The Twilight Zone/Deaths-Head Revisited

Deaths-Head Revisited
Season 3, Episode 9
Airdate	November 10, 1961
Production Number	4804
Written by	Rod Serling
Directed by	Don Medford
Produced by	Buck Houghton
← 3x08 It's a Good Life	3x10 → The Midnight Sun
The Twilight Zone — Season Three

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Deaths-Head Revisited is the ninth episode of the third season of The Twilight Zone, and the seventy-fourth episode overall.

The episode follows Gunter Lutze, a former SS officer who revisits the Dachau concentration camp 17 years after its liberation by Allied Forces during World War II. Hoping to relish in the misery, anguish and murder of its detainees, he instead is confronted by the ghost of one of his favorite victims, reminding him of the horrors he inflicted on its inmates.

Starring: Joseph Schildkraut (Becker)

Also Starring: Oscar Beregi (Captain Gunther Lutze)

with Karen Verne (Innkeeper), Robert Boon (Taxi Driver), Ben Wright (Doctor)

Uncredited: Rod Serling (Host)

Plot Overview

Gunther Lutze, who served as an SS captain with the Nazis during World War II, returns to Dachau, Bavaria, after a self-imposed 17-year exile to South America. Checking in under an assumed identity, the hotel clerk seems to recognize him, even though he denies his true role claiming to have served in the panzer division on the Eastern Front during World War II. He then further torments her by asking her if the abandoned camp nearby is a prison, even though it is clear he knows what purpose it served.

Lutze arrives at the camp, recalling with sadistic glee the pain and suffering he inflicted on the more than 2,000 inmates of the camp. Walking around the camp, he smiles as he relishes in memories of forcing inmates to exercise in the nude in sub-freezing temperatures, forcing inmates to drink saltwater only every few days while not feeding them for days on end ... and looks with wonderment as he sees the gallows where he and his minions hung inmates, often leaving them to suffer for hours on end before they finally die.

Just as he's relishing in the ultimate Christmas Day-like glee in his memories at the camp ... he all of a sudden hears a voice welcoming him.

It's the voice of Alfred Becker, the ghost of a camp inmate who was killed by Lutze in 1944, just moments before the camp was stormed by Allied Forces and Lutze made his escape. Lutze thinks at first Becker is merely a caretaker of the camp, which Becker says he is indeed the caretaker ... "in a manner of speaking."

It soon becomes clear that Becker is in a welcoming mood, but not a friendly one ... instead, he relentlessly reminds Lutze that his actions were horrifically inhumane if not worse. Lutze stubbornly insists he was "only following orders," an explanation that Becker refuses to accept, telling Lutze that thousands of people were murdered at his own hands and that he was one of the main architects of the attempted extermination of an entire race of people. Lutze then tries to change the subject, saying the war was over 17 years ago and that the world has moved on to other issues at hand and that something "minor" should be forgotten. Becker again rejects Lutze's argument, telling him those "little mistakes" were nothing of the sort, but rather crimes against humanity.

Becker then puts Lutze on trial for his actions, charging him with ordering the deaths of 1,700 innocent people without due process, forced "experimentation" on women and children, the murder of hundreds of people at his own hand and much more. A jury of dozens of inmates, who were burned in the furnaces, serve as the "jury." Lutze is unnerved and passes out, but upon waking Becker tells Lutze it was no dream ... he really is being tried and that he is being found guilty as charged.

Lutze, still in deep denial about his actions, has had enough, and then admits he killed Becker and others the night Allied Forces seized the camp, attempting to burn down the camp but instead deciding to flee, barely escaping capture. He calls Becker a madman and charges after him several times, but Becker calmly pronounces sentence: He must undergo the same horrors he had imposed on the inmates in the form of tactile illusions, including being shot by machine gun, hanging and torture. Lutze screams in pain before collapsing into a psychological break. He is barely conscious as Becker gives him one last declaration: "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."

Shortly thereafter, Lutze is found in a state of catatonic shock and is tended by local medics. After a doctor has him sedated, he is taken to a mental asylum, still experiencing and reacting to illusory sufferings. Both the taxi driver who drove him to the camp site and the doctor wonder how a man who was perfectly calm two hours before could have gone insane. The doctor looks around and asks, "Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"

Rod Serling provides the answer in his epilogue: "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."

Trivia

The Show

• Both Oscar Bergi Jr. and Joseph Schildkraut, the two main characters, were each Jewish and were natives of Eastern Europe. Their immediate families both fled Europe before World War II, but both had extended family murdered in the concentration camps.

Quotes

See above for closing narration. The opening narration:

"Mr. Schmidt recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northwest of Munich... a picturesque, delightful little spot one-time known for its scenery, but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon perceive, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp—for once, some 17 years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the SS. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time, he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis... he walked the Earth without a heart. And now former SS Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is awaiting him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas... of the Twilight Zone."