10 Best World War II Documentaries, Ranked (original) (raw)
Published Jan 5, 2026, 5:50 PM EST
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Just as there’s been no shortage of wars, and movies about said wars, so too is there no shortage of documentaries about war. Some of these are TV shows, and are arguably more suited to that format when the war in question is World War II, seeing as even focusing on just one area of that mammoth global conflict requires quite a bit of time, especially if you want to make things comprehensive.
Shows won’t be included below, though, even if The War is sometimes called “a Ken Burns film” and the miniseries Five Came Back is actually shorter than some of the movies included here. If you're after documentary movies about World War II, all the following have quite a lot to offer, proving both informative and effectively anti-war, since, regarding the latter, having to confront and process real-life stories and/or footage can be rather harrowing.
10 'Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia' (1943)
Image via U.S. Army Pictorial Service
It’s easiest to appreciate Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia for its historical value, as a documentary (of sorts) made while World War II was still being fought. “Of sorts” is worth mentioning there because the Why We Fight series was made for propaganda purposes, so watching it, you're left in a situation where you don’t know how factual things are, but also, it’s a way to try and put yourself in the shoes of someone grappling with the war while it was ongoing.
There’s something interesting about watching a World War II-related film that’s made in the present tense, so to speak, a little like the non-documentaries Mrs. Miniver and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Casablanca. Anyway, Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia sheds light on the titular battle and is an interesting historical document, as well as a fairly surprising part of Frank Capra’s (usually more upbeat and even sentimental) filmography.
9 'Night Will Fall' (2014)
Image via BFI
There was a documentary film made in 1945 called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, and it was really just a document in the traditional sense of the word: visual evidence of what had been done at the concentration camps Nazi Germany controlled during the Second World War. Night Will Fall has some of the footage from this early documentary, but much of it’s also about how that footage was captured and why it was left unreleased/inaccessible for so long.
Said production involved Alfred Hitchcock as well, which kind of makes this further interesting as a documentary about filmmaking, or at least documentary filmmaking, but it’s primarily about the war and the Holocaust. That’s all to say it’s not an easy watch, but with the topic(s) at hand, if Night Will Fall were somehow an easy watch, it probably wouldn’t be doing its job very well.
8 'White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki' (2007)
Image via Home Box Office
White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has a title that very much lets you know what you're in for right from the start. Nuclear weapons were used at the very end of World War II, when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, done as a way to accelerate Japan’s surrender, but at the cost of massive numbers of civilian lives.
And White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forces you to think about those who died and those who survived forever changed, with much of the documentary being made up of interviews with survivors still standing in 2007, and the same’s done with some American soldiers who also survived the war, and played a part in deploying the bombs. Nuclear warfare is usually relegated to the areas of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic stories, but here, everything’s distressingly real, and the fear that something similar could one day happen again continues to be an unnerving thing that humanity just has to grapple with and fear.
7 'Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie' (1988)
Image via The Samuel Goldwyn Company
Klaus Barbie was an infamous and high-ranking member of the Gestapo: the secret police of Nazi Germany, and during World War II, he was responsible for numerous deaths and other atrocities. Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie is about what he did, how he fled to South America after the war, and then what happened after he was captured in 1983 and subsequently put on trial as a man in his 70s.
It's naturally heavy-going stuff, yet also interesting in that it detailed a then-recent event – the trial of Barbie – which was itself about crimes that had occurred decades earlier. There’s naturally a lot of history here, and Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie is also a pretty interesting look at justice and how it relates to war-related crimes, even if the film is also quite long and patiently-paced (perhaps best to split something like this into a couple of viewings, unless you're up for something heavy and have four-and-a-half hours to spare).
6 'The Last Days' (1998)
Image via October Films
Just as White Light/Black Rain was structured around interviews with survivors, so too is The Last Days, only here, the focus is on those who survived the concentration camps. Befitting the title, the emphasis is on those particularly hard final stages of the war, which stretched everyone in already unthinkably awful positions further, and then the film is also partly about how some soldiers experienced coming across the camps themselves, as participants in the liberation of those camps.
