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After an SS officer's family is accidentally sent to Treblinka, he must save them before the commandant dismantles the camp and kills all inmates.
SYNOPSIS:
The Final Solution written By: Jerel Damon & Sallie Olson & Rutger Oosterhoff
An earlier version of TFS, written by Jerel Damon & Rutger Oosterhoff is copyrighted under reg. number:U.S. Copyright Office reg. nr. : PAu 4-002-849
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When I was on vacation in France, I heard this wild story—Spielberg offering a million dollars to anyone with a brilliant idea for his next film. Sounded like pure bullshit to me. I rolled my eyes, turned off the radio, and went back to reading Schindler’s List. But something sparked in me. I didn’t just want to read another Holocaust story—I wanted to write one. Something meaningful. Something that burns. Maybe even something controversial. Then I remembered a chilling passage from Treblinka: a German officer’s family accidentally boards the wrong train—headed not for their countryside retreat, but for the death camp he helped design. Within thirty minutes of arrival—they're gassed. No records. No witnesses. Non. That's what prompted me to tell this story: Logline: A Nazi officer races to save his wife and children after they’re mistakenly sent to Treblinka—forcing him to navigate the hell he helped create and confront the brutal truths of his ideology before it consumes them all. Tagline: They thought their blood was pure. The camp showed them it wasn’t. The Final Solution is a Holocaust drama that flips the lens inward—what happens when the machinery of genocide swallows its own architect? The story explores complicity, identity, and irreversible loss. Think Son of Saul meets The Pianist, but told from the unthinkable perspective: the perpetrator turned desperate father. The central character, Baldewin Brandt, is a decorated SS officer—proud, indoctrinated, blind. But when his wife Eleonore and their two sons, Alvie and Berrin, mistakenly board a transport bound for Treblinka, his orderly world collapses. What begins as a tragic accident becomes a race against time and ideology. As Baldewin claws through the very horror he helped engineer—train yards, selection platforms, and finally the gas chambers themselves—his transformation is agonizing and human. And the twist? The only person who can help him from the inside... is a Jewish prisoner leading a secret revolt. This isn’t about redemption—it’s about recognition. A man witnessing, too late, what he truly is.Written pitch to producers
Dear [Producer's Name],
My name is Rutger Oosterhoff, and I’m reaching out with a completed screenplay titled The Final Solution—a historically grounded, emotionally charged Holocaust drama told from a rarely explored perspective: those who thought they were untouchable, until the machine they built turned inward.
Set in 1943, the story follows Baldewin Brandt, a decorated Nazi officer and true believer in the Reich’s mission. He’s efficient, composed, and loyal—until one mistake sends his wife and two young sons onto a train not meant for them, but for those deemed unworthy of life. Treblinka awaits. Suddenly, Baldewin is forced to navigate the very machinery of death he helped build—not as its architect, but as its victim by association.
Logline:
"A Nazi officer races to save his wife and children after they’re mistakenly sent to Treblinka—forcing him to navigate the hell he helped create and confront the brutal truths of his ideology before it consumes them all."
But Baldewin is not just a cog in the system. Years earlier, during his involvement in the Rumbula massacre, he was part of atrocities that left a stain on his soul—one he has never confessed, even to himself. Since then, he’s quietly aligned with a shadowy branch of the German resistance—not out of heroism, but out of guilt, and a desperate hope that some part of him might still be human.
Inside the camp, the story follows not just Baldewin’s desperate search from the outside, but the unraveling and survival of his family from within. His wife Eleonore, once cosmopolitan and rational, must learn to navigate the irrational—concealing their identities and clinging to hope as the camp strips them of information, dignity, and time. Her sons, Alvie and Berrin, are thrown into an environment where childhood ends in an instant.
