The New German Cinema created a stir in the 1970s comparable to that of the French New Wave a decade earlier: the work of talented young filmmakers like WernerHerzog,RainerWerner Fassbinder,WimWenders, andVolker Schlöndorff impressed itself upon American film-goers, especially for its richness of cinematic expression. The Holocaust was hardly their main theme, but one could argue that it was in the background of such disparate films as Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun. The demented demagogue who leads his soldiers on a death trip is a Spanish conquistador in Peru, but his incarnation by the German-speaking Klaus Kinski suggests an image of Hitler (especially when he says, “We need a Führer”). And Fassbinder's resilient heroine (Hanna Schygulla) is a product of her culture, indeed an incarnation of postwar Germany – a survivor of sorts. Even in Wenders's Wings of Desire (1987), a major sequence takes place on a movie set where Peter Falk is acting in a period film about Nazis and Jews.

The first German fiction film to deal with the Holocaust was Only a Day (Nur ein Tag, 1965), directed by Egon Monk – a former assistant to Bertolt Brecht – from the writings of Gunter Lys. This stark but effective black-and-white drama took the form of a report on a German concentration camp, Altendorf, in 1939. Although the protagonists are not sufficiently individuated – the hero is more of a collective protagonist, including Jews, Bolsheviks, and criminals – admirable attention is paid to the details of concentration camp life among male prisoners.