Russian and East European Studies

Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946

Jeremy Hicks

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780822978084
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Most early Western perceptions of the Holocaust were based on newsreels filmed during the Allied liberation of Germany in 1945. Little, however, was reported of the initial wave of material from Soviet filmmakers, who were in fact the first to document these horrors. In First Films of the Holocaust, Jeremy Hicks presents a pioneering study of Soviet contributions to the growing public awareness of the horrors of Nazi rule.Even before the war, the Soviet film Professor Mamlock, which premiered in the United States in 1938 and coincided with the Kristallnacht pogrom, helped reinforce anti-Nazi sentiment. Yet, Soviet films were often dismissed or even banned in the West as Communist propaganda. Ironically, in the brief 1939-1941 period of Nazi and Soviet alliance, such films were also banned in the Soviet Union, only to be reclaimed after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, and suppressed yet again during the Cold War. Jeremy Hicks recovers much of the major film work in Soviet depictions of the Holocaust and views them within their political context, both locally and internationally. Overwhelmingly, wartime films were skewed to depict Soviet resistance, "Red funerals, " and calls for vengeance, rather than the singling out of Jewish victims by the Nazis. Almost no personal testimony of victims or synchronous sound was recorded, furthering the disconnection of the viewer to the victims. Hicks examines correspondence, scripts, reviews, and compares edited with unedited film to unearth the deliberately hidden Jewish aspects of Soviet depictions of the German invasion and occupation. To Hicks, it's in the silences, gaps, and ellipses that the films speak most clearly. Additionally, he details the reasons why Soviet Holocaust films have been subsequently erased from collective memory in the West and the Soviet Union: their graphic horror, their use as propaganda tools, and the postwar rise of the Red Scare in the United States and anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union.

1

“Right Off the Top of the News”

PROFESSOR MAMLOCK AND SOVIET ANTIFASCIST FILM

In May 1939, as viewers watched a screening of the Soviet film Professor Mamlock (Professor Mamlok) at New York’s Thalia Theatre, on Ninety-fifth Street, near Broadway, someone threw a tear-gas bomb into the auditorium.¹ This film, which depicts the Nazi persecution of an initially apolitical Jewish surgeon who “converts” to communism following Hitler’s 1933 takeover, had been showing uninterrupted in New York since November 1938, when its premiere accidentally coincided with Kristallnacht, the 9 November Nazi pogroms in Germany. As one of the first films from any nation to show the Nazis’ systematic persecution of the Jews, it seemed, as the New Republic columnist Otis Ferguson put it, “right off the top of the news”; he added that it was “closer to events than the latest March of Time.”² In fact, its topicality gained it unprecedented success for a Soviet film. In the greater New York area alone, it allegedly was shown in 103 cinemas, with Jews in particular flocking to see this dramatic reconstruction corroborating the numerous eyewitness accounts of Nazi anti-Semitic persecution.³ The film may have carried a message people needed to hear, but the tear-gas thrower, a homegrown U.S. Nazi, was not the sole obstacle to the film’s being seen, for the attempts to censor or outright ban Professor Mamlock outnumbered similar proposals concerning any other Soviet film, even the incendiary Battleship Potemkin.⁴ At the same time, the Soviets’ own self-promotion in their depiction of Nazi anti-Semitism, as well as the subsequent ban on this film, likewise erected barriers to the film’s success.

Thus, while the film ultimately attracted a large audience in the United States, at least for a subtitled film, it has since been all but forgotten beyond occasional retrospective screenings and one-line mentions in the most comprehensive histories concerning representations of Jews or the Holocaust.⁵ In other countries, where censorship was even more successful in keeping the film from the public, it is even less commonly considered.

Given the enormous importance now accorded film depictions of the Holocaust in Western culture, it may seem incredible that one of the first films of the genre—the first feature film to portray the Nazi persecution of the Jews directly as a central theme and not simply allude to it—should have been and continues to be neglected. The films conventionally seen as alerting the English-speaking world to the dangers of Nazism are the far more widely seen sixteen-minute “Inside Nazi Germany” issue of the March of Time newsreel (January 1938), which shows signs of anti-Jewish measures but, as a British critic wrote, no “Jew-baiting atrocities.”⁶ Indeed, the newsreel’s stance was perceived as morally and politically ambiguous toward Nazi Germany.⁷ Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) was another film both more widely seen and conventionally perceived as having been important in revealing the nature of Nazi Germany to Americans. Directed by Anatole Litvak, a Jew born in Kiev, this Hollywood film takes a more explicitly anti-Nazi stance than does the ambivalent “Inside Nazi Germany,” yet it never refers to the Nazis’ anti-Jewish measures. Professor Mamlock depicts Nazi anti-Semitism much more clearly than these other two films do and condemns it more unambiguously; indeed, its whole plot turns on this facet of Nazism. The film’s disappearance from memory is thus an anomaly in film history and considerations of representations of the Holocaust.⁸ Yet the erasure of the film from memory is also symptomatic of attitudes both at the time and immediately after the war.

