- Caption
- STILL PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE NAZI PROPAGANDA FILM, "Der Fuehrer Schenkt den Juden eine Stadt" [The Fuehrer gives the Jews a City]. Portrait of an elderly Jewish man sitting in an audience in the Theresienstadt ghetto.
- Photographer
- Ivan Vojtech Fric
- Date
-
1944
- Locale
- Theresienstadt, [Bohemia] Czechoslovakia
- Variant Locale
- Terezin
Czech Republic
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Ivan Vojtech Fric
- Event History
- The SS, seeking to exploit the beautification efforts undertaken at Theresienstadt in preparation for the Red Cross visit of June 23, 1944, decided to produce a film about the ghetto for propaganda use in Germany. Entitled "Der Fuehrer Schenkt den Juden eine Stadt" [The Fuehrer gives the Jews a City], its purpose was to show the pleasant life of Jews in a town that was generously given to them by the Nazi regime, in contrast to the hardships faced by Germans under the Allied bombardment. Aktualia, a Prague firm specializing in documentary films, was hired to make the movie, while Kurt Gerron, a Theresienstadt inmate and former cabaret actor, was assigned the role of producer and director. Prisoners were forced to serve as members of the cast. Though the film was shot in August and September, 1944, it was not completed until March 1945. At that time the documentary was seized by the German authorities. Only a portion of the original film survived.
[Source: Zdenek Lederer, "Terezin," in "The Jews of Czechoslovakia": 3: 134-8]
See https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt.
See Also "Terezin" in Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Volume 2 Part A.
See Also https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda.