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===Overview=== {{Further|Operation Reinhard}} The film is concerned chiefly with three topics: the [[Chełmno extermination camp]], where mobile [[Nazi gas van|gas van]]s were first used by Germans to exterminate Jews; the death camps of [[Treblinka extermination camp|Treblinka]] and [[Auschwitz concentration camp|Auschwitz-Birkenau]]; and the [[Warsaw ghetto]], with testimonies from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators. The sections on Treblinka include testimony from Abraham Bomba, who survived as a barber;<ref name="Video Archive">{{cite web |url=http://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/past/2001-2002/witness-and-technique-interview-in-claude-lanzmann2019s-shoah |author=William Baker |title=Abraham Bomba: Witness and Technique |publisher=University of California, Davis campus |work=Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection |date=September 2005 |access-date=6 September 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140907010437/http://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/past/2001-2002/witness-and-technique-interview-in-claude-lanzmann2019s-shoah |archive-date=7 September 2014 |url-status=dead }}</ref> [[Richard Glazar]], an inmate; and [[Franz Suchomel]], an [[SS]] officer. Bomba breaks down while describing how he came across the wife and sister of a barber friend of his while cutting hair in the gas chamber.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://wearcam.org/envirotech/undressing_and_cutting_off_hair.htm | title=Excerpt 3 from Shoah }}</ref> This section includes [[#Gawkowski|Henryk Gawkowski]], who drove [[Holocaust train|transport trains]] while intoxicated with vodka. Gawkowski's photograph appears on the poster used for the film's marketing campaign. Testimonies on Auschwitz are provided by [[Rudolf Vrba]], who escaped from the camp before the end of the war;<ref name=Vrbainterview>[https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=5009 "Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Rudolf Vrba"], Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.</ref> and [[Filip Müller]], who worked in an incinerator burning the bodies from the gassings. Müller recounts what prisoners said to him and describes the experience of personally going into the gas chamber: bodies were piled up by the doors "like stones". He breaks down as he recalls the prisoners starting to sing while being forced into the gas chamber. Accounts include some from local villagers, who witnessed trains heading daily to the camp and returning empty; they quickly guessed the fate of those on board. [[File:Jan Karski - Instytut w Rudzie Śląskiej.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Jan Karski]] was interviewed by Lanzmann in the winter of 1978–1979 in Washington, D.C.<ref name=Karskiinterview/>]] Lanzmann also interviews bystanders. He asks whether they knew what was going on in the death camps. Their answers reveal that they did, but they justified their inaction by their fear of death. Two survivors of Chełmno are interviewed: [[Simon Srebnik]], who was forced to sing military songs to entertain the Nazis; and [[Mordechaï Podchlebnik]]. Lanzmann also has a secretly filmed interview with Franz Schalling, a German security guard, who describes the workings of Chełmno. Walter Stier, a former Nazi bureaucrat, describes the workings of the railways. Stier insists he was simply managing railroad traffic and was not aware that he was transporting Jews directly to their deaths, though he admits to being aware that the destinations were concentration camps. The Warsaw ghetto is described by [[Jan Karski]], a member of the [[Polish Underground]] who worked for the [[Polish government-in-exile]], and Franz Grassler, a Nazi administrator in Warsaw who liaised with Jewish leaders. A Christian, Karski sneaked into the Warsaw ghetto and travelled using false documents to England to try to convince the Allied governments to intervene more strongly on behalf of the Jews.<ref name=Karskiinterview>[https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=4739 "Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection, Interview with Jan Karski"], Washington, D.C.: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.{{pb}} Also see Jan Karski, ''Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World'', Georgetown University Press, 2014 [1944].</ref> Memories from Jewish survivors of the [[Warsaw Ghetto uprising]] conclude the documentary. Lanzmann also interviews Holocaust historian [[Raul Hilberg]], who discusses the significance of Nazi propaganda against the European Jews and the Nazi development of the [[Final Solution]] and a detailed analysis of railroad documents showing the transport routes to the death camps. The complete text of the film was published in 1985.
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