Professor Mamlock met a problematic reception in the English-speaking world in part because many perceived it as emphasizing the fate of Jews under the Nazis in inconvenient or unacceptable ways. This perspective emerged, for example, in a 1943 House of Commons debate about the BBC where John McGovern, a Labour Party MP, cited Professor Mamlock as a film that attempts to speak for the Jews and was censored as such.⁹ This claim may overstate things a bit, but the assertion is indicative in that films of that time contained virtually no direct Jewish testimony from inside Nazi Germany; any film daring to breathe the merest hint of it was heralded as authentic—or treated with suspicion and suppressed.

Professor Mamlock could make some claim to offer an authentically Jewish perspective, based as it was on a play by the refugee German Jewish writer Friedrich Wolf, who imaginatively reconstructed the story’s events around a photograph he had seen of a Jewish doctor in Mannheim whom Nazis there had persecuted, hanging a board bearing the word Jew around his neck.¹⁰ The text was first published in the Soviet Union, where a German-language edition appeared in 1934; the play premiered in Poland later that year in a Yiddish translation. (The Polish production starred the actor Alexander Granach, who had been celebrated for his role in Fritz Murnau’s German expressionist classic Nosferatu [1922]. Granach subsequently lived for a brief period in the Soviet Union before taking up a Hollywood acting career in which he often played a Nazi in anti-Nazi films.) The following year saw the play receive an even more successful German-language premiere in Zürich.¹¹ Wolf’s original drama does bear a communist subtext, but this became an outspoken communist message in the Soviet film adaptation, which was directed by another Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, the Austrian filmmaker Herbert Rappoport, and his Soviet codirector Adol´f Minkin. This interplay between the film’s representation of Jews and its portrayals of communists helps reveal why Soviet depictions of the Holocaust were resisted where possible, for they struck a raw nerve in both Britain and the United States. On the rare occasions where such films represented the fate of Jews as Jews, something Professor Mamlock does, they combined this with a communist message in a manner that dominant Western opinion found objectionable. Even when such films overcame all obstacles and proved popular, they were forgotten as soon as practically possible. Western suspicion of the Soviets thus significantly hindered this potential means of alerting democratic opinion and eliciting public responses to the events befalling European Jews.

Before looking at the film’s critical reception, we must first understand how and why, in a country with a deeply ambivalent attitude to its own Jews, a groundbreaking film portraying their persecution came to be made.¹²

Professor Mamlock and Soviet Antifascist Film

Said to be “the first fiction film made about the Holocaust,”¹³ the Soviet adaptation of Professor Mamlock received its Moscow premiere on 6 September 1938, the first of three anti-Nazi films released there that year. All three make the experience of Jews central, indicating a coordinated propaganda offensive against the Nazis, a final effort to promote an anti-German alliance comprising the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and their allies. Each of these films was adapted from literary works by refugee German antifascist writers. Grigorii Roshal´ adapted Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel The Oppermann Family (Die Geschwister Oppermann) to make The Oppenheim Family (Sem´ia Oppengeim [1938]),¹⁴ and Aleksandr Macheret loosely based The Swamp Soldiers (Bolotnye soldaty [1938]) on a memoir of that name (in German, Moorsoldaten) by Wolfgang Langhoff.¹⁵ Nevertheless, Professor Mamlock had incomparably greater impact and so deserves more attention.¹⁶

Soviet anti-Nazi films are a problematic category, since they almost never use the term Nazi, always preferring the vaguer Fascist. Moreover, their target is broader than “fascism” alone,¹⁷ principally because of the diffuse concept of fascism common in the Soviet Union, where it was seen simply as a form of capitalist state.¹⁸ Thus many of the Soviet films in this genre are set not specifically in Nazi Germany but in fictional places bearing a composite of capitalist features. A good example is Ivan Pyr´ev’s Conveyor of Death (Konveier smerti [1933]), which has anticommunist thugs adorned with swastikas, but the police uniforms are as much English as German, as is the prominence of the Salvation Army, and we see both communist leaflets and graffiti written in English, French, and German. The target is capitalism as such, denoted by the film’s structural metaphor, the conveyor of death, which symbolizes the fomenting of war for munitions factory profits. Such depictions were clearly incapable of rallying an alliance of anti-Nazi powers.

