Martin Freeman to star in BBC movie about Adolf Eichmann trial

Martin Freeman will play the British TV producer who turned the 1961 trial of fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann into a worldwide television event. The Eichmann Show will be a BBC2 drama that tells the story of how producer Milton Fruchtman and director Leo Hurwitz (Anthony LaPaglia) televised the trial of the century, which exposed the horrors of the Holocaust to a global audience over four months in 1961.

Eichmann had been one of the architects of the Final Solution, the genocide of the European Jewish population during World War II. He had fled to South America after the war but was captured by Israeli commandos in Argentina in 1960 and brought back to Israel for trial. He was convicted and hanged in 1962.

The Eichmann Show is part of the BBC’s special Holocaust Memorial Day coverage, which will mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Jan. 27. “The liberation of the camps is a very significant anniversary which the BBC will mark with a range of thought-provoking programmes,” said Danny Cohen, the BBC’s director of television, in a statement. “Alongside new documentaries and drama from acclaimed performers and producers, the BBC will re-show Shoah in full and provide coverage of the Holocaust Memorial Event.”

Shoah was Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 landmark documentary that interviewed Holocaust survivors.