosanna after an incredibly tense opening scene in which Landa interrogates a French farmer about his harboring of a Jewish family; once Landa confirms this suspicion, officers gun down the family. Only Shosanna escapes. We fast-forward three years and meet Aldo Raine, who is giving an introductory monologue to the “Basterds,” a commando squad of American Jews newly commissioned to kill and terrorize German soldiers behind enemy lines. The speech immediately signals Tarantino’s willingness to depict gleeful violence, a major shift compared to Defiance, in which violence is treated as a regretful last resort, Raine tells his “bushwhackin’ guerilla army” of ten men that he didn’t come to France “to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity! Nazi ain’t got no humanity! They the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass-murderin’ maniac and they needa be destroyed.” In particular, he demands of each soldier “100 Nazi scalps, taken from the heads of 100 dead Nazis!” Pitt’s cartoonish accent and gratuitously violent language betray a new phenomenon for this list of films: the macho American caricature.

While Raine’s Basterds set out on their mission in German-occupied France, we learn that in Paris Shosanna has adopted the name Emmanuelle Mimieux and owns and operates a movie theatre. A deleted scene28 shows the previous owner, an elderly Frenchwoman, asking a young Shosanna: “You want me teach you [how to project film] in order to work here, in order to use my cinema as a hole to hide in?” Work is an escape, and as with the Schindlerjuden,business gives the oppressed an avenue to prove their usefulness. Shoshanna falls squarely within this category.

A young German war hero, Frederick Zoller (played by Daniel Brühl), chances upon the theatre and is immediately taken with Shosanna. He convinces the Nazi establishment to hold the premiere of the movie adaptation of his war exploits, Nation’s Pride, at her theatre. Thus, the professional has an opportunity to become an insurgent. Business owners are given much more leeway than their academic or public-sector counterparts who draw more immediate suspicion, and Shosanna is no different. Speaking with Marcel, her Black projectionist, she proposes an idea: “Burn down the cinema on Nazi night, [and] with a 350-nitrate film print collection, we won’t even need explosives.” And because her role is not just as a business owner and operator but also as an arts industry professional, she adds a cherry on top: “Marcel, my sweet, we're going to make a film. Just for the Nazis.”

While Raine and his men devastate the Nazi ranks, Shosanna and Marcel plan the assassination of Zoller and the rest of the Nazi top brass. At the same time, we are introduced to the third parallel protagonist: British officer Archie Hicox (played by Michael Fassbender), whose military resume tells of three successful undercover operations, and whose pre-war professional role (with typical Tarantino panache) was as a celebrated film critic29 for a publication called Films and Filmmakers. Just as Shosanna’s film expertise and business operation will give her a chance to take down the Reich, it’s revealed that Hicox’s critical background is an unlikely requirement for his own mission: “This little escapade of ours,” explains his superior officer, “requires a knowledge of the German film industry under the Third Reich.” This strange mission is fittingly titled “Operation Kino.”30 Hicox is to rendezvous with the Basterds for the film premier to kill the Nazi leadership gathered there; their point of contact is Bridget Von Hammersmark (played by Diane Kruger), a famous German actress (yet again, someone whose professional stature gives her unprecedented access and a role in the plan).

After more violence and narrative twists, the three plotlines converge on the night of the big premiere. Throughout the dramatic, bloody, explosive conclusion, hints of the importance of the professionalism that got everyone there shine through. In a tense faceoff between Col. Landa and captured Basterds, they ask the Nazi about his nickname, “the Jew Hunter.” He scoffs: “Jew Hunter? I’m a detective. A damn good detective. Finding people is my specialty. So naturally, I worked for the Nazis finding people. And yes, some of them were Jews. But Jew Hunter? Just the name that stuck.” We don’t know Landa’s background before the war; he may really have just been a run-of-the-mill police detective or private investigator who has risen through the Nazi ranks by professional merit. But the euphemism and deflection are a critical part of the implied negotiation between Landa and the Basterds for a post-war pardon. As any good businessman in the 20th century would desire, he wants “property […] on Nantucket Island” waiting for him when he arrives in the US. Even though Landa successfully inks the deal with the American government, the Basterds—our only protagonists who are purely combatants, killing machines avenging the Jewish population—make sure he’s not off as scot-free as he thinks. What can professionals accomplish, and what role does their insurgency have in overcoming oppression? We can’t be sure, but in the blockbuster revenge fantasy laid out in Inglourious Basterds, we know Tarantino believes it might involve a lot of blood.