Berrin, the younger, more fragile boy, is branded a “useless eater”—a chillingly bureaucratic term that seals his fate. His death fractures the family’s already tenuous hope. Alvie, the elder son, is forced to grow up in a single heartbeat. He begins taking responsibility—not just for survival, but for protecting what’s left of his mother’s strength, and his own humanity. His arc becomes one of forced self-definition in a place designed to destroy identity.
Separated across different labor sectors, the surviving family members spend much of the film not knowing whether the others are still alive. In a camp built to erase communication, this search—for signs, for whispered names, for stolen glances across roll calls—becomes its own form of resistance.
Tagline:
"They thought their blood was pure. The camp showed them it wasn’t."
At its core, The Final Solution is not a tale of redemption, but a mirror held up to the ideology of purity, superiority, and order—shattered by one logistical error. The story unfolds with sharp moral tension, emotional gravity, and bitter irony that asks: What happens when the system you worship treats you like just another number?
I co-wrote this screenplay with Jerel Damon and Sallie Olson. What prompted me to write it was a strange combination of disbelief and obsession: while on vacation in France, I heard a story—Spielberg supposedly offering a million dollars for a great Holocaust idea. I rolled my eyes and went back to reading Schindler’s List. But a line from Treblinka haunted me: a German officer’s family boards the wrong train and vanishes into the camp, undocumented, unnamed. No record. No trace.
That image stayed with me. And I didn’t want to write another Holocaust story—I wanted to write one that burns. One that dares.
The screenplay is based on extensive historical research, drawing on sources like Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka and Yitzhak Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. It aims not to comfort but to disturb—cutting past cliché into the psychological and political contradictions that made the Holocaust possible.
If your work supports cinema that is unflinching, politically relevant, and emotionally fearless, I would be honored to share the full script. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Warm regards,
Rutger Oosterhoff
[Email / Phone / Website / IMDb]
The Story:
ACT 1 Rumbula forest. Germans are shooting Jewish people in front of a mass grave.
Berlin. Eleonore (30’s), the wife of German army officer Baldewin Brandt (30’s), is packing clothes for herself and her two sons, Alvie (11) and Berrin (7). They will take the train to Posen to meet her husband, who gets promoted to an SS- Obersturmbannführer.
Posen, The husband has a conversation with another SS officer about Operation Reinhard and the Chelmo Killing Centers. The railways helping the progress in death camps of millions of Jews into Poland, speeding up the "Aryanization". The liquidation of the Jewish ghettos is on schedule.
Berlin train station. After much confusion, Eleonore and her two sons board the train.
Shortly into the trip, she notices the yellow stars of David on all the passengers, Jews. She remains faithful that she will be sorted out, relying on her husband’s rank in the German army and who is expecting her. A Jew tells the young woman that they are headed east for work on the trains, tricked into going to death camps. She comforts her sons with chocolates.
Shots of the train passing through Germany and into Poland. All passengers are speculating what awaits them.
ACT 2 Treblinka Train Station. When chucking into the station. The officer’s wife sees this station has been crumbling, not shiny, weeds and rust. Dread sets in -- she is in the wrong place. Fury from the SS officers begins when Jews get off the trains, shouting, beating, and shooting.
Eleonore pleads with the guarding officers she is the wife of a German officer and an honest to Aryan German, proving it with an Aryan passport. She makes a desperate attempt by showing that her boys are not circumcised.
Officers escort the young woman and her sons out into the middle of the yard, surrounded by Jews. She is told to undress and then undress her sons, they are embarrassed, sobbing. The officers laugh at this cruelty and she disappears with her sons into the crowd.
Eleonore is split from her sons who are escorted to the Hospital: a place where Jews who are labeled useless eaters are shot through the head in front of a burning mass grave.
Berrin gets killed, but the Jewish doctor tells Alvie when asked for his profession by the SS, he must lie and say he is a bricklayer. When they ask him his age, he must lie and say he is thirteen.
Alvie is saved and housed in the men’s barracks of the ghetto, the Jewish part of what is called “The Living Camp”. Worker Jews - being part of one of the Sonderkomando’s - are beginning to commit suicide to avoid the gas chambers.
