The fragment, as fragments, tends to dissolve the totality which it presupposes and which it carries off toward the dissolution from which it does not (properly speaking) form, but to which it exposes itself in order, disappearing— and along with it, all identity—to maintain itself as the energy of disappearing: a repetitive energy, the limit that bears upon limitation (Maurice Blanchot)

Introduction

The ethical challenge of the documentary today is to present images of openness, images that engage in conversation between filmmaker, subject matter, and audience. It is only through the production and reception of images that negotiate the authority of the filmmaker, the conclusiveness of the material and the totalistic quest for truth that the imbalance of power relations between representation and represented can begin to be questioned, even diffused [1] . Typically, there is no place for Nazi documentary film within this project. For documentary film taken by Nazi cameramen and women is thought to be eclipsed by its overwhelmingly ideological agenda. [2]  Due to the political allegiance of its maker, its wartime subject matter, and the purposes for which it was used, it is dismissed because it inherently propagates the heinous ideals of Nazism. There is nothing open, inconclusive or conciliatory about Nazi documentary film and thus, it is, not surprisingly, rejected on ethical grounds.

In the same way that the Nazi documentary is rarely seen to advance the project of documentary film or its study, it is not usually considered for its complication of the historical representation of World War II and the Holocaust. It is usually agreed Nazi documentary images must be approached with caution. Critics argue that they represent the glorification of the Nazis’ criminal advance to totalitarian power, the violence of the German camera, the objectification of the enemy. In very different ways, critics maintain that the aesthetic and subject matter betray Nazi power and privilege, anti-Semitism, and perversity. [3] Critics also argue that the classical camera angles, the balanced frame compositions, the full frontal closeups, the careful construction of racist crimes, the pride and excess of public spectacle, reveal the perversions of Nazi ideology. [4]  Thus, the Nazi image is complicit in the dehumanization of the Jews, it embodies all the ideological beliefs that led to World War II and the Holocaust. The violence of these images overwhelms them, eclipses them, and therefore, it is not possible to approach them for their historical evidence, aesthetic innovation, or their other ideological influences. They have no currency as anything but evidence of Nazi ideology.

These claims are made on the basis of a limited corpus of documentary films. Namely, those produced by The Ministry of Propaganda. There is another kind of Nazi documentary image that is recycled again and again in narratives that seek to understand and remember World War II and the Holocaust. Usually unacknowledged, and typically anonymous, these images are reproduced as factual documents in the displays of, for example, Holocaust exhibitions all over the world. [5] And so the paradox. On the one hand, images taken by Nazis are dismissed as unreliable because of their ideological perversion, and on the other, Nazi images of a different genre have become indispensable as evidence in the narration of contemporary histories. [6]  It is true that attempts have been made to integrate the amateur images taken by self-identified Nazis into broader histories, and to consider them for their aesthetic contributions. Michael Kuball’s films and writings are notable examples of this. [7]  However, the more common discourse allows the propagandistic vision to speak on behalf of all Nazi documentary images, including amateur, anonymous material. In turn, this tendency lies at the crux of the paradox.

In this essay I turn to a particular instance of recycled Nazi amateur film footage that embraces this paradox unawares. Namely, the BBC’s The Third Reich in Colour (Germany, 2001), a made-for-television documentary that claims to showcase recently recovered archival film footage shot during World War II by Nazis and Allies, but most often by Germans, and even more often by German soldiers. Despite its assertions, the television documentary uses the rare and early colour footage as a visual backdrop to an already familiar history of World War II and the Holocaust. Through my analysis of The Third Reich in Colour I illuminate how and where the Nazi amateur footage both advances our understanding of documentary film and offers critical insight into the historical events it witnesses. I analyse the images for their aesthetic and historical value. Thus, I underline their complexity, and in turn, their status as evidence of much more than Nazi ideology.

In recent years, there has been a growing commitment in Britain to remember and memorialize World War II and the Holocaust, and Nazi amateur film and photography are at the centre of these efforts. The British initiatives have taken a number of forms: for example, the mounting of a permanent Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, [8]  the nationwide observance of a Holocaust Memorial Day (January 27), and a spate of documentary films such as Science and the Swastika (UK, 2001) and I met Adolf Eichmann (UK, 2002) produced and aired on terrestial television. [9] Underlying all of these efforts we can detect a familiar image of Nazi Germany and its people as evil. In turn, Britain-the-Allied-liberator is represented as the saviour to generations. This reinforcement of British benevolence comes at a telling historical juncture in British cultural and political history.

