Issue 6: Documenting Nazi Crimes through Soviet Film

Questions have been raised about the trustworthiness of Soviet film footage of crimes from the WWII period for as long as the Russian cinematographic archives have existed. In the past, this footage and the concerns about it were mainly discussed through the lens of the Cold War. Today, the reasons for distrust are even broader in scope, due to the possibility of digital manipulation and the activities of the contemporary Russian propaganda machine, which has instrumentalised the history of WWII as part of its onslaught against Ukraine. Furthermore, Soviet and post-Soviet compilation documentaries reproduced, ad infinitum, decontextualised images of women in mourning and close-up shots of human remains. That obscured the full quantity of original rushes that had been preserved and prevented us from assessing their significance. However, three parallel dynamics have made it possible to reinterrogate the already-familiar footage and discover new material. Firstly, from 2000 to 2020 the emerging field of visual history greatly contributed to our historical understanding of the Holocaust.1 Secondly, in the 1990s the Soviet archives became more accessible, which initially opened up space for fresh interpretations until, in the first decade of the new millennium, the history of WWII was instrumentalised for the Russian nationalist project. This is only paradoxical at first glance; right from the outset there was a focus on opening up, and publishing documents from, certain archives in the service of political objectives. Thirdly, researchers began to investigate how the crimes were covered in the press, perceived at local level and presented within the constantly rewritten collective memory of WWII during the post-war period.2 For our work, we have adopted an interdisciplinary perspective that builds on and benefits from this research.3

As part of the project Visual History of the Holocaust (VHH),4 we conducted several viewing sessions in Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia and Russia.5 This greatly expanded the corpus of film footage we are familiar with. In this special issue, we seek to situate a visual analysis of that footage within contexts of de-occupation, war crime investigations and political pressure. The articles collected here also question the interpretive biases that emerged at different stages (e.g. when selecting the scenes to be filmed, during the filming itself and during the subsequent processes of evaluating, cutting, recomposing and reordering the material) and analyse how the footage was gradually alienated from the social and political context of filming observed at a local level.

Soviet camera operators began documenting evidence of Nazi crimes early on in the war, and a growing body of such footage was produced as time went on. However, archivists of Soviet audiovisual materials faced several challenges that did not arise for equivalent documents in English-speaking countries. Whereas in the West, film footage of the liberation of the camps was systematically catalogued and benefited from large-scale digitisation efforts over the years, the Soviet films were dispersed across various institutions and countries and, at least until we carried out our research, could not strictly speaking be said to form a corpus. Most of this footage was not digitised and the archival referencing system dates back to the 1990s, when the Soviet archives were opened to the public. Our investigations revealed a strong centralisation of the film archives between 1939 and 1946, as well as inconsistencies in the Moscow central archive’s distribution of audiovisual documents of the de-occupation to former Soviet republics after they became independent countries.

We went to the post-Soviet archives with the intention of potentially integrating into our corpus valuable Soviet documents that had been inaccessible to researchers during the Cold War. Of course, it was necessary to be mindful of Russian and Belarusian rhetoric that had reclassified WWII as the “Great Patriotic War” (1941–1945) in order to rally support among the population. This reclassification erased the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939). Moreover, Jewish, Roma, LGBT+ and disabled victims were collected under the general heading of “Soviet civilian victims.” Our research aimed to reveal the subtle temporalities of the crimes and their investigation and to identify specific groups of victims in order to shed light on this code of silence. Our goal of historicising the footage went against the approach taken by some archivists, who treated the archives as a vast reservoir of anonymous footage and iconic images. Our research team sought to highlight institutional interventions at different stages, from filming to conservation, and thus to reveal blind spots, biases, gaps and shortcomings. However, our work was seen as an attempt to encroach on the archivists’ domain and was met with resistance, which only intensified with the worsening political situation.

The audiovisual archives in Ukraine and Estonia proved more open and cooperative. In Belarus, information about what was held in the archives was withheld and the archives’ managers were eager to extract information about new preservation technologies available in Western Europe. They dismissed arguments that the history of war crimes constitutes a shared heritage. The relevant documents are a major source of revenue for both the Belarusian and Russian archives, especially in the context of the political escalation and the manipulation of memories of WWII. The archives’ typical customers are television channels and filmmakers, who purchase excerpts or shots from a cursory thematic classification table without bothering to search for metadata. The archival institutions were also not forthcoming about distinctions between originals and copies, possible gaps in the collections and questions of provenance. In 2020, the suppression of the democratic movement by the Belarusian government brought any exchange with European institutions to an end, so that the materials we had identified (in particular, unpublished footage documenting Maly Trostenets, Vitebsk, etc.) could not be integrated into our corpus. After several viewing sessions and protracted meetings, the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow did send copies of film documents (both edited films/newsreels and compilations of rushes). The delivery of these archival materials coincided with the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which marked the end of our cooperation with Russian archival institutions.