The Professional as Victim and Perpetrator: Son of Saul
The fact that Son of Saul (Saul Fia in Hungarian) is director László Nemes’ feature directorial debut comes as a triple shock. First, it enjoyed immense success, winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Second, it shows substantial formal vision. The movie was shot on 35mm film with a 40mm lens in Academy aspect ratio, oftentimes mere inches away from actors’ faces, creating a narrow, claustrophobic field of vision and lending many of the shots a frenetic, point-of-view feel.31 In interviews, Nemes discusses many of these formal decisions as “rules” the crew made, including that “this is not a beautiful film, so no beautiful shots” and that always “the camera should be trained at eye level, making it a very subjective experience.”32 The film is only comprised of 85 shots in its 1:47 runtime; an average film has more than a thousand.33 The result of Nemes’ skill is a physical immersion that serves the third, and most shocking, aspect: its material. Son of Saul takes the viewer into a day in the life of a Sonderkommando,34 concentration camp prisoners who were forced to corral new arrivals, aid in gas chamber operations, and dispose of bodies. Therein lies the challenging relevance of the movie to this analysis: when professionalism is required within victimhood.

Son of Saul’s plotis deceptively straightforward. The film opens with a title card in Hungarian defining Sonderkommando—including that “they work no longer than a few months before being executed”—and mentioning an alternative job title: Geheimnisträger, or “bearers of secrets.” We are introduced immediately to Saul (played by Hungarian poet Géza Röhrig), whose bloodied lip, darting eyes, and sunken face suggest recent hardship. Saul waits in a concrete basement chamber, shuffling between people undressing, as a calm but firm German voice monologues: “You're exactly the kind of people we need in our workshops. Everyone gets work and a good salary. After the shower and the hot soup, come directly to me. We need nurses in our hospital. We need craftsman of all kinds. Tablemakers, carpenters, masons, cement workers, mechanics locksmiths, electricians.”

The Nazi deceit rests on the lie that the concentration camp is similar to the forced labor camps to which the Jews would have been accustomed. He leverages the same industrial language of business and “usefulness” to calm the nervous crowd. Of course, it’s a ruse, and, once the heavy iron door shuts, screams begin to emit from the chamber and grow louder. Completely desensitized, the clang of the door and the clamor inside are background noise to Saul as he immediately and mechanically begins picking up all the clothes, searching them for any luxury items, and keeping his thousand-year stare fixed into the distance. As Saul continues throughout his “workday,” the camera remains locked onto his face, leaving the background fuzzy: blurred clothed bodies ushered from the trains, blurred naked living bodies in the undressing room, blurred naked dead bodies in a pile in the gas chamber. These horrors make no sense. Neither does Saul’s own forced complicity, so he disassociates his own life as we see in the out-of-focus backdrop. Professional euphemism is everywhere amongst the laborers in the chambers; Nazi officers scream at Sonderkommandosto “burn the ‘pieces’”—referring to the human remains. The clockwork schedule of the gas chambers gives the men only a minute of downtime before they are told to “get back to work” with a new batch of Jews.

After a grisly killing in the gas chamber, the Sonderkommandos find a boy who has somehow survived. They alert a Nazi doctor, who arrives, takes the boy’s pulse, and then wordlessly suffocates him with his bare hands before instructing his assistant to “open him up.”35 Saul watches this unfold and then hurries to the clinic, where he pleads with the assistant to let him take the boy’s corpse. The assistant says no but, himself a prisoner, is sympathetic and offers five minutes with the boy later that night. Saul rushes to the Sonderkommando’s rabbi in residence and reveals his purpose for asking about the boy: “Rabbi—there’s someone I want to bury!” But the rabbi is just as beaten down as all his fellow forced laborers, and mutters, “Just say the prayer and get rid of it. Do you know the kaddish? I’ll say it. What’s his name? There’s nothing more to do.”

In the camp’s hellish world of forced work, Saul views this response as an abdication of professional responsibility, spitting back, “That’s not enough! You should know. You know it!” When the man refuses, Saul storms off, intent on finding a new rabbi. He hears there may be one “outside,” that is, among the men who work burning bodies in the field. So, he joins a work group there, where he meets a man who is covertly taking photographs of the mass cremation.36

Saul eventually finds the rabbi shoveling ashes into the Soła, and, when this man won’t help either, they scuffle. SS officers intervene, mocking Saul and killing the rabbi. Stuck once again without a rabbi to conduct a Jewish burial, Saul is pulled into a rebellion plot by fellow Sonderkommandos, for which he has to go to the women’s camp in Kanada and get a package of explosives. Under the cover of night, he uses the opportunity to search for a new rabbi amongst a new group of Jewish arrivals who are being led into the woods and indiscriminately executed. Believing he’s found one, Saul smuggles the man into their bunks and explains that the dead boy is actually his son. Although we don’t know if this is true—a fellow Sonderkommando believes it is not—Saul goes to bed looking forward to the burial. But the next day, the rebellion begins, and Saul must escape.

