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"The Soviets En Route to Nuremberg." Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps

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Michalczyk, John J. "The Soviets En Route to Nuremberg." Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 47–64. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474210652.ch-004>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 00:20 UTC. Copyright © John J. Michalczyk 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 4 Th e Soviets En Route to Nuremberg In late 1938, Sergei Eisenstein directed Alexander Nevsky , dealing with the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Order in 1242 as they invade a powerless and peaceful Russia in the wake of other foreign invasions. An obvious metaphorical fi lm, Eisenstein’s epic work alluded to the ominous threat of Nazi Germany. Th is modern, well- armed menace had appeared most evident in the military display in the 1934 Nuremberg gathering of the Nazi Party in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will . Early scenes in Alexander Nevsky clearly suggest a potential German invasion and above all, the committing of atrocities on the Russian people. Th e Teutonic Knights capture the city of Pskov and hang resisters; they callously snatch children from their mothers and cast them into a blazing fi re, an unconscious portent of the Holocaust to come. Wearing a miter bearing swastikas, the Roman Catholic bishop blesses the Knights, thus sanctioning their acts of violence against the innocent civilians. 1 Greg Dolgopolov off ers the rationale for this anti-German fi lm: It is impossible to view this fi lm set in the thirteenth century outside of the context of the history of its production in the late 1930s. Alexander Nevsky is an allegory that projected present events and sensibilities onto the past in order to draw strength from Russian history. Propaganda in the Soviet Union was not considered an invective. Th e fi lm was designed to mobilize and bring confi dence to the worldwide struggle against Fascism. Th roughout the 1930s, relations between the USSR and Germany were in a constant state of fl ux. Germany’s rearmament, Hitler’s avowed anti- communism and the weakness of the European policy of appeasement were cause for enormous anxiety. 2 Other Soviet fi lms of 1938 further marked the appearance of anti-Semitism while the pogroms against the Jews were occurring: Professor Mamlock (dirs. Adolf Minkin and Herbert Rappaport), Peat Bog Soldiers ( Bolotnye soldaty , dir. Aleksandr Macheret), and Th e Oppenheim Family ( Sem’ia Oppenheim , dir. Grigorii Roshal). 3 Less than a year later, in August 1939, aft er great acclaim for Eisenstein’s masterpiece, the Soviet government shelved Alexander Nevsky and other fi lms 47 48 Filming the End of the Holocaust with an anti-German tone in light of the German-Russian non- aggression agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Just two years later, however, following the German Army’s military incursion into Russia on June 22, 1941, the prophetic Alexander Nevsky was re- released as a rousing rallying cry for national unity in the face of the warring threat of Fascist Germany. Th e fate of other Soviet fi lms dealing with Jewish- related subjects was not as fortunate. When Operation Barbarossa was launched in 1941 against Russia to exterminate Jewish Bolshevism, the country lay vulnerable to a vicious onslaught of its soldiers and citizens. 4 Hitler, however, underestimated the resistance and resilience of the Soviets who managed to create a strong defensive, and then, in the wake of the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943, a major off ensive. With an echo of the Napoleonic defeat in Russia in 1812, Germany faced severe losses at Stalingrad and undertook a challenging winter retreat. Th e Red Army then began to push westward toward Germany. Starting earlier in November 1941, as each of the occupied areas such as Rostov- on-Don became liberated, the Soviets documented the atrocities of the invaders. Th e fi lming of the murderous deeds of the German Army as well as the results of the marauding Einsatzgruppen , the lethal killing squads targeting the Jews, provided visual testimony to the criminal activity of the Germans. 5 Th e treacherous Einsatzgruppen , the four major mobile killing units, accompanied the German Army through Poland on its march toward Moscow. 