The apparent abundance of footage risks masking just how incomplete the archives are. The gaps at multiple levels should prompt any historian studying the materials to question why this is the case. Why are certain historically significant audiovisual materials, documenting major massacre sites such as Bełżec, Treblinka and Sobibór, nowhere to be found in the archives? It is possible that those sites were never filmed: the camera operators did not always follow the itinerary agreed with the military, the sites were sometimes only discovered by chance and not all units benefited from the presence of professional filmmakers, who were the only ones with cameras. Furthermore, certain shots may have been defective and so technically unusable (for instance, due to the quality of the film, exposure errors or mechanical problems with the cameras). Or else they may have been lost or destroyed, either on purpose or through negligence. Alternatively, we may simply have so far been unable to locate the footage, whether due to indexing errors or the loss of cataloguing information, or because we did not gain access to all the existing footage or to every archive. The abundance of film footage thus in no way means it is complete, nor does it rule out the possibility of future discoveries should the archives become accessible to international researchers again (or, ideally, even more accessible than they were previously).

During an international research seminar conducted as part of the VHH project in 2021 and 2022,6 we compared various methods for historical analysis of visual documents, which made it possible to bring in the diverse perspectives of (film) historians, archivists, screenwriters, filmmakers and photographers. We have collectively attempted to embed these new documents within the history of documentary film understood as a tool of persuasion and mobilisation. The limitations of working on compiled rushes encouraged us to question the rhetoric inscribed within them, thus guarding against readings imposed by the way they were edited. Various fruitful analytical tools and frameworks were discussed over the course of our research into the use of audiovisual media both during the conflict itself and in the distinct waves of coverage of war crime trials (1945–1947, 1958–1970).7 On the one hand, the archival materials that we identified during our investigations can now be placed alongside an array of other sources, taking their specificity as visual sources into account. Analysing the creation of these filmic documents raises questions about the intersection of collective memories and networks of shared knowledge, as well as the weight of the traditional Soviet secrecy on the documentation. On the other, these materials shed new light on the social stakes of war crime investigations and the public exposure of evidence of crimes. They also contribute to the spatial history of the Holocaust.

These audiovisual materials are also crucial for understanding the immediate context of the crimes. While some films (from Auschwitz, Majdanek, etc.) are already known to historians of the Holocaust, looking at unpublished (or only partially published) footage opens up fresh perspectives on the sites of massacres, for example by making topographical connections such as identifying buildings or areas of towns. In line with recent work on the geography of the Holocaust,8 these materials allow us to distinguish between the contexts of persecution and genocide. How can we separate the history of the Holocaust from that of other massacres perpetrated by the occupiers? What does the footage tell us about the places and events that were prioritised for filming and about the camera operators’ instructions and perspectives?

This special issue aspires to open up the corpus to a broader scholarly context and thus enable closer cooperation between film scholars and historians (including art historians). We shared footage that was tagged with dates and locations by the camera operators and information on the filming process with historians specialising in mass crimes (Karel Berkhoff, Tal Bruttmann, Babette Quinkert, Irina Rebrova). That facilitated a dialogue between project participants who specialise in filmic materials (Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Anna Högner, Valèrie Pozner, Fabian Schmidt, Irina Tcherneva) and those whose research focuses on the Holocaust (Marie Moutier-Bitan). To better characterise the form of knowledge generated by these documentary materials, which bear the traces of the dictatorial regime in which they were produced, we approached them with a recognition that their production was shaped by contexts of investigation and local reception. Historical research can help us to identify the gaps in the footage thus created.

In their article “Depicting Atrocities: Ethics of Sharing Holocaust Images,” Anna Högner and Fabian Schmidt examine the emotional but also epistemological burden of the shock that contemplating images of atrocities can cause. They highlight the gap between, on the one hand, how research can habituate researchers to violence and, on the other, how the ethical burden becomes greater if the findings are presented alongside distressing images. The article goes on to question the place of empathy and grief in teaching the history of mass violence via drawings, films, photographs and museum exhibitions. How might researchers and their audiences find the proper distance between the need to know and the desire to avoid injuring both the living and the dead?

