Deaths-Head Revisited

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The Twilight Zone original series Season three (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) Fall 1961 – Summer 1962 List of The Twilight Zone episodes
Episodes: 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

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

[edit] Details

Episode number: 74
Season: 3
Production code: 4804
Original air date: November 10, 1961
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Don Medford

[edit] Cast

Captain Lutze: Oscar Beregi
Becker: Joseph Schildkraut

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A former captain in the Nazi military, Gunther Lutze, returns to the ruins of Dachau concentration camp to relive the memories. He meets Alfred Becker, one of the inmates that he knew from the war. As Captain Lutze reminisces about how he tried to implement the Nazi ways and was barely able to escape, he realizes that one of the last things that he did was kill Becker. Becker tells him that he (Lutze) must atone for the atrocities that were committed under Lutze's command and that he and the other victims have risen up to serve justice. Captain Lutze is forced to undergo the same horrors as the inmates he tortured, and the experience renders him insane. Before departing, Becker's ghost informs him, "This is not punishment. This is justice. But this judgement is only the beginning, Gunther. Your final judgement will come from God." Gunther, once found, is taken to the nearest institution, leaving his finders to survey the remains of the camp in wonder and bafflement.

[edit] Trivia

The Twilight Zone production crew modified a frontier fort that had been erected on MGM’s Lot 3 to make the set for their Dachau concentration camp.

[edit] 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.