Throughout its runtime, Son of Saul handles the Sonderkommando’s role through one man’s eyes alone. This creates a level of ambiguity that is critical to the film’s perspective, namely how the horrors of the Holocaust blurred lines among perpetrators, victims, witnesses, and bystanders, often making people play more than one role at once. Historically, fellow inmates disliked the Sonderkommando; in the camps, they were seen as “unclean,” and survivor Primo Levi asserted that they were “akin to collaborators.”37 At a screening of Son of Saul in Berlin, an Auschwitz survivor recounted: “We hated them more than we hated the Germans, because they were from my people […] and they lent a hand in the killing process.” Seen one way, there’s no doubt they are complicit. The men clock in and do their job every day. In one scene, as Saul staggers around looking for the boy’s corpse, he runs into two fellow laborers, who shove him and snap, “You’re the day shift. Get lost!” Throughout the film, an Oberkapo named Biederman is especially brutal to other Jews, even though he’s one of the leaders of the planned uprising. In one particularly telling spat between the German Biederman and a Jewish “equal,” Biederman sucker-punches the man and spits, “Jewish rat,” underscoring the complex hierarchy among prison functionary roles, religion, race, and the constantly shifting power dynamics between the men vis-à-vis their jobs.

On the other hand, Sonderkommandosare obviously also victims. The same survivor from the Berlin premiere went on to explain that it wasn’t until many years after the Holocaust that he realized that the Sonderkommandos’“suffering was much greater, much deeper, much more profound than my suffering.”38 Indeed, at Cannes, actor Géza Röhrig vehemently disputed a journalist’s claim that the men were “half-victim, half hangman”, saying rather, “They are 100% victims. They have not spilled blood or been involved in any sort of killing. They were inducted on arrival under the threat of death. They had no control of their destinies. They were as victimized as any other prisoners in Auschwitz.”39 Either way, Son of Saul presents a protagonist who, due to the demands of his (forced) job, operates in a far more morally gray zone than any of the ones explored by this analysis up to this point. The professionalism highlights the level of tragedy too; Saul is so robotically efficientin his role, shifting automatically from sponging up blood to clearing the shoes of the newly murdered. It is heartbreaking when we learn that he was just a watchmaker in the unimaginably distant past before Auschwitz. The profession seems cruelly poetic, though, as we observe his tightly wound motions, like those of an automaton.

Son of Saul leaves the reality of simultaneous victimhood and perpetration unresolved. Can one man be both? Even as Saul is subjected to horrific treatment— and we are told that he’s likely next in line to be gassed—he singularly focuses on burying a young boy’s lifeless body. He does so perhaps too markedly, jeopardizing the rebellion in the process. One of the last lines of the film, from another Hungarian to Saul, reinforces this ambiguity: “You sacrificed the living to save the dead.” Even within the Sonderkommandos, blame is an open question.

The Professional as Professional: The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece The Zone of Interest is a cinematic departure in more ways than one. Its plot is intentionally barebones compared to the 126 speaking parts and 30,000 extras in Schindler’s List;40 its tone is decidedly un-Hollywood when compared with the sentimentality of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas or the grandiose biblical allusions of Defiance; it doesn’t show us the fantasy wartime violence of Inglourious Basterds or the all-too-real concentration camp horror of Son of Saul. Instead, it presents the day-to-day domestic life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his family. With a screenplay based on a Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, the hauntingly minimalist production was an immediate critical success, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards (like Son of Saul almost a decade prior), as well as the nomination for Best Picture and a host of other year-end awards. And while those five other features all bestowed some status onto the professional–hero, family member, soldier, insurgent, victim and perpetrator—The Zone of Interest minces no words. Professionals, at the end of the day, are just that: professionals. Their complicity in the Holocaust (as in every other modern atrocity) is almost a given. This bleakly matter-of-fact interpretation, unfortunately, best reflects the field learnings from our FASPE trip: that vast and almost total complicity of businesspeople, lawyers, and technologists was a central hinge of the Nazis’ genocidal project.

Commandant Höss (Christian Friedel) lives in the eponymous 40-square-kilometer “zone of interest”, the patrolled administrative area around the Auschwitz complex. His family’s stucco, white home is picturesque, manicured, and simple, and a high wall separates it from the horrors of the camp on the other side. To fully immerse the viewer in his family’s psychological state— including that of his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five young children—we never see past that wall.