In “Soviet Film Footage and Professional Practices (1941–1945),” Irina Tcherneva situates the new corpus of rushes within the social history of documentary film and explains the specific contours of that history. She considers how the professional milieu of film grappled with large-scale brutality for the first time. Film milieu occupied an intermediate space between the film authorities’ and filmmakers’ attitudes and preferences regarding the codification of how information on the brutal crimes should be presented and transmitted. Which professional standards were disrupted by this confrontation with extreme violence? And which, on the contrary, were strengthened? Approaching the moment of filming as a site constituted by power relations, the article interrogates interactions between filmmakers, soldiers, investigators and survivors. The tension between forensic and propagandistic uses of the footage is brought into conversation with reflections on the equivalent tensions present in the ChGK’s textual documentation.

The next two articles focus on the archival nature of rushes and their modes of recomposition and later uses. In “Towards a History of Soviet Film Records (Kinoletopis’)” Valérie Pozner discusses the specific features that distinguish Soviet audiovisual documents of the Holocaust from their Anglo-American counterparts. Pozner traces the history of the archival project with which the kinoletopis’ collection originated back in the 1920s, elucidates its successive institutional affiliations and describes the various interventions to which the materials were subjected. This genealogy allows us to grasp the consequences of those choices for the items currently preserved in former Soviet countries. It also highlights the limitations inherent in researchers’ interpretations of such materials. Finally, the article critically examines some examples of how this archival footage has been used in recent documentary productions.

In line with Sylvie Lindeperg’s description of films as “portable sites of memory,” Fabian Schmidt and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann propose conceiving of the edited films as “travelling archives” or a “receptacle” of archives. In “A Travelling Archive: Tracing Soviet Liberation Footage” they show how the rushes preserved in the archives complement the shots that were integrated into the first compilation films. Their analyses focuses on films of Auschwitz and Majdanek produced in 1944/45. This fragmentation of the initial sources into a myriad of images is also analysed in the articles by Tcherneva and Pozner, but a different approach to it is taken here. Recomposing this complex body of footage is certainly a challenge; the authors suggest creating a new transnational archival structure to preserve the films using digital tools, and argue that the collections should be understood as repositories of necessarily migratory images.

“Zinovii Tolkachov’s Drawings from the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek Death Camps: Testimonial Works, Viewer’s Perception and Uses in Political Propaganda,” by Glib Vyshislavsky examines the artistic, political and social contexts in which drawings of two major crime scenes, Auschwitz and Majdanek, were produced and disseminated. Like several other articles in this special issue, this piece draws on verbal testimonies (first-person documents and records) to shed light on the processes of creation and exhibition (both of which are sensitive to the material experience of extreme violence). Just as in cinema, the Holocaust is only indirectly visible in these documents, both to their creators and their viewers – a displacement to which we are challenged to respond.

The next three articles provide case studies of how film footage can contribute to the history of the Holocaust at a smaller scale, especially our spatial knowledge of the crimes. Karel Berkhoff’s article “Soviet Footage from the 1940s and the Holocaust at Babyn Yar, Kyiv” examines the rushes shot in Babyn Yar and exhaustively maps out the footage. Berkhoff shows that many of the rushes only depict the main site of the massacre of Jews that took place in November 1943 fleetingly or at a distance, and instead focus on the place where the victims were forced to undress. Tal Bruttmann’s “Filming Auschwitz in 1945: Osventsim” helpfully supplements the analysis of footage from Osventsim given in the collective study Filmer la guerre.9 He examines the locations of the Soviet cameras and explains how these shots transformed scholars’ spatial perceptions of the camp and the movement of prisoners. Several recurring elements in depictions of the Nazi camps connect the footage shot at Auschwitz to that taken at other camps discovered by the Soviets. Using personal writings to identify the people filmed, the article also outlines how the process of filming was perceived by those caught on camera, both adults and children. Finally, in “Reflections on the Geography of the Holocaust Based on Soviet Film Footage: The Cases of Kremenets and Vyshnivets (July 1944),” Marie Moutier-Bitan looks at two locations filmed in western Ukraine after the arrival of the Red Army. Her aim is to formally identify the sites and highlight certain aspects of the genocide, such as the destruction of Jewish quarters and the social distribution of space.

Two further articles draw on film documentation to examine certain categories of victims. Given that, since the 1980s, historiography and museum cultures across Europe and the United States have been distinguished by visual representations of the Holocaust, Babette Quinkert focuses on a category of victims who were over-represented in the original footage but are “forgotten” today: Soviet POWs. Film footage can provide information on many topographical, architectural and material features, as well as the chronology of POW representation. In “Forgotten: Film Documents from the Liberated Camps for Soviet POWs” Quinkert, in line with a number of Holocaust specialists, establishes 1943 as a turning point. In “People with Disabilities as Nazi Victims on Screen and Paper: A Close Reading of the 1943 Krasnodar Trial Records,” Irina Rebrova analyses footage of the trial in Krasnodar and turns to the judicial archives for answers regarding matters on which the film is silent: psychiatric hospital patients as invisible victims, an arbitrarily chosen defendant and a false witness who gives accurate testimony about gas trucks. Rebrova interrogates the reasons that led the judicial authorities to reconstruct information when exposing these and other Nazi crimes.

