(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)March 31, 2008

(Mahwah) – Daniel B. Polin, president of Great Projects Film Company, Inc., presented “Witnessing for Posterity: The Trials of Adolf Eichmann and Saddam Hussein” on March 31, 2008 at Ramapo College. At that time in post-production, segments of the film the project on the Iraqi dictator were screened in public for the first time. In the interim, the film has been broadcast on Public Broadcasting outlets around the country.

Polin related his experiences making documentaries about bringing to justice two of human history’s most infamous tormenters: Adolf Eichmann as the key official responsible for implementing the attempted destruction of the Jews of Europe in World War II, and Saddam Hussein for tyrannizing and murdering his fellow countrymen as the ruler of Iraq. First broadcast in 1997 and based on actual trial footage and recollections of prosecutors, witnesses and other key participants, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann provides an insightful and haunting window into the nature of agency in the exercise of tyranny.

Showing parts of both films in the same program made it abundantly clear that whereas the Israeli authorities conducted the Eichmann trial in a manner that scrupulously maintained the principles of justice and decorum, the Iraqi government was unable to keep the chaos and animosities of the post-Saddam Iraq out of the courtroom. Right down to his brutal execution, the camera captured the tainted and dysfunctional nature of the Hussein procedural, all the more so because it also revealed the ineffectual role of U.S. advisers in trying to introduce a modicum of justice into the situation.

Daniel B. Polin, who founded the Great Projects Company in 1988, has been producing documentary films for two decades, primarily for public television. He was executive producer of “Great Projects: The Building of America,” a four-part PBS series about the role of public works and engineering in society. He also has been executive producer of Media Matters, an ongoing magazine series for PBS that examines the news media. He was producer of “Resistance,” a documentary about armed Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis; it premiered on PBS in April 2002.

Among the other films Polin has produced are two documentaries about rebuilding the World Trade Center site, “A Year at Ground Zero” and “Return to Ground Zero” (both for PBS); “Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War” (PBS); and “George Marshall and the American Century” (PBS), for which he won an Emmy.

Polin lives in Manhattan with his wife and two of his children. He has been a junior high school teacher and chairman of the board of his children’s daycare center, Basic Trust. He received his B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University and sits on its Writing Seminars Alumni Committee.

The talk was sponsored by Ramapo College’s Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the History Club and the Communication Arts major, with support from the Office of Student Affairs Platinum Series.

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