Britain has a long history of anti-Semitism, and in the twentieth century, a history of anti-Zionist stances towards Israel. For example, Britain joined in the opposition to lift the Egyptian blockade on the Straits of Tiran, a blockade that effectively protected the Gaza Strip, and was among the events that led to the Six Day War in 1967. The insidious anti-Semitism of British history, and gestures such as its support of United Nations Special Agency efforts to delegitimize Israel in the twentieth century are no longer tenable in the current international climate. Although I do not want to suggest a cause and effect relationship, it seems significant that the surge of British interest to memorialise and raise consciousness about the Holocaust, effectively helps to mute Britain’s partisan past towards the Arab-Israeli conflict [10]

Another reference point for the wave of cultural interest in the Holocaust might be found in Britain’s pressing need at the turn of the twenty-first century to differentiate from Germany as the largest economic contributor to the European Union and political heavyweight in the European Parliament. The differentiation remains urgent as Britain strains to maintain its autonomy in areas such as currency reform and immigration policy. It is possible to argue that differentiation from Germany in the cultural arena is telling of the British need to assert national identity at a time when the rhetoric of colonization is no longer viable. It is true that these explanations for the surge in production of made-for-television historical documentaries and other cultural forms that reuse archival footage shot by Nazi Germans are speculative. In addition, no doubt the production and broadcast of the documentaries are underwritten by programming needs, availability and access to material and so on. However, their existence and appearance on terrestial television can be interpreted as symptomatic of the broader trends in the struggle for national identity in post-colonial Britain. As mentioned, these initiatives to remember the Holocaust are taking place in a number of forms. However, television is a particularly powerful medium because of its capacity to access a disparate and large audience.

Prior to reflecting on the British reuse of the archival documents to remember World War II and the Holocaust, we must turn to the narratives themselves, their composition, their meaning, how they pitch themselves to a British audience. To this end, I explore the aesthetic and historical value of these images, an exploration that demonstrates their status as much more than documents of Nazi ideology. With this established, I then focus on the repeated tendency of the television narrative to use images taken by Nazi perpetrators (particularlyWehrmacht soldiers) as the foundation for “revisiting” and “remembering” the past. Ultimately, the Nazi images are used to obscure historical insight, to confirm the historical narrative of rescue that Britain has always told to itself. In short, the images are redeployed to confirm that responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust can be laid elsewhere and that the benevolent British Allies were responsive to the challenges of the enemy, and responsible to its victims. Despite these claims about remembering the past, the BBC production The Third Reich in Colour manipulates Nazi amateur colour film footage to create a coherent narrative that does more to repress and forget the historical trauma of the Holocaust than it does to remember and keep alive the possibility of writing these heinous events into history. The repetition of the well-rehearsed narrative of Germany as criminal perpetrator and the Allies as redeemer shuts down rather than opens up an interrogation, and thus, continued memory of the past. On the contrary, my analysis of Nazi amateur colour film footage and its recycling in The Third Reich in Colour is intended both to extend existing discourses of the documentary image, and open up the question of how a British audience will remember a past for which it is not responsible.

One can only speak of this British audience as the imaginary audience conceived by broadcast television. Similarly, the conception of history offered by The Third Reich in Colour is not necessarily that shared by British people as individual subject-spectators. Rather it is a history made for the audience as undifferentiated, undiscerning adherents to post-War British society and culture. It is also important to note here that The Third Reich in Colour was made in Germany, compiled by Spiegel TV’s Michael Kloft. The credits to the documentary indicate that it was packaged especially for the BBC. This packaging includes a voiceover narration by Robert Powell, a British actor renowned for his appearance in period dramas. As I go on to argue, Powell’s voiceover, connected for the British audience to his star persona, is one of the primary elements that transforms the fragmentary amateur footage into a historical melodrama. Of central importance to my interpretation of The Third Reich in Colour is the manipulation of the material at the level of voiceover and musical score, those elements which are unmistakeably British. In German versions of similar historical documentaries, not only is the voiceover in German, but it tends to tell a history that is more attentive to micro-developments in the political, economic, cultural and scientific landscape of Third Reich Germany. [11] Similarly, the melodramatic music is less common in the German television documentaries. The use of the musical score in German versions of these documentaries is sparse: the soundtrack is at times punctuated by the atmospheric melodies of a Vivaldi Fantasy or a Schubert March. Certainly, the melancholic clarinets and fiddles that we associate with the destruction of European Jewry appear to belong exclusively to The Third Reich in Colour. The renarrativized versions of the amateur colour material aired on German television embrace similar contradictions and, like The Third Reich in Colour, they transgress the integrity of the images through imposition of an otherwise unrelated history. Nevertheless, they are quite clearly different entities, different works, made for different audiences. Even if they were not, even if the same compilations were aired on German, French and British television, narrative meaning of The Third Reich in Colour cannot be divorced from the particularity of its viewing context.

