The Posthumous Life of the Nazi Propaganda – Postwar Films on the Warsaw Ghetto

Using Terry Eagleton’s definition of ideology as a point of departure I am going to focus on the use of archival footage from the Warsaw Ghetto in Polish postwar documentary films. The following films will be analysed: Requiem for 500 000 (dir. Jerzy Bossak and Wacław Kaźmierczak, 1962), Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising According to Marek Edelman (dir. Jolanta Dylewska, 1993) and 912 Days of the Warsaw Ghetto (2001). In order to overcome the determinism of the found ideology several methods have been employed by the filmmakers: re-editing the footage with an added voice-over narrative, the presence of an expert whose authority would undermine the truth claims of the footage, and a recent technology of digital manipulation. It is necessary to focus on the formal aspects of the usage of archival footage as well as the objectives of the film. One of the key problems a documentary filmmaker working on the Holocaust has to face is both a need to refer to the oppressive discourse of the perpetrators and keeping a critical distance.

Taking up this topic necessitates an inquiry into the posthumous life of the Nazi propaganda as the analysis of the postwar use of these material needs to take into consideration the fact that propaganda entails an uncritical adoption of its contents. What happens to propaganda when its political sponsors are no longer in power? We cannot forget that new contexts are not free from their own ideological tinging which affects the perception of Nazi ideology.

The Warsaw Ghetto in the films of 1942

In the spring of 1942 a German camera crew produced film footage in the Warsaw Ghetto. During the month-long shooting, they filmed the people in the streets, the food trade, the housing situation, cultural and religious events and activities to control diseases such as typhus and the detention center of the ghetto. The surviving recordings are fragments in rough cut without sound and have a total playing time of about 63 min. So far there are no indications for the purpose of these shots or who exactly commissioned the film. In order to approach the film as a source and despite the lack of background knowledge the shots are to be considered in two different perspectives: The first perspective focuses on content and selected visual motifs. Here the film is very closely related to the images of Nazi propaganda about ghettos in 1942 and reproduces already well-established structures of perception and instructions. The various shots show the rules and organizational structures of the National Socialist discourse and create a “typical” image of the ghetto. The second perspective which is deemed to be even more significant deals with the question on how the film is made. I will present an approach to this question by an analysis of the visual mechanisms and the involvement of the sequential structure of the medium. To demonstrate my reasoning I will illustrate some shots of the film.

„The Second Life“ of the Theresienstadt Films after the World War II

Film materials shot in the ghetto of Theresienstadt between 1942 and 1945 were considered lost for a long time. Results of historical research of the last decades (cf. the work of the historian Karel Margry) and other recently appeared facts enable us to reconstruct how the individual  film fragments made their way into different  international archives after the year of 1945. One should point out that there are still lost materials and contexts that haven’t been yet clarified, – among others the question of hiding the film clippings of 1942 by Irena Dodalová. Recently found documents in the Archive of Security Services in Prague became a new source of  information about filming in the ghetto and the production of the controversial propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (1944-45). They are connected with a trial in the mid 1960’s in Prague which was dealing with the illegal transfer of this film to West Germany, or rather its fragment. The topic of the post-war history of the film materials from the Theresienstadt ghetto which became an important source for historical study and also for publications on the Holocaust for the public, still presents a challenge for current research.