For its second act, the documentary sends us back in time, where the ironies of history are on inglorious display. Friedman and Nadler are big on context (check out their earlier works on nuclear proliferation and post-Cold War perils, not to mention Max Ophuls’ Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, which Friedman produced). In Stealing the Fire, they’re hot on the money trail of German companies that profited from the Holocaust and that persist in banal evils today — such as supplying the wherewithal for nuclear mass destruction to countries you wish they wouldn’t. While by no means the lone damnable firm in Germany or elsewhere, the multinational Degussa takes the limelight in this 95-minute probe. 
 
Through more and less effective voice-over, dramatization and archival footage, we delve deeper into the Nazi past. We learn that, in Degussa’s cozy wartime collaboration with the SS, it plumped its coffers by appropriating Jewish-owned companies, by recycling the precious metals taken from Jews (including yanked teeth in concentration camps), and — through one of its subsidiaries — by producing Zyklon-B for ethnic cleansing in the gas chambers. 

The kicker? Degussa was the company that came out with the ultracentrifuge, the technology that Schaab thieved for Bagdad. Back to the future, we learn the centrifuge is the magic wand enabling the extraction of weapons-grade uranium-235. Popcorn, anyone?
 
Despite the dense downer of much of the film, Friedman and Nadler are not without a sense of humor.  The punch line of the film is that Schaab, the first man to be openly tried and convicted in the West for atomic espionage in more than 50 years, is judged guilty but given a juvenile delinquent’s five years’ probation and a laughable $32,000 fine. The German government, we’re told, preferred to play down the whole stinking mess. 
 
Based on several sources, the film wonders if German officials didn’t turn the other way as the technology exports set out for Saddam Hussein. Khidhir Hamza, formerly in charge of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, gives his own testimonial. “Germany was an open field to us…no security, no hassle, unrestricted, uncomplicated,” he said in the film. “Without the Germans, there would be no centrifuge program.” 
 
Stealing the Fire stockpiles scads of such explosive comments. In their fervor to detail the workings of the weapons underground, Friedman and Nadler sometimes dwell on logistical and scientific minutia at the viewer’s loss. Curiously, the filmmakers seem to upend their strategy when, toward the close of the film, Jonathan Schell swans out to pronounce that the real story resides at a far loftier level. All that close-up sleuthing, for naught?
 
Whatever its overindulgences, Stealing the Fire is important viewing for anyone who plans to be conscious in these troubling times. Scientists say centrifuge technology could help Iraq get weapon-grade fissile material and clear its biggest hurdle to building a bomb.