Kristallnacht on Film: From Reportage and Reenactment

• In Event: Kristallnacht as Home Invasion, Political Catalyst, and Screen Image

Abstract

In the absence of original footage from Kristallnacht, newsreels, documentaries, and feature films employed several techniques to represent the November Pogrom immediately after it and in the ensuing decades.
The initial response in American and British newsreels consisted of political and religious figures condemning the violence and footage of the resettlement of fleeing Jewish refugees or on stills of the broken windows of Jewish shops.
After the outbreak of World War several anti-Nazi feature films either mentioned Kristallnacht or portrayed the vandalizing of a store owned by a Jewish character as in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). The anti-Nazi French propaganda film Mein Kampf: My Crimes (1940) intercuts footage of the 1933 boycott, a still of a pillaged Jewish store, and doctored pre-1938 photos of a Berlin synagogue with a dramatization of the Vom Rath assassination and the anti-Jewish violence it incited.
American wartime propaganda films followed another pattern. For example, Why We Fight: Prelude to War (1942) includes photographs of a burned German synagogue and newspaper headlines about Kristallnacht, but match cuts these with images of assaults on Christian churches to emphasize that both Jews and Gentiles were targets of Nazi persecution.
The emphasis on Allied documentaries from 1945 is on the atrocity footage from the liberated camps. Marriage in the Shadows, a German feature film produced in the Soviet Occupation zone 1947, contains a rare graphic recreation of the pillaging of German Jewish shops and pummeling of their Jewish owners reflecting the experiences of its director’s family.
Dramatizations of Kristallnacht do not reoccur in feature films until the 40th anniversary of the pogrom. The documentaries made in the interim rely on photographs, footage of the boycott and book burning, the fabricated scenes from Mein Kampf: My Crimes, and survivor interviews to depict Kristallnacht. It is only with the discovery of German home movies of Kristallnacht that authentic footage of the rampage appears in documentaries made in 1988 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the pogrom.

Author

• Lawrence Baron, San Diego State University