Unlike how he’s presented as a character in Schindler’s List thirty years prior (shadowy, bribe-taking, stern, powerful), here Höss is just a professional going about his business. Hedwig keeps a closely tended garden, the children play in a backyard waterslide, and various family members and friends cycle through for social engagements. The film is a slice of life, with static cameras observing the relaxed and domestic bustle of the household, such as when Hedwig’s mom visits, when Rudolf learns of a big promotion, or an extramarital affair is briefly glimpsed. Rudolf is unflappable in his dutiful professionalism, fatherly concerns, and careerist ambition. When the movie ends, we can’t be sure if anything has changed at all in the mindsets or worldviews of any of the characters.

Rather than plot, it’s the subtext-rich script and deft filmmaking toolkit that Glazer and his crew employ that fill in the 95-minute runtime with direct and indirect information about the extent of the evil just offscreen. Chief among these tools is the audio. Sound designers Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers did their research, collecting more than six hundred pages of Auschwitz witness and survivor testimonies about sound at the camp.41 They then applied that research by building a sound library that took over a year to complete. It includes distant barking dogs and gunshots, muted yells and unintelligible screams, churning and chugging machinery, and the screeching metal of trains and crematoria. The auditory horror implies the incomprehensible violence that is never shown but which is the backdrop for the quotidian goings-on. It’s particularly stomach-churning when a series of rifles is fired or a furnace roars up, while the family enjoys a wholesome breakfast chat or a pleasant garden teatime, reflecting the hardened hearts of anyone involved in carrying out the Holocaust.

The power of sound in conveying the absolutely all-encompassing landscape of death and despair evolved organically from the film’s message: sound designer Burn describes how “The script had five or six references to sounds the audience hears from over the wall, but ultimately, we realized those sounds needed to be a constant presence throughout the movie.”42 The same is true for the cinematography, led by Lukasz Zal, which frames the bleached walls and simple wooden furniture of the house with enough negative space to feel safely confined, even as we understand the vastness of the pain and death just out of reach.

The accomplishments of the crew contribute a sense of dread to the script’s euphemisms, with its considerable use of the faux racial “science,” hyper-sterilized language, and shared businesslike implications—all part and parcel of the Nazi genocide. The professional activities of The Zone of Interest are particularly harrowing due to their seeming mundanity. From the perspective of potential unethical activity from businesspeople, the film’s first example of this dual reality is also its most memorable. Rudolf, along with a fellow SS officer, and two civilians carry briefcases and rolled-up blueprints through the villa garden, make small talk about their train journey. The exchange indicates familiarity: the fellow SS officer nods, “welcome back!” and one civilian responds, “we’re glad to be here.” They make their way into the house and take their seats around a table, unfurling the blueprints. What commences is grotesque in its instant recognizability: a sales pitch. We learn from a blueprint logo that the civilians are men from J. A. Topf & Söhne, the prestigious engineering firm which was the largest of twelve companies that designed and built gas chamber ventilation systems and concentration camp crematorium ovens.43 They jump right into the meeting, explaining the intricacy of their innovative new design to Rudolf and his comrade: “The other side of it is the next chamber. In here is the next load ready to burn, once the ‘pieces’ in here,” he says pointing with a pen, “have been completely incinerated.”44 Rudolf’s interest is piqued: “In how long?”

The two salesmen realize they’ve hooked him in and start reeling: “Seven hours. Four to five hundred at once,” says one. Not to be outdone, the other chimes in, “closer to five hundred!” He hands it back:

So, once that’s happened, you close this chimney. Then simultaneously open the next. The fire will follow the air, through this baffle of course, into this chamber and burn this load. In each case, the chamber directly opposite the fire zone, which is burning at around a thousand degrees, has by now cooled to around forty degrees. Cool enough to unload the ash then reload pieces.

The explanation is smooth and the handoffs between the two men well-choreographed; they’ve done this before and understand their customer. The euphemisms need no explanation, but, once the camera cuts to the blueprint’s illustrated chimneys and architectural key, we understand that what he’s describing is co-creating a new product explicitly for the camp (this is historically accurate: Topf employees filed for a patent in 1942 for a “continuous operation corpse incineration oven for mass use”).45 As the realization dawns on us, Rudolf becomes visibly more engaged. The entire scene is disturbingly indistinguishable from a 21st-century account manager selling a new piece of tech to a legacy client. Meanwhile, throughout the house call, Hedwig entertains women in the next room, a portrait of gendered domesticity, disturbed only mildly by a discussion of Hedwig’s friend pilfering clothes looted from “some little Jewess half her size.”

