Archiving the Ghetto: An Unfinished Propaganda Film of the Warsaw Ghetto, 1942

Abstract

Throughout May and for the first two days in June 1942, German cameramen shot extensive 35mm footage in the Warsaw Ghetto. Filming concluded shortly before the commencement of the so-called Großaktion Warschau – the deportation of hundreds of thousands of the ghetto’s inhabitants to the death camp at Treblinka, where they were murdered. The close temporal connection of the filming to the coordinated mass-depopulation of the ghetto and killing of its inhabitants has raised questions as to whether the Nazis sought to shoot film which they would not have been able to obtain shortly afterwards, and whether their interest in doing so extended to other, later stages of the annihilation of European Jewry.