Theresienstadt – Filmfragmente und Zeitzeugenberichte

The Nazi propaganda film, Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet, presents a distorted and carefully orchestrated rendition of life in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. The film scenes that depict ghetto housing, often dismissed as a product of the superficial “beautification” measures carried out in Theresienstadt, nonetheless invoke the spatial hierarchies that existed in the ghetto. As the densest ghetto, Theresienstadt’s “spatial problem” was perpetually acute, and the Raumwirtschaft (Space Management Office) was established to closely monitor the use of available space and to manage the living accommodations of ghetto inmates. Drawing upon a wide set of archival records and ego documents, this article examines how Jewish inmates navigated everyday life amidst an acute shortage of space and argues that space was an important ghetto commodity that radically reshaped communal relations in Theresienstadt.

On 23 June 1944, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) inspected the ghetto town of Theresienstadt. It was the first time that this humanitarian organisation had ever visited deported Jews. After protracted negotiations, the inspection was finally entrusted to a junior member of ICRC staff who had no experience of visiting civilian detainees. His findings about the prevailing situation in Theresienstadt were generally positive and were used by the Nazis as propaganda. After the war, the ICRC representative was harshly blamed for his lack of perceptiveness. This article questions the established view of the ICRC visit to Theresienstadt by placing such inspections in the broader context of activities undertaken by the ICRC on behalf of inmates. By conducting a more careful reading of the written report and an analysis of the attached photos, this article challenges the commonly accepted idea that the ICRC representative was completely duped by the Nazis' Verschönerungsaktion in Theresienstadt.

The article approaches the hell of Theresienstadt by starting with reflections on its historical reality as a special camp and as part of the Nazi policy of extermination. It then gives some insights into authentic experiences of the “forecourt of hell”, as remembered by survivors of the Holocaust and expressed in the interviews conducted during field research in the years 2017 and 2018. Set against this background, we finally reconstruct and interpret the reality of the place as it is presented in the Nazi propaganda film Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Terezín: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area). Based on an analysis of selected parts of the film, we develop the thesis that the Theresienstadt film represents a very distinct means of presenting Nazi political ideology through a propaganda tool. This is because the film stages a “hall of mirrors” that distorts the hell of ghetto life into a paradise, in order to expose this “heaven on earth” as nothing but an optical illusion and a phantasm. The more-or-less hidden main message of the “documentary film” is that skilled and well-informed observers of this Jewish fake paradise will be able to decode the mirror writing and discover the ongoing downfall of humanity, and thereby finally become aware of an existential threat that transmits and reveals its own verdict of annihilation.