Most traumatic documentary you have seen on telly.

[jhawk]

Anything to do with the Second World War or the Holocaust. I'm not a very emotional person usually, but on most of those types of documentaries. I had the occasional thought of "Jeeeeeeeeesus Christ..." and there have been a few times where Dad and I have watched a Second World War film or whatever together and one of us has invariably said, "You just can't imagine, can you? You just cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like..."

Then there's Northern Ireland documentaries, which I watched a fair bit of in my mid-late teens due to writing a military fiction novel, some of which was set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Plus, I suppose the whole conflict was fascinating from my perspective. My Granddad served there, too .

 

[User16390]

Same here ...

I watched the one about the concentration camps with my father. I was completely stunned and very upset. He suddenly announced that he had helped liberate one of those camps and that one of his tasks was to use a mechanical digger to dig the mass graves and then bulldoze thousands of corpses into them. I spent an hour listening to horrific story after horrific story about his wartime experiences. I always found him a bit stern, but understood him better after that conversation.

I think those born after the war have been on the the whole very fortunate, most of us have never seen first hand the horror of war,or cruelty on an industrial scale of humans or animals. I was raised by my grandfather who fought in the Second World War, I knew he was at Dunkirk but he refused to talk about his experiences, at least until not long before he died at the age of 76, he told me how they was trying to make it to Dunkirk, there was huge confusion and that they was crossing some fields which they thought was safe only for him and his fellow soldiers to be attacked, he lost two of his best friends. Like your father my grandfather was quite stern, in fact I would say he was a real hard man who never emotionally left the army, I never saw him cry until that day.

 

[ColinJ]

I was raised by my grandfather who fought in the Second World War, I knew he was at Dunkirk but he refused to talk about his experiences, at least until not long before he died at the age of 76, he told me how they was trying to make it to Dunkirk, there was huge confusion and that they was crossing some fields which they thought was safe only for him and his fellow soldiers to be attacked, he lost two of his best friends. Like your father my grandfather was quite stern, in fact I would say he was a real hard man who never emotionally left the army, I never saw him cry until that day.

My dad didn't get evacuated from Dunkirk so he was still in France a couple of weeks later when remnants of the British forces were being picked up from Saint-Nazaire. He was very lucky to be standing on a nearby cliff when the Germans sank the Lancastria, rather than being on board himself, but it was a traumatic thing to witness.

 

[RedRider]

'14 Days in May' follows the final days of Edward Earl Johnson on death row. Great BBC documentary as I remember it, deeply affecting and utterly disturbing. I challenge any people pro-death penalty to watch.

 

[coffeejo]

I can't watch anything about cruelty to animals including documentaries showing the impact of our destruction of the natural world but I'm ok with animals killing one another for food or territory, or humans killing animals for food (so long as it's quick and respectful).

I've not lived through something "unimaginable" but have seen more than my fair share of the darker side of human nature, so documentaries about what we can do to another aren't as shocking - my inner cynic is never surprised, almost expects it.