Deaths-Head Revisited

"Deaths-Head Revisited"

The Twilight Zone episode

Scene from "Deaths-Head Revisited"

Episode no.

Season 3
Episode 74

Directed by

Don Medford

Written by

Rod Serling

Featured music

Stock

Production code

4804

Original air date

November 10, 1961

Guest stars

Oscar Beregi, Jr.: Captain Lutze
Joseph Schildkraut: Becker
Karen Verne
Robert Boon
Ben Wright: The Doctor

Episode chronology

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"It's a Good Life"

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"The Midnight Sun"

List of Twilight Zone episodes

"Deaths-Head Revisited" is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

1 Synopsis
2 Critical response
3 Cultural references
4 References
5 External links

Synopsis

Gunther Lutze, a former sadistic captain in the SS, returns to the ruins of Dachau concentration camp to relive the memories of his time as its commandant during World War II. He revels in the recollections of the torment he inflicted on the inmates, remembering with a cold smile the suffering he was responsible for. As he walks around the gallows and prepares to leave he is surprised to see Alfred Becker, one of the camp's inmates. Becker relentlessly dogs Lutze with the reality of his grossly inhumane treatment of the inmates, while Lutze stubbornly and unemotionally insists that he was only carrying out his orders and had no idea that the Third Reich planned to exterminate Jews. Lutze eventually remembers that he killed Becker 17 years ago on the night before US troops reached Dachau, and realizes that he is facing the man's ghost. Becker and the spirits of many other inmates put Lutze on trial for crimes against humanity and find him guilty. As punishment and atonement, Lutze is made to undergo the same horrors he had imposed on the inmates. He is not physically touched; rather, he experiences the pain in his mind, culminating near the detention room, where he screams in agony. Lutze has been driven insane.

Before departing, Becker's ghost informs him, "This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God." Lutze is eventually found and taken to a mental institution for the criminally insane in a straitjacket, leaving his finders to survey the remains of the camp in wonder and bafflement. As they prepare to leave and take Lutze to the asylum, the doctor who examined him looks around visibly upset and asks, "Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"

Serling closes the episode with a powerful statement: "There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."

Critical response

Gordon F. Sander, excerpt from Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man:

Serling meted out nightmarish justice of a worse kind in "Deaths-Head Revisited" (directed by Don Medford), Serling's statement on the Holocaust, written in reaction to the then-ongoing Eichmann trial, in which a former Nazi, played by Oscar Beregi, on a nostalgic visit to Dachau, is haunted and ultimately driven insane by the ghosts of inmates he had killed there during the war.

Cultural references

The band Anthrax sampled a few lines of dialogue for the introduction to the song "Intro to Reality" on the 1990 album Persistence of Time. The song "Belly of the Beast" by Anthrax was itself based on the episode's story.

The New Jersey hardcore band Rorschach samples some of the lines from the ending narration on the song "Lightning Strikes Twice" from their album Remain Sedate.

References

Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
A play on the title of the popular Evelyn Waugh novel, Brideshead Revisited.
DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1593931360
Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0970331090

External links

v · d · eTwilight Zone (1959) episodes

Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgement Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"

Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "The Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble With Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"

Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"

Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"

Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink From a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander With Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"

Categories:

1961 television episodes
The Twilight Zone episodes
Works about the Holocaust

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Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Deaths-Head Revisited

Contents

Synopsis

Critical response

Cultural references

References

External links

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Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

Wikipedia

Deaths-Head Revisited

Contents

Synopsis

Critical response

Cultural references

References

External links

Look at other dictionaries:

Share the article and excerpts

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