Educational Media Reviews Online

Stealing the Fire is a documentary tracing the roots of the Iraqi nuclear program to its source, the Nazi war machine of WWII. It centers on the story of a recently convicted German technician Karl-Heinz Schaab who was given a wrist-slap of a sentence by the German court for selling the secrets of making giant centrifuges to former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The centrifuge enriches uranium, which then can be used to fuel a nuclear device.

A German UNSCOMM inspector looking for forbidden weapons in Iraq found documents on the latest centrifuge technology that could be traced back to Schaab. He eventually was extradited from Brazil where he had fled, and received a laughable $32,000 fine with probation for the crime of “high treason.” Apparently the German courts and government wanted his case to disappear. Schaab was connected to a German multinational corporation whose genesis was a German company that directly profited from the Holocaust. This firm had an exclusive contract with the SS to smelt the gold and silver from concentration camp victims, manufacture the Zyklon-B to gas them, and even supplied the uranium for the Nazi atomic bomb project. This is the same company that recently has been a major atomic trader with Iraq and Pakistan. Stealing the Fire shows the surprising ease that international arms deals are made with the complicity of elected officials. However they underplay the avarice of corporate brigands who are the real villains here and allude to a larger story of anti-Semitism, selling weapons to arm Israel’s enemies. It doesn’t work. The tale is still compelling, which took five years of filming to complete that included over 100 interviews, location shots in four continents and archival footage. With the current search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this is a timely, true story worth watching.