Beyond the crematorium salesmen, the rest of The Zone of Interest continues to convey the massive nature of the business community’s complicity. This unflinching look at the core failures of ethical professionalism during the Holocaust is more damning than those seen in any of the prior works. In a letter to Reichsleiter Bormann,46 an ally of Höss’s discusses the downsides of his proposed transfer in terms of a decline in Auschwitz’s industrial efficiency: “Comrade Höss has made unprecedented achievements over four years of painstaking work; I witnessed the construction of this great camp close up so can attest.” Even here, the film hammers home the deep intertwinement of the Nazi military apparatus and its private-sector counterparts, as the ally highlights Höss ’s “close contacts with the Silesian armaments industry” and the “groundbreaking ideas [Höss has brought] to the whole field of KL practice.”47

Furthering that last thought, the letter of recommendation closes on a modern professional commendation one would receive in academia or engineering: “His particular strength is turning theory into practice.” Later in the film, when Hedwig’s mother visits, she discusses a couple she met on the train from Germany who are moving to Auschwitz for a job at a new Siemens factory; after all, she says, “all the big companies are here!” In a private moment between Hedwig and her mother, Hedwig gushes about her husband, “he’s fine! Working nonstop, even when he’s home. Which he loves! Nonstop. Pressure like you wouldn’t believe.” To be meaningful, a husband’s job must be time consuming.

When the letter of recommendation doesn’t work and Rudolf is to be transferred away from the camp, Hedwig gets upset. He has no better explanation than just that the move is a result of drably corporate “structural changes.” But just as he’s pulled away due to “work,” so is their future tied to a far more idyllic dream career. As Hedwig promises, “after the war, we’ll farm, like we said.” But in the present, Höss has a job to do, and it is not farming. He reaches back out to the crematorium salesmen in fawning admiration: “Bischoff and I both agree the ring crematorium is definitely the answer. What a difference it will make—bravo! I welcome your suggestion that the design should be patented in order to secure priority; I will follow up with a letter of intent.”

As with any good business relationship, he implies that his new promotion could be mutually beneficial, closing his dictated letter, “although it pains me to leave Auschwitz, I believe I’ll be in a better position to push for funds and materials from there.” His current job is closer to his heart, but it’s always best to follow the money. Höss knows this better than anyone, learning from countless Nazi leadership meetings such as one where a peer is promoted “for consistently hitting his labor targets,” and celebrated for his service to industry. A superior exclaims, “I get fan mail from CEOs for this man!” Post-promotion, Höss leans into the Nazis’ corporatism, addressing the “significant and converging challenges at every operational level” involved in the Hungarian Jewish genocide with bulleted agendas including “timings,” “redirection of construction resources,” and “prisoner workers.” For the last item, Rudolf invites an outside consultant, a man from large auto manufacturer Steyr-Daimler-Puch, to discuss “pay rates and incentives.” At every step, business thrives.

An audaciously open-ended final scene concludes the film as quickly as it began. And even though it builds on its filmic predecessors, such as in its extensive use of euphemistic ethical fading, The Zone of Interest stands alone in its grasp and communication of the absolute ubiquity of business complicity in the Holocaust. Glazer understands that from 1933-1945, German professionals overwhelmingly stood by and profited from Nazi atrocities, in many cases going so far as to actively perpetuate them for personal and professional gain.

* * * * *

Although these six films reflect thirty years of diverse and evolving perspectives on the role of business, industry, and broader professional conduct in and during the Holocaust, each resoundingly confirms the importance of our responsibility as professionals to behave ethically and as people to reflect on—and to learn from—the mistakes of our collective past.

Cameron Davis was a 2024 FASPE Business Fellow. He is currently a graduate student pursuing a dual-degree MBA at MIT Sloan and MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Notes

