Narrated by Liev Schreiber (Defiance), The Quiet Village tells the story of Kulmhof, the first extermination camp established by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1945, at least 152,000 people, mainly Polish Jews, were murdered there in gas vans by the SS and German Police. Only six people survived the camp. The Quiet Village is a story of humanity and remembrance, exploring memory and the act of bearing witness.

About

Situated in a small Polish village called Chelmno, Kulmhof was established by the Nazi regime to carry out the murder of Jews in the so-called Warthegau, the territory of Western Poland annexed by Hitler’s Reich. The camp was created by SS functionary Herbert Lange, who implemented the use of specially constructed mobile gas vans, built in Berlin, in which carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were routed into a sealed rear compartment. Within weeks, the village and surrounding forests were transformed into a place of tragedy and horror, a site that has remained less widely known in public memory in the eight decades since the war. The Quiet Village seeks to illuminate this overlooked chapter of the Holocaust, examining the history of the camp through the voices of survivors, perpetrators, witnesses, and their descendants, as well as rare and newly discovered archives.

The Quiet Village features interviews filmed across five countries.

Directed by Ashton Gleckman, co-written by Ashton Gleckman and Samantha Maynard, and produced in association with the Academy Award-winning production company RadicalMedia (The Fog of War) and the T4 Association (Research of Nazi War Crimes) in Berlin, Germany. The film is executive produced by Jon Kamen (Hamilton), Adam Benzine (Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah), historian Michael Berenbaum (One Survivor Remembers, The Gerda Weissmann Klein Story), and Cameron Munro, author of the landmark study Engineered for Mass Murder: The Nazi Gas Vans 1939-1945.