The Soviet attitude to the Nazis evolved during the course of the 1930s, however, and filmmakers crafted serious attempts to court liberal anti-Nazi opinion, especially in Britain and France. Emphasizing Nazi racism provided an obvious way to do this, since the Soviet Union itself was initially constituted as an internationalist and multiethnic state guaranteeing minority rights. An analysis of Nazism along these lines was attempted as early as 1934, when the internationally oriented but soon-to-be-disbanded Mezhrabpomfil´m studios produced Vladimir Nemoliaev’s film Ruddi’s Career (Kar´era Ruddi [1934]), in which engineering graduates are polarized between those teasing and humiliating a Jew, Josif Weltmeyer, and those sticking up for him.¹⁹ After a period of vacillation and association with the anti-Semitic faction, whose members soon become Nazi storm troopers, the main character, Ruddi, eventually throws in his lot with the Jew, the former classmates sympathetic to Weltmeyer, and the striking workers. Apparently, however, no other Soviet films searched for this potential common ground until 1938.

Nevertheless, the flawed analysis of fascism in terms of a general critique of capitalism, which failed to address its racist dimension adequately, colored both the Soviets’ subsequent view of the Holocaust as part of a larger phenomenon and their refusal to acknowledge the situation facing Jews specifically. The historian Larry Ceplair even identifies the Marxist view that “anti-Semitism was a symptom of the greater disease that could only be defeated by the overthrow of capitalism” as complicit in the failure of Soviet-led popular-front politics to help save Europe’s Jews.²⁰ Still, this stance enabled Soviet filmmakers to depict the plight of these Jews, as in Professor Mamlock, whereas no Hollywood film dared tackle the subject until 1940. While political thinking stopped the Soviets from doing more to prevent the Holocaust, economic priorities initially equally hampered the United States and other democracies in any similar endeavor. As Jay Leyda has commented, one of the advantages of being boycotted and vilified by the Germans was that, unlike the Americans, the Soviets were not worried about losing German markets.²¹ Consequently, the antifascist theme reached its apogee in 1938–39, when Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov led the Soviet Union in its final push to form an antifascist front. The Soviets then abandoned this policy following the Czechoslovakian crisis, and in the face of insuperable mutual suspicion between their nation and Poland, the Jewish Litvinov was replaced by the non-Jewish archpragmatist Viacheslav Molotov, enabling the signing of the nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany.²² The choice to adapt internationally celebrated literary condemnations of Nazism, banned in Germany itself, was clearly taken with an eye toward Western liberal sensibilities, as was the emphasis on anti-Semitism.²³

A key component of Professor Mamlock’s attempt to influence Western opinion was its setting in contemporary Germany, not an undefined country. The film’s codirector, Adol´f Minkin, claimed that this distinguished Professor Mamlock from earlier Soviet antifascist films: “Previously in antifascist films the action usually took place in ‘a certain’ country, and the time of the action was vaguely defined as ‘in our time.’ Working on Professor Mamlock, we used concrete material; we knew the place, time, and setting of the action.”²⁴ Thus, Professor Mamlock’s appeal depended centrally on its ability to portray Germany convincingly. Soviet critics agreed that it did so, unlike earlier films made by Mezhrabpomfil´m studios (even though the organization specialized in such depictions); they presumably had films such as Ruddi’s Career in mind.²⁵ Those films often incorporated newsreel footage—usually generic shots of Berlin traffic—alongside the acted scenes so as to convey a strong sense of place that would compensate for the fact that no Soviet film crew would be allowed to shoot on location in Nazi Germany.

Grigorii Roshal´, the director of The Oppenheim Family, commented on the difficulties that Mosfil´m employees faced in making sets and props for a Soviet film set in Western Europe.²⁶ Professor Mamlock’s Lenfil´m crew, however, enjoyed the advice of Herbert Rappoport, who had recent firsthand knowledge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. “Right off the Top of the News”: Professor Mamlock and Soviet Antifascist Film
• 2. “The Beasts Have Taken Aim at Us”: Soviet Newsreels Screen the War and the Holocaust
• 3. Imagining Occupation: Partisans and Spectral Jews
• 4. Dovzhenko: Moving the Boundaries of the Acceptable
• 5. Mark Donskoi’s Reconstruction of Babyi Iar: The Unvanquished
• 6. Liberation of the Camps
• 7. “The Dead Never Lie”: Soviet Film, the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the Holocaust
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index