  1. “Blitzkrieg Bop – Ramones”, Genius, 2024.
  2. Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Dunkirk. The other three are Wonder Woman, American Sniper, and Gone with the Wind. Internet Movie Database (IMDb), 2024.
  3. “Top Grossing Director at the Worldwide Box Office”, The Numbers, Nash Information Services, 2024.
  4. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Sound of Music (1965), Patton (1970), Schindler's List (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
  5. “What is left of the Hilberg’s Triad ‘Perpetrators-Victims-Bystanders’?” Jewish Historical Institute,
  6. April 25, 2013.
  7. Discussed at length in Berlin and Krakow during FASPE, and covered in excellent detail in recent
  8. articles such as Tobias Buck, “The fight for Germany’s ‘memory culture’”, Financial Times, March 9 2024.
  9. Jenny Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Postwar Germany, Cambridge University Press, August 2017.
  10. Michael Rothberg, “Lived multidirectionality: ‘Historikerstreit 2.0’ and the politics of Holocaust memory”, Memory Studies, November 30, 2022.
  11. Vicki Lawrence, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung: Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past”, AGNI, 1998.
  12. Perhaps most infamously, “headcount reduction” for “mass layoffs.” Some particularly memorable academic material on the subject from our coursework was found in the session on language and ethical fading.
  13. Who will appear as the main character in Zone of Interest thirty years later!
  14. An aside: this brief rant is also the closest that Schindler’s List gets to accentuating the mass business and legal complicity of German society in the Holocaust. Each of the components of the list is produced by a business or regulated by a lawyer. And while there are quick namedrops elsewhere in the film to I. G. Farben, or ammunition manufacturers, the glimpse of the essentially universal profiteering off the war effort found in Göth’s rant is unique in a story that, for the most part, keeps its lens narrowly focused on Schindler and his activities.
  15. “Group 3: Julius Madtrisch and Raimund Tisch”, Yad Vashem
  16. “Ludmilla Page describes sabotage during production of munitions in Oskar Schindler’s factory in Brunnlitz”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, March 11, 1992.
  17. “John Boyne Biography”, JohnBoyne.com, 2024.
  18. “Third Data Release—The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in English Secondary Schools”, UCL Centre for Holocaust Education’s Continuity and Change Research Study, University College London, 2016.
  19. Andrew Lapin, “Author has no regrets releasing sequel to controversial ‘Boy in the Striped Pajamas’”,
  20. The Times of Israel, December 6, 2022.
  21. “Disney's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas—The stuff of nightmares”, The Scotsman, September 10, 2008.
  22. Carole Green, “Profiles: Mark Herman”, BBC, October 9, 2008.
  23. It’s implied that Shmuel is in “Kanada”, the still-under-construction segment of the camp we saw during the FASPE program tour, but the lack of guard presence is misleading nonetheless.
  24. This is a point of debate between the book’s author and the movie’s director and the academic community. However, records show only about 600 boys in the Auschwitz records and estimate that more than 100,000 were murdered directly on arrival, making the plot device extremely unlikely.
  25. “Tuvia Bielski”, Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, United States Holocaust Memorial
  26. Museum, 2018.
  27. Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, Oxford University Press, 1993.
  28. “Clothes” or “clothing”—in Hebrew script, ַמלּבֹוִׁשים. It’s not clear where the insult lies: it may be about the fact that the people are “dead weight” worth no more than their shirts and pants; it may be about their suits and dresses being particularly fancy or expensive, representing their higher class.
  29. Defiance, The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb).
  30. “The Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education”, Pacific Lutheran University, 2019.
  31. Both words in the title are intentionally misspelled, in what Tarantino has called a “Quentin
  32. Tarantino spelling”.
  33. Inglourious Basterds, The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb).
  34. A fun side note on Tarantino’s running interest in metatextual references to film criticism: until this year, Tarantino’s tenth and final film was going to be called The Movie Critic, although production fell apart this spring. For more: Borys Kit, Pamela McClintock, and James Hibberd, “How Quentin
  35. Tarantino’s ‘The Movie Critic’ Fell Apart”, The Hollywood Reporter, April 23, 2024.
  36. Kino is German for “cinema” or “the art of moviemaking.”
  37. See the photograph accompanying the article cited here; that proximity between the camera and actor is very challenging, and heavily contributes to the film’s feel. Gregg Kilday, “How ‘Son of Saul’ Defied the Dangers of Re-Creating the Holocaust”, The Hollywood Reporter, November 16, 2015.
  38. Zhuo-Ning Su, “Son of Saul Director László Nemes on Capturing a Portrait of Hell and the Spiritual
  39. Experience of Cannes”, The Film Stage, October 8, 2015.
  40. Greg Miller, “Data from a Century of Cinema Reveals How Movies Have Evolved”, Wired, September 8, 2014.
  41. German for “special unit”—an example of wartime Nazi euphemism.
  42. An instance that—like other scenes in both this movie and Schindler’s List – could be an important