Baldewin worries why his family did not make it to this promotion party. He discovers that his wife took the wrong train and ended up in a death camp. He hatches a plan to rescue his family.
Franz Stangl (35), the camp commandant, and a sadistic SS officer -- shoots any Jew for sport.
Heinrich Himmler has a tour of the Treblinka. At the death camp part - Camp 2 - he sees the pits of black and blue corpses. He orders the cremation of the bodies and SS man Herbert Floss - known as "The Artist" - is put in charge of the burnings. The black smoke from the burning Jews can be seen from miles away, day and night, for months.
Franz, begins to believe the young woman and her story. She becomes a love interest to him until he can further figure out a plan. She has sex with him to survive. He knows the death camp's existence is a state secret but is compelled to help her. He cannot decide on whether to kill a wartime hero's wife.
A decision is made when Himmler hears of the uninvited Nazi guest, he orders Franz through phone to kill the family members; nobody must ever know that there was an undivided Nazi family in Treblinka. And the family can certainly not survive their ordeal and testify later at a war tribunal about what happened in the death camp.
Baldewin arrives at the camp and is invited to the luxurious villa of Franz. He sees his wife sleeping on his bed and becomes enraged. He is then stripped of his German uniform and imprisoned in the camp.
Later, in the Barracks, it becomes clear that the boy Baldewin shot in the Rumbula forest massacre, was the son of his camp made, Hassan. Hassan, who fled the gruesome scene when his family was killed. Now both are forever connected through their guild. Baldewin slowly becomes a trusted member of the committee that organizes the revolt. They can use a man that has served - as they think - in the Russian army.
ACT 3 August 2, 1943, A grenade blows up in the middle of the ghetto; the signal for the revolt. Chaos, fires, running, shooting, a swastika is set on fire, a sense of pride and anger.
Jews get over barb-wired fences, run through the minefield, and into the Polish forest.
From the Brandt family, only Alvie makes it to the forest.
Franz is hanged after being judged guilty for "mass-murder and war crimes against humanity".
Years later, we see Alvie with his family -- on the terrace enjoying ice-cream – in front of a cafe in Jerusalem, Israel
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Research material:
(1) "Treblinka" by Jean-Francois Steiner
(2) "Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka; The Operation Reinhard Death Camps" by Yitzhak Arad
Director: Alexander HahnExecutive producer: Alexander Hahn
Executive producer: Rutger Oosterhoff
Co-producer: Guntis Trekteris Possible other Production companies(producers):Polen:
Film Produkcja (?)
Israel:
CohenMediaGroup (?)
2-Team Productions (?)
Germany: ?CAST
Baldewin: ?
Eleonore: Esther Kuhn?
Alvie:?
Berrin:?
Franz Stangl:?
Kurt Franz:: Philippe Reinhardt
Naomi: Aiste Dirziute (rumored)
Amos: ?
Lydia: Laura Rauch
Gael Minkus (50): ?
Jacob Chomsky (27): ,?
Ilan Levy (31): ?
Benjamin Stein (27): ?
the General (60s): Stefan Weinert?
Arthur Gold: Oscar Isaac?
CASTING
Larissa Kohl?(good option)
MUSIC
Dasha Dauenhauer (preferred)
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Thanks people!
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Thanks for rating Sarahfina. Contact you for "Kleiner Mann": for the Facebook war/holocaust group Simon and I are setting up.
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Thanks Sarah!
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Thanks Kakha, appreciate it!
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Read the script. Engrossing to the end..
Thanks Nick, took us 6 years to get it this far.
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Thanks Donna! Appreciate it!
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Thanks Joshua!
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Rutger Oosterhoff This is a bold and morally complex premise that flips the expected perspective of a World War II story. The urgency is strong, with clear stakes and a race-against-time structure. To sharpen the logline further, you might hint at how he plans to infiltrate or overcome the system he once served. That added detail would enhance the intrigue while preserving the tension.
