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In many places and for many people, the legacy of World War II still hangs heavy. The war in both the Pacific and Europe ended by the early fall of 1945, but several of the countries involved remained caught in desperate power plays for decades afterward (some formerly Soviet block countries still are). But for many, the longest shadows cast by the war are the inexpressibly dark remembrances of the Holocaust, filled with dismayed wonder at how such a catastrophe ever happened. Philippe Sands is a lawyer and professor of international law at University College London. The author of several books, in 2012 Sands took on the task of writing about The Nuremberg Trials. In the process, he met Niklas Frank, the son of prominent Nazi governor, Hans Frank. Niklas introduced Sands to Horst von Wächter, son of Otto von Wächter, another prominent Nazi. What Sands — a Jew whose grandfather barely survived...

Exclusive: Mythology Entertainment, the growing production company run by Brad Fischer, Laeta Kalogridis and James Vanderbilt, has hired Jon Silk to the post of executive vice president of Production and Development. He will help the two-year old company handle a growing volume of film, TV and theater projects, and he will hunt for more properties to develop. Silk comes there from Lin Pictures, where he was senior vice president of Production and co-produced Gangster Squad. He was a former director of Development at Benderspink and started as an assistant to producer Scott Rudin. “Jon is an extraordinarily talented executive whose experience, relationships and taste we have long admired,” said the Mythology founders. “We couldn’t be more excited to welcome him to the Mythology team and look forward to working together with him as we continue to build our slate and company.” Mythology most recently produced the Roland Emmerich-directed White House Down for Sony,...

A compact, conclusive primer on the criminality and rise of the Nazi party, Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today, is actually a recovered documentary from 1948 written and directed by the late Stuart Schulberg (brother of Budd, the writer of On The Waterfront) that, though U.S.-sponsored, was never released in this country. Thought lost for many years, Schulberg’s daughter Sandra Schulberg and her fellow documentarian Josh Waletzky have now restored the film using a decent print that they discovered with the help of the German Bundesarchiv (Germany’s National Archive, headquartered in Berlin). Enlisting the vocal talents of actor Liev Schreiber, the narration has been re-recorded, this time in English and the result is an interesting documentary that combines footage of the trial of Hitler’s commanders who survived the war – Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher, etc. with a concise flashback history of the rise and fall of the Nazi Party.

What is the most significant and watched footage of actual/unstaged events ever recorded? Among the obvious candidates: Abraham Zapruder’s film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 23, 1963; Nasa’s footage of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon on July 21, 1969; and the live TV news footage of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Long before those events took place, though, another one of at least as much historical importance as any of them — and, in my humble opinion, of even greater importance — was also visually recorded, seen by the vast majority of Americans alive at the time, and, yes, questioned by conspiracy theorists: the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The biggest difference between this footage and the rest? The story behind it has been largely forgotten. I think it’s worth retelling.

The extent to which Allied leaders were aware...