The 25 Best Twilight Zone Episodes...#13 - "Deaths-Head Revisited"

The first impression after viewing "Deaths-Head Revisited," number 13 on the list of the 25 best Twilight Zone episodes of all time, is wide-eyed amazement after hearing the last line, uttered by the doctor attending to former SS Captain Gunther Lutze.

"Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"

You might remember thinking...the concentration camp at Dachau is still there? After all the atrocities committed by the Nazis during that horrific period, they left the camp intact? Of course, many long-time Twilight Zone fans' first viewing of this episode occurred nearly half a century ago, and only 20 years or so after World War II. Many of the rest of us watched for the first time several years later, but that fact was still so impactful. Revisiting the episode afterward and every time since, one can't help but be moved by the setting in which this powerfully-scripted teleplay takes place. Even though it is difficult to imagine CBS allowing an overseas production for a half-hour anthology program, the staging appears remarkably genuine. It is the setting which supplies this Twilight Zone episode resonance and significance.

"Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northwest of Munich," narrates Mr. Serling, "a picturesque, delightful little spot onetime 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 seventeen years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the S.S. 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 Nazi: he walked the Earth without a heart. And now former S.S. 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."

Keeping in form with the other "best" Twilight Zone episodes, the writing and performances of "Deaths-Head Revisited" are stellar. Serling pens this script with understated venom, channeling poignant messages through the ghost of the tortured camp inmate, Alfred Becker, played hauntingly by Joseph Schildkraut. Captain Lutze, performed ominously and arrogantly by Oscar Beregi Jr., returns to Dachau to reminisce under the alias Mr. Schmidt, to recall the glory days of murder and torment. He is greeted by Becker, to whom Lutze mistakenly refers as current day camp caretaker. Becker takes him on a brief but substantive tour of the misery Lutze inflicted before informing him that his trial was about to begin. It is not until the second half of the episode that Lutze recalls he had killed Becker, who reminds him it occurred immediately before the allied forces liberated the camp. Suddenly, the weight of this visit had been thrust full force on his shoulders and his psyche. Becker was dead, after all. How can this be happening?

The trial, of course, proceeds at the hands of those Lutze had tortured, maimed, and/or killed. He is found guilty and forced to absorb the very same inhuman treatment he meted out. At episode's end, he is found shriveled on the ground in agony with no apparent wounds or injuries...only the pain that justice, a long time dormant, had wrought.

More enlightened today than as a child, it is not surprising at all that Dachau, and other camps, were kept "standing." As Mr. Serling concludes, "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."

To best chronicle and commemorate this television institution, an unscientific poll of 250 people in the New York metropolitan area gave rise to the best 25 Twilight Zone episodes of all time. In order of importance, criteria included writing, performance, and compelling subject matter. "Deaths-Head Revisited" is number 13.