By interweaving multiple perspectives into studies of audiovisual materials, this special issue opens up new questions that cut across various bodies of documentary knowledge of the Holocaust. Future research might productively examine the local communities discovered by reporters and artists – communities in mourning, sometimes distant or hostile – and their involvement, voluntary or forced, in the collection of records. Similarly, one major dividing line in several of these essays concerns the opening up of documents to the general public. The risks entailed by publishing and exposing during the war and in the immediate post-war period are one variable that can account for the myriad forms these documents have taken. This special issue also invites us to reflect on our responsibility when classifying sources, both in academic settings and contexts of public remembrance and education. Which of the archival materials can be considered “Holocaust liberation footage,” and by what criteria? This issue forms part of a broader collective discussion on war crimes based on the textual, visual, quantitative and material traces that those crimes left behind. That discussion combines a wide variety of perspectives – spanning social, visual and political history, linguistic and spatial approaches and critical reflections on sources produced by perpetrators, victims or liberators. This interdisciplinary, international dialogue is more necessary than ever at a time of multiple wars and rising populism.

Irina Tcherneva, Marie Moutier-Bitan, Valérie Pozner

Suggested Citation: Tcherneva, Irina, Marie Moutier-Bitan, Valérie Pozner. “Issue 6: Documenting Nazi Crimes through Soviet Film. Editorial.” Research in Film and History 6 (2025): 1–13. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/23559.

• 1

  To give just a few references from a very extensive bibliography: Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Sylvie Lindeperg, Nuit et Brouillard: un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007); Stuart Liebman, ed., Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Antoine Germa and Georges Bensoussan, eds., Les Écrans de la Shoah: la Shoah au regard du cinéma (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2011); Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Geschichtsbilder im medialen Gedächtnis: filmische Narrationen des Holocaust (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); Ophir Levy, Images clandestines: métamorphoses d’une mémoire visuelle des “camps” (Paris: Hermann, 2016); Jean-Louis Comolli and Sylvie Lindeperg, Face aux fantômes (Paris: CNC, 2018); Tal Bruttmann et al., Die fotografische Inszenierung des Verbrechens: ein Album aus Auschwitz (Darmstadt: WBG Academic, 2019).

• 2

  Kiril Feferman, Soviet Jewish Stepchild: The Holocaust in the Soviet Mindset, 1941–1964 (Saarbrücken: VDM, 2009); Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011); David Shneer, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Yosef Gorny, The Jewish Press and the Holocaust, 1939–1945: Palestine, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014); Arkadi Zeltser, Unwelcome Memory: Holocaust Monuments in the Soviet Union (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2018); Anna Koch and Stephan Stach, eds., Holocaust, Memory and the Cold War (De Gruyter: Oldenbourg, 2024).

• 3

  Dagmar Herzog, ed., Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006); Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Valérie Pozner, Alexander Sumpf, Vanessa Voisin, eds., Filmer la guerre: les Soviétiques face à la Shoah, 1941–1946 (Paris: Mémorial de la Shoah, 2015); Valérie Pozner, Irina Tcherneva, and Vanessa Voisin, eds., Perezhit’ voinu: Sovetskaia kinoindustria, 1939–1949 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2018); Valérie Pozner and Irina Tcherneva, eds., Conserveries mémorielles 24 (2020): The Cinema Goes to War: Screens and Propaganda in the USSR (1939–1949), https://journals.openedition.org/cm/3710; Nadège Ragaru, ed., Cahiers du monde russe 61, no. 3 (2020): Écritures visuelles, sonores et textuelles de la justice: une autre histoire des procès à l’Est.

• 4

  “Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age,” funded by the EU Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement no. 822670. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all our colleagues on the project, with whom we visited post-Soviet archives, explored the collections of other archival institutions in the United States and discussed methods and approaches at various conferences and seminars.

• 5

  No new original liberation footage had been found from Latvia or Lithuania.

• 6

  Recordings are available at https://www.vhh-project.eu/events-2021 and https://www.vhh-project.eu/events-2022.

• 7

  Research project led by Vanessa Voisin, “Les crimes de guerre nazis dans le prétoire, Europe centrale et orientale, 1939–1991,” project no. ANR-16-CE27-0001.

• 8

  Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

• 9

  Pozner, Sumpf, Voisin, eds., Filmer la guerre, 56–64.