Death's-Head Revisited

I just watched the 1961 Twilight Zone Episode, Death's-Head Revisited, about a Nazi SS Officer who returns to Dachau, where he was captain, to revel in nostalgia. It was first aired in November of 1961, just a few months after the Eichmann Trial came to an end. The trial was aired on new programs internationally, lasting from April to August of 1961. Death's-Head Revisited clearly reverberates with the message to "never forget" and with a call for justice and retribution.

Captain Lutze, wandering Dachau alone, is confronted by camp prisoners who he was responsible for torturing and killing, and put on trial by them for his "crimes against humanity." He is found guilty and sentenced to a life of insanity where he must bear the agony (both physical and mental) of the crimes he committed. Though he and others reveal their wish for the past to be put in the past, the ultimate message is that the past needs to be retained and maintained in our memories. Those who died and suffered in the camps cannot leave it behind them and neither should the general public or Captain Lutze, especially.

The opening narration includes a scathing description of Nazis which is echoed again further into the episode in the dialogue between Lutze and Becker, a victim of the camp. Lutze is qualified as "a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the Earth without a heart." There is no room for ambiguity in the characterization of Nazis or the SS here, though we often hear of acts of kindness or compassion in survivor testimony, as in George Gottlieb's testimony from the Shoah Foundation archive, where he talks about the opportunity granted by an SS Officer for he and his brother to go looking for their mother with a bag of food. This media portrayal of the Nazi as the epitome of evil is certainly easier for an American public to understand, especially in terms of support for survivors and retribution.

The witness, through the Eichmann Trial, came into a position of newfound respect and legitimacy. The ultimate witness in Death's-Head Revisited is Becker, the murdered victim who is able to return to speak to the living, Lutze, but also, through the medium of a television show, to the American public. He is the voice of the dead and he speaks eloquently about what has been lost in the camp and what continues to be denied. It seems, then, that the witness takes on a dual role of speaking for himself and for those who cannot speak. The fictionalized witness presented by the media, as is the case of Death's-Head Revisited and other television shows such as the Holocaust miniseries, can allow for "the dead" to "speak." Of course, this creates a problem of voice and a history which Wieviorka discusses at length in regards to historians and the media. There is an anxiety of the witness of being dispossesed of history because it is being told by someone who has not experienced it firsthand and yet speaks of it as if he had. This Twilight Zone episode again brings that issue into discussion.