6 In order to conquer the ideological enemy, the Soviet Union, the mission of the units called for eliminating any enemy of Germany—Jew, gypsy (Roma/Cinti), Soviet offi cial, and, as part of the continued euthanasia war against the disabled, any mentally and physically challenged individual. Even prior to the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, Heinrich Himmler established the Einsatzgruppen to take this preliminary step in the “Final Solution” with this type of massive slaughter. He abided by the principle of creating a strong ethnic German presence ( Lebensraum ) in the East as part of the Th ird Reich’s world domination plan. Th is would necessarily mean eliminating anyone who did not conform to this Aryan ideal. Th e operation fi rst began with liquidating male Jews and then proceeded to include women and children as part of a more extensive genocidal attempt to eliminate all European Jewry, and in this phase of the war, Russian Jews. As the Einsatzgruppen units formed of SS and other police units relied upon informers and collaborators, the slaughter became widespread. Soviet cameramen fi lmed this extensive carnage aft er an area was liberated, to be shown on newsreels in theaters throughout Russia. Mass shootings and burials in vast graves served as the Nazis’ normal means of execution and concealment with the Th e Soviets En Route to Nuremberg 49 most well- known being the massacre of Kiev Jews at Babi Yar. 7 When this form of killing damaged the perpetrators psychologically within several months of the Nazi invasion, mobile gas vans were utilized for execution, taking this pressure off the killers. Th ese vehicles temporarily served as the prototype of the lethal gas chambers discovered by the Soviets, British, and Americans as they liberated various extermination camps and fi lmed them as documentation of the tragic level of the Nazi killing apparatus. At the time of the fi lming of Rostov, Minister of Foreign Aff airs, Vyacheslav Molotov, made note of Soviet goals of justice on November 7, 1941 and again on January 6, 1942, stating that the government must hold the leaders of Nazi Germany responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the occupying army. 8 It would be a year later, in November 1943, that the three Allied powers, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union would reiterate this point in the Moscow Declaration and direct their condemnation of criminality at both the leaders of the Th ird Reich and the perpetrators committing the evil deeds. In order to prosecute the war criminals, there must be authentic documentation, and fi lm would be the most visible and visual means to record these deeds. Even prior to some of the formal planning of an international court of law to judge the war criminals, Stalin initiated a war crimes tribunal. Historian Robert Gellately, the editor of Dr. Leon Goldensohn’s interviews during the Nuremberg Trials where he oversaw the prisoners until July 26, 1946, comments on the early Soviet trials leading up to establishing the International Military Tribunal: . the Soviets were taking steps of their own to settle scores with the invaders. As they liberated their land from the Nazi yoke in the summer of 1943, they began carrying out their own trials, including trials of their own citizens, for participation in Nazi war crimes. In the fi rst such trial (July 14–17, 1943) at Krasnodar, the Soviets made public to the world one of the fi rst cases of mass murder of the Jews. Th ere were eight death sentences, which were carried out in the city square in front of a crowd estimated at thirty thousand people. 9 On September 29, 1941, the Nazis gathered the Jews from the Ukrainian city of Kiev and transported them to a ravine outside the city. Th ere the German police and SS shot execution- style every person in the back of the neck, stacked the bodies in a pile, shot another group and stacked those on top of the earlier layer. On that day and the next, 33,771 Jews lay dead in the large pit at Babi Yar. 10 No Soviet cameraman fi lmed the massacre, but photos do remain from German soldiers who captured the executions on camera. In 1944, Soviet investigators 50 Filming the End of the Holocaust opened a grave at Babi Yar and witnessed the masses of corpses remaining from the 1941 massacres. 11 Not too long aft er the Nazi invasion, two thoughts permeated the minds of the Soviet government and the civilians—vengeance and justice. It would take almost four years before both were attained. In order to arrive at these goals, Soviet cameramen began to document the atrocities infl icted on the Soviet citizens. In November 1941, the Red Army fi rst liberated the southern city of Rostov- on-Don, which Hitler saw as an important conquest following Moscow and Leningrad/St. Petersburg. 12 Th e cameramen fi lmed the ruined city where the Nazis raped and pillaged their way through the civilian population for eight days. Bodies fi lled the streets, and ruined churches testifi ed to the Nazi destruction of the body and soul of Mother Russia, as revealed in one of the fi rst signifi cant newsreels of the results of the Nazi occupation—Soiuzkinozhurnal no.
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