Critical to my argument is the relationship between the television documentary and the archival images. For if we bother to examine the archival images before and without their renarrativization, we will see that they are rich in historical and aesthetic detail. In the BBC documentary’s narrative all that we might learn from these aspects of the images is hidden. The archival images are not used to remember – to open up, to understand, to challenge – the chequered history of Germany’s Third Reich. The television documentary makes only the most cursory of attempts to engage with, even to refer to the images. Rather, the archival images’ complexity, their insight, their own contradictions, are covered over and rendered insignificant by a coherent history (communicated by the voiceover) that has been told countless times elsewhere. The archival images are forgotten by a documentary that, on behalf of its British audience, is intent upon confirming its own authority.

This article ultimately looks to three discursive goals: first I argue that the ignorance shown towards the archival footage betrays a discomfort and fear towards the amateur colour footage. By extension, the relationship between the archival image and its televisual recycling reveals the ambivalence towards the Nazi image, and the histories it narrates, an ambivalence that exists in the cultural imaginary more generally. A representation like The Third Reich in Colour might claim that images must be suppressed due to their ideological distortion. Second, I argue that the television documentary consequently places the archival images at a distance through its omniscient voiceover narration and music. In turn, the documentary takes these measures to alleviate the British viewer’s potential identification with these otherwise ordinary documents. To identify with the images—which here means to see footage that could so easily have been taken from one’s own camera—implies to see physically and ideologically through the eyes of Nazi soldiers. Thus my task in this article is to expose the simultaneous intimacy and distance of the amateur footage which lies at the heart of their recycling in The Third Reich in Colour. Third and last, my critique of The Third Reich in Colour represents a more general challenge to the narratives we are told and we tell ourselves in order that we might comfortably inhabit the present, free of a responsibility to the past. Before launching into these discourses that result from the relationship between the fragmentary footage and their recycling in The Third Reich in Colour, we must spend some time with the amateur footage in its archival form. Through close analysis of the archival images we will recognize they have an aesthetic and historical interest that is smothered by the television recycling. This appeal becomes testimony to their value as much more than evidence of Nazi ideology, and consequently, substantiates the argument for misappropriation.

Images from the archive

Towards the middle of The Third Reich in Colour, from somewhere above the street, a camera watches in slow motion as several inhabitants of a ghetto walk down the street. The camera seems to be following a man wearing a cap, leaving the others behind as they fall out of the moving frame. The footage cuts to a long shot of a Chasid as he walks along in the lower half of a canted frame, his hat and pais identify him from afar as an orthodox Jew. Other people walk before the camera, obstacles obscure the camera’s view of him, but still it follows him. And then another man, older, with a bushy grey beard and walking stick, hobbles through the same streets, again at an angle, against the background of the drab grey ghetto buildings. A fourth man is picked out by the camera as it continues its journey through the ghetto. None of these figures appears to be going anywhere, they are simply walking through the streets as life goes on around them. It is true that they all walk with purpose, and their motions must have goals, however, this is not the concern of the camera person. Rather, this footage wants to show their movement. One of the men stops to talk, perhaps negotiate, with the ghetto’s Jewish police, an old man turns at one point to follow a young woman. However, the significance of these actions is not elaborated upon within the course of the sequence. It is the existence of the people, the documentation of very ordinary daily movements that form the substance of these short fragments.

My first response to these fragments is to see the Nazi behind the camera. The camera not only watches, but follows. Similarly, it follows not just anyone: it follows ghetto inhabitants who bear the physical signs of their religious beliefs: uncut beards, pais, and hats. In addition, the ghetto inhabitants are not aware of being watched: they are, in a sense, surveyed. Upon reflection, however, I am also struck by the similarity between these images and those taken in the ghettos by Jews —particularly, in Lodz. [12] The images of, for example, Mendel Grossmann may not be in motion, they may not be in colour, however, they do bear the same traces of life caught unawares, clandestinely shot from the safety of an undisclosed vantage point. [13] This is the alternative interpretation. In this colour footage of the ghetto inhabitants, the shift to slow motion, the strange angles, the canted frames, the uneven composition, the unsteady, hand held images bear all the traces of a film shot on the sly. These images tell of an 8mm camera placed in a coat pocket, behind an unseen window high above the street. However observational, the footage does not appear to be official documentation.