There is an undeniable value in a documentary like The Last Days being made when it was, since now, almost 30 years later, there are naturally fewer survivors around to tell their stories, and also greater chances that the memories of any remaining survivors could have been impacted by age. This film gives those people a voice, and their stories are both difficult and necessary to listen to.
5 'The Sorrow and the Pity' (1969)
Image via Norddeutscher Rundfunk
A rather exhaustive but worthwhile look at the Vichy regime, The Sorrow and the Pity details how and why France fell to Germany early in World War II, with the aforementioned regime being in place there for much of the remaining war. The scope is limited to the conflict between Germany and France, which is an admittedly small area of an overall World War, but The Sorrow and the Pity also shows that there is a lot of ground to cover here.
Most of the archival footage used here is impressive, not to mention edited together well, and it’s all executed in a way that helps you understand the progression from France at the start of the war to France by the end of it. It’s also split into two parts, in case the four-hour runtime looks daunting, so that helps a bit.
4 'Night and Fog' (1956)
Image via Cosmo Film
While it’s easily the shortest documentary here, clocking in at a little over half an hour in duration, Night and Fog might well have the most impact of the bunch, or at least be the most confronting. It’s another documentary about the concentration camps, editing together some footage from before and after they were liberated alongside some sequences shot at some point later, with the camps eerily empty and in color.
It's also strange and startling how Night and Fog condenses such a big topic into an ultimately rather short documentary film, all in a way that doesn’t undermine the enormity of the event itself, nor how haunting its legacy is. If not for one other soon-to-be-mentioned documentary about the Holocaust, made in 1985, Night and Fog could well be the definitive documentary focused solely on Nazi Germany’s planned and so-called "Final Solution."
3 'Triumph Over Violence' (1965)
Image via Mosfilm
A Soviet documentary about the rise of Nazism in Germany in the lead-up to World War II, and then some of the things that happened while the Nazi party was in power, Triumph Over Violence does tell a familiar story, but does so in a very singular way. There’s a rather masterful use of historical footage throughout this one, and it feels very comprehensive while also managing to cover a great deal of time, and within a runtime that’s not too long, in the end (at 138 minutes).
The lack of subtlety in Triumph Over Violence is okay when the whole thing is intentionally meant to feel bold, and like a shock to the system.
There isn't subtlety to Triumph Over Violence, in terms of the message it wants to get across, but that’s okay when the whole thing is intentionally meant to feel bold, and like a shock to the system. This might sound like a diss, but there are filmmaking and editing techniques here that feel like they could’ve influenced Michael Moore, or at least paved the way for his very brash and confrontational documentary filmmaking style.
2 'The Memory of Justice' (1976)
The Memory of Justice is partly about the Nuremberg trials, which took place after the end of World War II and were intended to pass judgment upon those surviving members of Nazi Germany for the atrocities committed during said war. It was done on an international scale, and The Memory of Justice uses the trials to explore further wars, as well as ask questions regarding who – if anyone – is allowed to pass judgment when a war involves both sides doing horrific things.
It can still be the case that one side does fewer terrible things than the other, but The Memory of Justice is something that asks you to look at things a little more critically, unpacking moral questions that aren’t as straightforward as history might sometimes have you believe. It’s deeply troubling and thought-provoking, and also so much more remarkable than its reputation might suggest (since very few people talk about it at all, at least compared to The Sorrow and the Pity, also directed by Marcel Ophüls).
1 'Shoah' (1985)
Image via New Yorker Films
There’s a similar approach to the Holocaust taken in Shoah as there was in The Last Days, but Shoah is considerably longer and features many more people who experienced the Holocaust firsthand. The enormity of the event is reflected in the runtime here, which comes close to nine-and-a-half hours all up, and the interviews are with people who survived concentration camps, individuals who were among the perpetrators, and bystanders who witnessed things, albeit from a distance.
All these interviews are hard to listen to and comprehend in different ways, because the survivors went through hell, the perpetrators did some terrible things, and the bystanders sometimes seemed shockingly casual or carefree about all that happened. Shoah is the definitive documentary about the Holocaust, and will probably remain so, on top of being up there among the greatest documentary films (regarding any subject) ever made.
Shoah
Release Date
April 21, 1985
Runtime
566 minutes
Director
Claude Lanzmann
Cast
Claude Lanzmann
Self - Interviewer