Content area
Full text
It is well known that in 194445 the Nazis produced a propaganda film on Theresienstadt, the Jewish concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Long thought to be titled Der Fuhrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt, but in actual fact titled Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem judischen Siedlungsgebiet, this film was made on orders of the SS by a team of Jewish prisoners, led by German director Kurt Gerron, and a crew from the Prague newsreel company Aktualita, with hundreds of prisoners being enlisted as actors and extras[1].
However, this was in fact the second film made by the Nazis at Theresienstadt; an earlier one had been made in 1942. Historiography has paid scant attention to this first film. Very few Theresienstadt survivors discuss it in their accounts and memoirs, and those that do easily confuse it with the later film. Most Theresienstadt historians fail to mention it; film historians do not seem to know about it at all.
Much less documented than its successor, many questions regarding this earlier film still remain unanswered. However, in recent years, several new sources have surfaced which help to throw some light on it. These include an original draft script and several still pictures, but by far the most spectacular new source is some 8 minutes of film footage, which surfaced at the Polish Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych (WFDiF) film archive in Warsaw in 1994, which shows the camera crew at work during the shooting of the film and also contains several scenes from the film itself. The purpose of this article is, first, to outline the history of the 1942 film and, second, to describe and analyze the new-found sources and footage[2].
In September 1942-the Theresienstadt ghetto had been in existence for less than a year-the news sped through the town that a film was to be made about Theresienstadt. Nothing is known about who gave the order for this film, other than that the order came from Berlin. Rumour in the ghetto had it that it was Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-SS himself, who wanted a film on Theresienstadt made `for his private use'[3]. However, there exists no documentary evidence to support this contention. Himmler's personal records held at the German Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives) at Berlin-Lichterfelde do not hold...