Getting Away With Murder(s)

Almost 1 million people in 22 countries carried out the unprovoked murder of 11 million innocent men, women and children. 99% of those responsible were never prosecuted; most were never even questioned. The Allies knew what their crime was. The Allies knew where a great many of the murderers could be found - Germany, Austria, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, and numerous countries in South America. The Allies had an endless wealth of evidence to present to the courts. The Allies unanimously agreed to prosecute those responsible when they drew up The London Agreement in August 1945. But, after the late 1940s, these very same Allies did almost nothing. Why?

Director David Wilkinson’s sole motivation for making GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER(S) was to find out precisely why so many were actively permitted to get away with their crime(s) – the crime of mass murder on an industrial scale.

A simple question. He knew long before he began filming that the answer would be more than complex. Wilkinson’s journey takes him all over the UK, then to Ireland, the USA, the killing fields of Lithuania, Latvia and the Czech Republic, to the infamous death camp Auschwitz - Birkenau in Poland, Austria, France and, of course, Germany.

The narrative leads with interviews, including with the 100-year-old Benjamin B Ferencz who is the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Professor Mary Fulbrook, Dr Dan Plesch, Holocaust survivors Kitty Hart-Moxon, Malka Levine, Arek Hersh, Nazi hunter Dr Stephen Ankier, British broadcaster and writer Robin Lustig, German prosecutor Jens Rommel, Holocaust educator and campaigner Philip Rubenstein and Holocaust memorial cofounder and humanitarian campaigner Dr James Smith.

Rating: 15
Genre: Documentary
Director: David Wilkinson
Stars: Prof Mary Fulbrook, Dr Dan Plesch, Philip Rubenstein, Dr James Smith, Benjamin Ferencz, Julian Glover (voice), Dame Eileen Atkins (voice)

"Released to coincide with the 75th anniversary of sentencing at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, this epic documentary asks some troubling questions...in an understandably gruelling yet thought-provoking film."
Tom Dawson, Total Film  ★★★★

"A strikingly ambitious work about the Holocaust...The key fact that needs to be stated about this film is that it finds its creator David Wilkinson carrying on where the great Claude Lanzmann's Shoah left off...Getting Away with Murder(s) shows twice over that there is still fresh ground to be covered...This is a film that has no time for arguments that what was done was too long ago to matter now and that the perpetrators, if still alive, are so old that pursuing them any longer is misguided. Wilkinson clearly resents it that statutes of limitations can prevent fresh prosecutions."
Mansel Stimpson, Film Review Daily ★★★★