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Hi Ashley, he infiltrates/overcomes the system by also being a part of the resistance; he leads a double life, so to speak But that's for the story itself. The most "infiltration" I can give you is that he willingly goes to the lion's den to get back his family.
But a logline that's too long but more what you're looking for is:
A Nazi officer races to save his wife and children after they’re mistakenly sent to Treblinka—forcing him to navigate the hell he helped create and confront the brutal truths of his ideology before it consumes them all.
Rutger Oosterhoff was kind enough to read an excerpt of my script, I thought I would put a breakdown of the first few pages here. Many of my insights come from taking a course by the https://www.scriptfella.com/
And while no one wants to hear their baby is ugly, we only get better through a critical review. Take everything below with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila.
FADE IN: => DROP superfluous directorial instructions
EXT. JERUSALEM - ICE CREAM STORE - DAY => Drop JERUSALEM - it's on SUPERIMPOSE
ADULT ALVIE BRANDT, (44), sits beside his WIFE, (30s) => ADULT is redundant if 44
A young boy and girl in matching outfits => name children if they speak in the scene.
TBH => I'd drop all that first scene
ALSO - Strive to introduce characters at their most characterful. Eating ice cream isn't their most characterful.
ALVIE, (11), clings to his MOTHER (30s) and little brother, BERRIN (7/8) => Generally don't name characters until they're speaking.
Berrin is 7/8 = 0.875 ;-) you make Alvie 11, why a fraction/range?
ARMED UKRAINIANS => Are you sure they'd be Ukrainians in Poland? If you haven't read it, check out https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/046503...
Even if it is possible for them to be Ukrainian, better to remove the nationality, unless tangential to the plot.
force the mass of frightened Jews to split into two columns. => They form lines. is redundant.
At the front, they surrender their valuables onto a table. => passive. Soldiers force the captives to surrender their possessions and their dignity at the table.
SORTING COMMANDOS collect the valuables into piles. => Commandos sort things?
UKRAINIAN #2 strides over and lashes her with a whip. => UKRAINIAN #2 => A civilian? use rank /Sargent/Captain.
Are soldiers issued whips? While possible, certainly atypical unless there is a mule train, etc. Wouldn't he use the but of his rifle?
Her husband shields her. He whips out a knife and cuts her finger off. => This reads like the husband cut off the finger!
Ukrainian #2 tosses her finger and ring in a bucket full of rings. => NICE!
Alvie, shocked, looks away. His gaze settles on... => (BOY - how could we know his name as a viewer)
FADE TO BLACK => drop all that nonsense. Your scene heading is enough.
You have 4 superimpositions on two pages.
ON page 1 Alvie watches a finger chopped off in TREBLINKA - DEPORTATION SQUARE - and then in the next scene is eating ice cream in BERLIN CITY PARK - DAY => Continuity error
(loud) => drop direction. Only use parenthesis sparingly/when necessary. Write - don't direct.
For example a proper use of parenthesis - But TBH you waste a line even with that. Better to use an entire line instead and describe what goes on.
ALI
(Spanish/subtitled)
Don’t be out too late.
EXT. BRANDT RESIDENCE - THE NEXT DAY
The house stands two-stories tall with a garden parallel
to the west wing. A fence gates off the house from the
street.
The above is nothing but a directorial choice - there is no action. If there is nothing in that scene that forwards the plot, that scene must go.
Edit fiercely. REMOVE EVERYTHING you possibly can until you can remove no more and still tell the story..
HTH.
Normaly this goes in private. Not sure why you post it here?
It ends with the same scene.
I'm not woried.
"This reads like the husband cut off the finger!" Nonsense, it's about logic.
I cut about all parenthesis in my script less of them then 99% of sctipts. If this is all you have I'm not woried.
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Thanks for rating Kelvin!
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Thanks for rating, Ryan!
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