Theresienstadt 1942. Dreharbeiten

Working material. Film discovered in 1994. The material presents a film crew at filmset during shooting film about the ghetto in Theresienstadt. 

The unethical use of film and photo cameras which captured and vilified Jewish life in Poland began in 1939 with an invasion of German cameramen and photographers who followed in the footsteps of the military. Five weeks after the attack, the first “ghetto” was established in former Piotrków Trybunalski, now called Petrikau on Reinhard Heydrich’s orders. More “ghettos” followed until the end of the year, including Masovian Płock (Plotzk, later called Schrötterburg) where 10.000 Jews were interned, and, in December, Radomsko, with 20.000 prisoners. (1)
On the newly drawn political European map the “racially inferior” were to be marginalised, isolated, exploited and eliminated. The spatial and social institution of the “ghetto“ was to play a double role. After the public ostracization of Jews with armbands and stars, the “ghetto” became an early tool of spatial segregation and withdrawal of the technologies of the Holocaust from the public eye. At the same time the “ghetto” became a productive resource of propaganda material for Nazi media. In this sense the artificially created “ghetto” was one of the early institutional apparatuses of the genocidal phase of the Holocaust, intimately connected with the optical apparatus recording the results of Nazi biopolitics. (…) Whereas for Goebbels the term “ghetto film” seemed to be a clear concept and synonymous with another composite typical for the NS jargon, the “Judenfilm”, today’s audiences and scholars will feel uneasy when confronted with the word without quotation marks. The same is true for the Nazi version of the word “ghetto” which deserves always to be marked as a quote, similar to the Nazi terms “Aryan” or “Final Solution”. (…) What are “ghetto films”? The surviving examples of this dubious genre – especially if the footage was not included in published newsreels, propaganda films or “Kulturfilms” – are almost as scarce as the documentation of the intentions behind their commissioning. Research during the last decade has at least been able to roughly establish the institutional background of the official cameramen and which groups or individuals would have commissioned or privately shot “ghetto films” (Uziel 2008, Horstmann 2009, Rother and Prokasky 2010, Zöller 2014).
(1) As most Polish cities were renamed by the German authorities, the newly established “ghettos” are called by their German names to mark the difference from the extinguished toponym which often was Slavic: Łódź became Litzmannstadt and Terezín became Theresienstadt.

Natascha Drubek, Editorial: The Ghetto as Holocaust Apparatus; http://www.apparatusjournal.net/index.php/apparatus/article/view/34/94

There was, in fact, a third filming project on the premises of the ghetto, unfortunately, only mentioned but not represented on the “Truth and Lies” DVD. Olaf Sigismund, the SS officer and film-maker employed by the Nazi security service, was present in Theresienstadt during the filming of the first film in November 1942. He in his turn filmed the process of the filming using a 16mm camera, probably, as documentation for his office in Berlin.
It might have been his footage that was displayed at the Czech exhibition “Truth and Lies” (first at the Jewish Museum, Prague, later in Terezín), but not included in the DVD material: a scene with a film crew and a crowd of extras, workers, and onlookers, under the supervision of the SS and the ghetto police, taking pictures of a train – most probably, a Transport -- arriving at the station. Adler’s expression “organisierter Wahnsinn” becomes an apt description without any metaphoricity whatsoever when one watches the installation from which the filming of the train was performed: a vagonette carrying the crew with a huge camera and all the necessary equipment, running to and fro along an additional line of rails laid parallel to the railway, pulled/pushed by hand by a group of prisoners, and repeating this apparently meaningless maneuver obsessively again and again, without an end. Adler could have witnessed similar scenes during the production of “organized madness” in the filming of the Gerron film.

Natascha Drubek, http://www.apparatusjournal.net (Apparatus issue 2)