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{en} Giacomo Lichtner. Film and the Shoah in France and Italy. London - Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008 <Book>

Abstract

"Examines Soviet newsreels, documentaries, and feature films. Soviet filmmakers were the first to record visually the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and, from 1941 on, the Nazi mass murder of Jews. Two feature films dealt mainly with the fate of Jews under Nazi rule: "Professor Mamlok" by Adolf Minkin and Herbert Rappaport (1938) and Mark Donskoi's "Unvanquished" (1945). Some others mentioned the Holocaust, e.g. "A Priceless Head" by Boris Barnet (1942) and Fridrikh Ermler's "She Defends the Motherland" (1943). Even more so, newsreels and documentaries made in 1941-46, albeit censored and only rarely identifying victims as Jews, showed the Holocaust, among them "The Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine" (1943) by Aleksandr Dovzhenko. Soviet filmmakers were the first to film Nazi death camps liberated by the Red Army, in "Majdanek" by Irina Setkina (1944) and in "Osventsim" ("Auschwitz") by Yelizaveta Svilova (1945). During the preparations for the Nuremberg Trials, "Film Documents of Atrocities Committed by German-Fascist Invaders" was compiled from newsreels and other documentaries; this film showed victims of the Nazi genocide, which the U.S.-made documentaries "Nazi Concentration Camps" and "The Nazi Plans" failed to do. "The Judgment of Nations", filming the main Nuremberg Trial, was made by Roman Karmen and Yelizaveta Svilova. Many of these Soviet films were shown in the USA and in Britain, but were mainly dismissed as communist propaganda and as being too horrific. After 1946, they were removed from the screens and, hence, erased from collective memory - in the West, under the impact of the Cold War, and in the USSR, following the rise of official antisemitism."--Publisher description.

Contents

"Right off the top of the news" : Professor Mamlock and Soviet Antifascist film -- "The beasts have taken aim at us" : Soviet newsreels screen the War and the Holocaust -- Imagining occupation : partisans and spectral Jews -- Dovzhenko : moving the boundaries of the acceptable -- Mark Donskoi's Reconstruction of Babyi Iar : The unvanquished -- Liberation of the camps -- "The dead never lie" : Soviet film, the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the Holocaust.