“Duty”, a Nazi officer who inspired one of the characters.

Duty this is a director’s film John Madden which airs tonight at 21.00 on the Iris channel. This is a remake of an Israeli movie called Hav-hov director Assaf Bernstein.

duty, plot

Rachel Singer (ur.Jessica Chastain), David Peretz (Sam Worthington) and Stephen Gold (Marton Csokas) are three agents of the Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency tasked with identifying and arresting Dieter Vogel, a Nazi surgeon who worked at the Birkenau death camp during World War II. However, the mission does not go quite as planned, and the three agents are forced to improvise, creating an aura of undeserved heroism around them. Thirty years after RachelHelen Mirren) and Stephen (Tom Wilkison) must face the secret they’ve been keeping for so long, while their daughter Sarah (Romi Abulafia), decides to write a book about the long-standing heroic deed of his parents. It is this project that will be the beginning of a whirlwind of tragedies and trials that will bring the main characters face to face with everything they have been running from for thirty years.

The terrible inspiration behind the film

Duty The film is set in 1965, when the horrors of World War II were about to be left behind. But the 1960s were also the years of the hunt for fugitive Nazis, as was the case with Wiesenthal, concentration camp survivor who dedicated his life to finding fugitive Nazis hiding in American society. For example, Wiesenthal is historically considered a key figure in the arrest Eichmann, who was subsequently killed in Israel in 1962. Therefore, it is not surprising that John Madden and screenwriter Jane Goldman chose the sixties for the first chapter Duty, in which the protagonists track down a frightening Holocaust figure, an unscrupulous surgeon played by Jesper Christensen. According to websiteInternet Movie Databasethe ruthless doctor hunted by the main characters in this film is loosely based on Josef Mengele, A Nazi SS officer who went down in history for the terrible experiments he performed while serving in the Third Reich and, especially, during the years spent in the Auschwitz death camp.

In a biographical reconstruction made by Treccanifor example, we read about how a doctor used his research to torture pairs of twins to death, especially children and teenagers. From the most routine check-ups to actual torture, such as injecting poisons into the eyes and blood to learn about pain tolerance, Mengele went down in history under the nickname Angel of Death. His research, as well as his belief that Jews, Gypsies, and all those who did not conform to race, as understood by the German government, were “subhuman”, Mengele is generally regarded as one of the worst war criminals.

On inside over, in addition, we read about how a doctor/scientist managed to avoid arrest, living more or less undisturbed in Latin America until his death in 1979, sometimes even using his real identity, while the secret services could not identify him. The worst thing about Mengele’s story is that he was not a “mad scientist” seduced by ideology: the fall of the Reich and the death of Hitler meant almost nothing to him. It was not the Nazi ideology that fascinated him, but his macabre and violent obsession with eugenics and the biology of twins, so much so that he was held responsible for the cause of the Candido Godoy twins. It is a country with a high rate of twin pregnancies, an event that dates back to Mengele and the experiments he allegedly continued to carry out under the pretense of treating locals by injecting experimental drugs into the veins of pregnant women.