SYNOPSIS
Stealing the Fire, newly-completed, reveals how the most closely guarded secrets of our time are now for sale in a dangerous atomic underground. The filmmakers obtained exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to Karl-Heinz Schaab,
a German technician, and his defense team during his recent trial for treason in Munich. Schaab is the first person in the world convicted of atomic espionage in an open trial in the last fifty years. He sold top secret documents stolen from Germany to Saddam Hussein and traveled to Baghdad numerous times to help Iraq in its nuclear bomb quest.
Stealing the Fire links Schaab to a German multinational corporation and a main supplier of nuclear technology to developing nations. This film is one of the first to investigate the postwar activities of German corporations which directly profited from the Holocaust. Not only
did this firm have an exclusive contract with the SS to smelt all the gold and silver from concentration camp victims but it also manufactured Zyklon-B, and supplied uranium for the Nazi atomic bomb project.
In the last few decades, this company has become a leading atomic trader with Iraq and Pakistan. Schaab sold to Iraq classified blueprints for
a real-life doomsday machine, the
ultracentrifuge.
Stealing the Fire follows an unbroken chain of events and personalities connecting Hitler’s atomic bomb program, Nazi gold, and today’s nuclear weapons black market. Combining interviews, location shots, and historical footage, the film, which took five years to complete and was shot on four continents, journey ss from the boardrooms of Europe to the cafés of Brazil to the desert laboratories of the Middle East. Among the almost one hundred people interviewed are Dr. Carl von Weizsacker, the last living scientist who worked on the German atomic bomb project;
A.Q. Khan, a suspected nuclear spy known as the “father of the Pakistani A-bomb”; and Karl-Heinz Schaab and his cronies.
The film tells a story of international intrigue that reveals how leading black market suppliers of nuclear weapons technology had their roots in the Third Reich.
Stealing the Fire is a true story. It has never been told.
