William Bemister - Television

Television

As an independent television journalist, Bemister's first film was The Confessions of Ronald Biggs, a documentary about the fugitive British train robber Ronald Biggs, who was then living in Brazil.

Bemister's co-produced 90-minute film The Hunter and the Hunted, about Nazi war criminals, their whereabouts, and the Nazi hunters who sought their arrest and prosecution, was commissioned by the Australian Seven Network and filmed on location in South America, France, Germany, Israel and the UK. Included in the film were scenes identifying the then home in La Paz, Bolivia, of Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, and the first confirmation by a Bolivian law officer of Barbie’s true identity.

Barbie had been living under the alias Klaus Altmann, and while the Paris Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld had identified him in Bolivia in 1971, the government there had always refused requests to extradite him to France. In a filmed interview with Bemister, La Paz District Attorney Gaston Ladesma admitted that Altmann had confessed to him that he was Klaus Barbie. On 19 January 1983, 14 months after The Hunter and the Hunted was telecast on network television in the United States that a new moderate government in Bolivia deported Barbie to France to stand trial.

The film also contained the only filmed interview of SS-Standartenführer Walter Rauff (who has been called "arguably the most wanted Nazi fugitive then alive"). In 1979, Bemister traced Rauff to a small bungalow in a suburb of the Chilean capital, Santiago, near a house occupied by his son and grandchildren. A few hours later Bemister found himself on the wrong side of a jammed garden gate to the son's house as the former SS Standartenführer Walter Rauff sought entry from the street, while a nearby surveillance camera team filmed the whole encounter. Unaware of Bemister's hidden microphone, Rauff gave his only filmed interview, joking about Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal: "We are all old (presumably referring to other Nazis) and failing him in clients".

Adolf Eichmann's son Horst also controversially discusses the case against his father in the film. A 58-minute version of the film was later telecast on PBS in the United States for which Bemister won the 1981 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism on U.S. Network Television and the 1982 CINE Golden Eagle Award.

Bemister's other international producer credits include Philby on Thames Television in Britain, Moscow's Man for Sveriges Television, WDR-Fernsehen in Germany, and the Discovery Channel worldwide; and the Home Box Office documentary special America Undercover: The Search for Dr Josef Mengele for which he worked as Producer-Correspondent. He was also Investigative Reporter for Fremantle Media's The Seven Million Dollar Fugitive.

His productions for Australian television networks include a two-hour feature documentary, Spy Trap, telecast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission; the one-hour documentary special Psychic Visions Of The Future, a cynical look at the world's alleged psychics for the Australian Ten Television Network, and Warriors Of The Deep, a docudrama about the Japanese midget submarine attack into the heart of Sydney Harbor in 1942, then the base for American and Australian warships. This film was telecast by the Australian Seven Network.