  43. teaching tool for FASPE Medical cohort colleagues.
  44. Inspired by the real Sonderkommando photographs taken by a Greek Jew named Alex, as learned during FASPE.
  45. Jacqueline Shields, “Concentration Camps: The Sonderkommando”, Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2024.
  46. Toby Axelrod, “Is Germany ready for ‘Son of Saul’s up-close Holocaust experience?”, The Times of Israel, February 29, 2016.
  47. Catherine Shoard, “Son of Saul's astonishing recreation of Auschwitz renews Holocaust debate”, The Guardian, May 15, 2015.
  48. Anne Thompson, “From the EW archives: How Steven Spielberg brought Schindler's List to life”,
  49. Entertainment Weekly, January 21, 1994.
  50. Jake Kring-Schreifels, “Sounds that Cannot Be Unheard: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on The Zone of Interest”, Filmmaker Magazine, December 15, 2023.
  51. Jason Struss, “Creating the sound of death: How The Zone of Interest brings the Holocaust to chilling
  52. life”, Digital Trends, December 19, 2023.
  53. “Topf and Sons: An ‘Ordinary Company’”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2024.
  54. Patrick Hipes, “The Zone of Interest: Read The Screenplay For Jonathan Glazer’s Searing Holocaust Drama About Humans’ Capacity For Evil”, Deadline, January 9, 2024.
  55. Jan van Pelt Robert, “5 Sinnreich Erdacht: machines of mass incineration in fact, fiction, and forensics”, Destruction and human remains: Disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence, Oxford University Press, January 22, 2015.
  56. Reichsleiter translates to “national leader” or “Reich leader”; Martin Bormann was one of the few
  57. men elevated to the position, which was the second-highest political rank in the Nazi Party.
  58. KL here is the abbreviation of Konzentrationslager, or “concentration camp.”
  59. For example, Plaque F19, one of the shortest, remembers Jeanine Cahen, who at one year old, was deported with her mother and grandmother. “Jeanine Cahen avait 1 an. Elle était née le 1er Janvier 1943 à Marseille ou elle vivait 9, rue Lafayette. Elle a été déportée avec sa mère, son père, et sa grand-mère par le convoi n. 74 du 20 mai 1944.” (Jeanine Cahen was one year old. She was born on Jan. 1st 1943 in Marseille where she lived at 9 Lafayette Street. She was deported with her mother, father, and grandmother on convoy 74 of May 20, 1944.”
  60. The French for “arrest” (arreter) also translates to “to stop,” though the context here suggests that it denotes the legal principle.
  61. Memorialization of the Holocaust, and other tragedies, is sometimes alleged to be used for political purposes, even when the usage is at odds with fact. See, e.g., Joanna Kakissis, Controversy Surrounds Planned Hungarian Holocaust Museum, NPR (Feb. 6, 2019), https://www.npr.org/2019/02/06/691909937/controversy-surrounds-planned-hungarian-holocaust-museum (Hungarian memorialization of the Holocaust); Paresh Dave, Solider who may have shot Pat Tillman haunted by remorse, LOS ANGELES TIMES, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2014-apr-20-la-na-nn-pat-tillman-soldier-10-years-remorse-20140420-story.html (discussing the U.S. military’s attempts to retroactively paint a friendly fire incident as a heroic death against combat forces).
  62. Cf., Cheryl Corley, In Some States, Your 6-Year-Old Child Can Be Arrested. Advocates Want that Changed. NPR (May 2, 2022), https://www.npr.org/2022/05/02/1093313589/states-juvenile-minimum-age-arrested-advocates-change.
  63. Image available at: https://shoahpresquile.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/03locauxjuifsvacantsadml97w40.jpg.
  64. Id.
  65. Id.
  66. See, e.g., O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, 851 F.3d 69 (2017) (Circuit Judge Baron writing, in approving a settlement in a dispute in which the critical issue was interpretation of an oxford comma, “for want of a comma, we have this case.”).
  67. Bruce Ching, Echoes of 9/11: Rhetorical Analysis of Presidential Statements in the “War on Terror” 51 SETON HALL. L. REV. 431, 442 (2020).
  68. Id. (“Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers justified [the shift] by positing that going forward, the effort of the U.S. and its allies would be ‘more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military.’”) (citing Eric Schmitt & Thom Shanker, U.S. Officials Retool Slogan for Terror War, N.Y. TIMES (July 26, 2005), https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/26/politics/us-officials-retool-slogan-for-terror-war.html.).
  69. Id. at 442-443 (suggesting that the Bush Administration shifted away from the more powerfully all-consuming war footing because the new phrase “would not highlight ‘the failure of the president’s war policy’—in contrast to ‘the war frame [that] includes an end to the war—winning the war, mission accomplished!”).
  70. Ari Shapiro, Obama Team Stops Saying ‘Global War on Terror’ But Doesn’t Stop Waging It, NPR (Mar. 11, 2013), https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/03/11/174034634/obama-team-stops-saying-global-war-on-terror-but-doesnt-stop-waging-it.
  71. Average monthly boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq increased every year from FY2003 to FY2008, with the exception of a 1% annual decrease in FY2006, and peaked in FY2008 at 187,900. See Amy Belasco, Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, FY2001-FY2012: Cost and Other Potential Issues, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, at 9 (July 2, 2009), avail. at https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf.
