AllMovie

Academy-award winning documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman direct this harrowing, lyrical look at the persecution of homosexuals during the Third Reich. German historian and member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Klaus Muller interviews the dozen or so surviving victims, now frail and wizened, who recount their experiences. Jewish resistance fighter Gad Beck recalls how he posed as a Hitler Youth in an ultimately vain attempt at saving his lover. One man was freed from a sentence at Dachau only to be interned again a Buchenwald. Another recalls hearing, in the distance, a "singing forest" -- the sound of gays bound and tortured by Nazis in a local grove. Epstein and Friedman fashion a layered narrative consisting not only of interviews but also archival footage depicting background life in Weimar Germany.