  72. Jessica Purkiss & Jack Serle, Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush, BUR. OF INVEST. J. (Jan. 17, 2017), https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in-numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush. See generally Elodie O. Currier, After Action: The U.S. Drone Program’s Expansion of International Law Justification for Use of Force Against Imminent Threats, 76 VAND. L. REV. 259, 287-282 (2023) (discussing shifts in drone policy between the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations).
  73. Frigaliment Importing Co. v. B.N.S. International Sales Corp., 190 F. Supp. 116 (1960).
  74. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon v. Babbitt, 17 F.3d 1463, 1465 (D.C. Cir. 1994), rev’d. 115 S. Ct. 2407 (1995).
  75. See generally, Elodie O. Currier, Myth of Anonymity: De-Identified Data As Legal Fiction, 54 N.M. L. Rev., 17-30 (forthcoming 2024).
  76. Carl Jung uses “syzygy” to denote two opposing traits that are “yoked together” or unified. See, e.g., C.G. Jung, The Syzygy: Anima & Animus, in COLLECTED WORKS OF C.G. JUNG, VOL. 9 (PT. 2) (Princeton, 1969).
  77. RSPO, RSPO Trademark Ranks Among Top 12 Food Ecolabels, RSPO (May 24, 2022), https://rspo.org/rspo-trademark-ranks-among-top-12-food-ecolabels/.
  78. RSPO, Our Trademark, RSPO (last visited July 9, 2023), https://rspo.org/as-an-organisation/our-trademark/.
  79. RSPO, 2018 PRINCIPLES AND CRITERIA FOR THE PRODUCTION OF SUSTAINABLE PALM OIL (2018), at 14.
  80. Roberto Cazzolla Gatti & Alena Velichevskaya, Certified “Sustainable” Palm Oil Took the Place of Endangered Bornean and Sumatran Large Mammals Habitat and Tropical Forests in the Last 30 Years, 742 SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT 140712 (2020).
  81. Id. at 71 (“The size of a landscape may be determined by identifying the watershed or the geographical land unit containing a cluster of interacting ecosystems; (b) selecting a unit size that encompasses the plantation concession and a buffer of the surrounding area (e.g. 50,000 ha or 100,000 ha); or (c) using a radius of 5 km from the area of interest (for instance, the planned concession.”)
  82. Id. at 46-47.
  83. Id. at 65.
  84. Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Natasha Singere, Michael H. Keller & Aaron Krolik, Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, And They’re Not Keeping it Secret, N.Y. TIMES (Dec. 10, 2018) https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur. While Facebook and Google’s claims that they do not sell location data may be legally accurate, compliance with those claims do not prevent the platforms from using location data to create a more detailed (and more valuable) profile of your habits, nor do they preclude internal use to track ad performance. Id.
  85. John Yoo, MEMORANDUM FOR WILLIAM HAYES II, GENERAL COUNSEL OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (Mar. 14, 2003), avail at https://www.aclu.org/documents/memo-regarding-torture-and-military-interrogation-alien-unlawful-combatants-held-outside at 41 (among other claims, writing that “Because the presence of good faith would negate the specific intent element of torture [a good faith claim that the inflictor did not intend to cause prolonged mental suffering] is a complete defense to such a charge.”)
  86. A 2021 study published in the journal Cognition shows that use of euphemistic language improves public approval for unpopular actions while avoiding perceptions that the speaker is being dishonest. See Alexander C. Walker, Martin Harry Turpin, Ethan A. Meyers, Jennifer A. Stolz, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, & Derek J. Koehler, Controlling the Narrative: Euphamistic Language Affects Judgements of Actions While Avoiding Perceptions of Dishonesty, 211 Cognition 104633, 9-11 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104633.
  87. Maschmann at 59 (“I did not read the Nuremberg Laws […] until I had to give a course on them at a Labour Service camp. Previously I had been satisfied with a very imprecise knowledge of tehir contents. Doubtless this is because I did not want to know exactly what they contained. I did not want to be obliged to think about it.”); Id. at 105 (Here, as there, a different attitude could perhaps have lead to suicidal consequences. If I had inquired further, I would have become inextricably entangled in conflicts which would have caused the total collapse of my ‘world.’ Clearly our subconscious energies and I can speak here for many of my companions were fully concentrated on protecting us from such crises.”)
  88. Theda C. Snyder, How Euphemisms Improve Your Lawyering, ATTORNEY AT WORK (May 30, 2022), https://www.attorneyatwork.com/how-euphemisms-improve-your-lawyering/ (“The sister [in a eulogy] said that [decedent] maintained an “air of innocence” throughout her life . . . In fact, [decedent] was a total airhead.”).
  89. Id. (cautioning that non-euphemistic phrases like “lied” are “guaranteed to antagonize opposing counsel.”)
  90. The line between euphemism and trauma-informed language is somewhat blurry: even guides on journalistic coverage and social work seem to blend the two. See, e.g., Isobel Thompson, Dart Center Style Guide for Trauma-Informed Journalism, DART CTR. FOR JOURNALISM & TRAUMA (last visited Jul. 7, 2023), https://dartcenter.org/resources/dart-center-style-guide; Screening and Assessment in TRAUMA-INFORMED CARE IN BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SERVICES (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment 2014), avail. at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207188/.