Further into the documentary, we return to what can now be recognized as the ghetto at Warsaw to observe the goings on: the trolley cars glide along just inside the ghetto wall, a man sits and watches the world go by, the colourful market bustles with activity as goods are bought and sold, the people fossick through the wares, vendors wipe down the skin of the produce on sale. This is a camera that sees day to day life in the ghetto, the discussions, the toing and froing, the various stages of preparation for market day, and the ordinariness of the lively market. We see inside the ghetto walls, the diverse activities and peoples who weave the fabric of Warsaw Ghetto life. Unlike the footage already described, these images of the quotidian bear no traces of the political or ideological allegiance of their cameraman.

In the course of this same footage we know to have been shot in the ghetto sometime between 1942 and 1943 we see images that disturbingly tell the tale of starvation, diseases such as typhoid and death, diseases for which the Nazi maltreatment of the Jews is renowned. [14]  And what makes these images so painful to watch is that they depict children. The children sit, sometimes lie, on the sidewalk, because they have no energy, their muscles so emaciated they are unable to stand or sit up. Underfed, covered in rags, it is all they can do to hold out a hand to ask for food. What makes these images even more disturbing is that because they are shot level with the children on the sidewalk, we also see the legs of the people who walk past them, never stopping as they move about their daily business. As if the sight of the children with their bones bared, the flies swarming around their sores, their sunken eyes in shadow, heads held low is not enough to horrify us, the images somehow become even more powerful as we see the children being ignored by those who share their world. The children’s suffering is all part of daily life in the ghetto.

This footage is the most disturbing of the three examples discussed. The camera unapologetically observes the gypsy children in all their suffering, caring little for the exploitation of their difficulties for the purpose of documenting the ghetto. Similarly, the abject state of the children’s bodies, their dire distress brings to mind all of the monstrous crimes that the Nazis committed. We cannot ignore the trauma witnessed by this footage. However, this is not our only response, the footage has other dimensions. Indeed, it is even possible to see other crimes present in the image, not only those committed by the Nazis, and by the camera person. [15] Not least of all is the interpretation that stems from the fact that we know it to be the Warsaw ghetto, and we know of the injustices and violence that went on in the ghetto. Further, we know these injustices were far more complex than the simple equation of Nazi perpetrators versus Jewish victim would allow. [16] Other ghetto inhabitants may have acted in the name of survival and self-preservation, however, they were not always so innocent. Whose are the legs that walk past, ignoring the starving children? Don’t they belong to the ghetto’s other inhabitants? Was the violence that took place in the ghetto so straightforward? Doesn’t this footage also tell of the complex layer of abuse and hierarchical abandonment said to comprise the very substance of ghetto life? [17] While the amateur footage certainly represents Nazi perpetration, it also reveals much more. It is infinitely rich in historic and aesthetic detail. For example, we have already seen the fabric of daily life, the bustling intensity of the market, the various different modes of transport in motion, and the infrastructural layers of privilege and poverty so necessary to self-preservation.

In addition, the images open up myriad questions relating to their production: questions of authorship, provenance, image-making practices among amateur filmmakers, among Wehrmacht soldiers. Who was the filmmaker? Where did he or she get the film stock? Did the camera person have access to this technology because of an official role as journalist, photographer? And why film the goings on in the ghetto? As documentation? Propagada? A personal past time? Did he or she do the editing? Was the footage edited upon acquisition by the archive? The questions are infinite because even those film fragments which are given to the archives by next of kin typically come with, at most, a description of the location and date of shooting. There is little certainty about the form and substance of these images. While we cannot answer many of these questions about the footage, in these few fragments, what we can see a negotiation typical of documentary film: a negotiation between the image as aestheticized representation (colour, camera movement, angle, and so on) and as documentary evidence (of daily life in the ghetto). In any interpretation, the footage must be seen to oscillate between film as record and as representation. [18] It has the potential to be seen as both a search for objectivity and as the invention of the filmmaker and, due to this fluidity, surely passes as more than a propagandistic manipulation of objective events? Similarly, it does not do justice to the density of the footage to see it only through the ideological lens of the Nazi camera as perpetrator. As we will see momentarily, The Third Reich in Colour will ignore this complexity in its historical narrativization of the footage. Before turning to the recycling of these particular images, it is useful to detail two less “charged” archival example that are also reworked into The Third Reich in Colour.

In another sequence, a camera watches the streets of Berlin through an objective long shot. We see the latest model cars drive through and around the Brandenburg Gate, streetcars move through the centre of the city with the Church of St. Nikolai in the background, an old Jewish man shuffles along, and behind him, the circular motion of cars at Ernst-Reuter-Platz. From somewhere on Strasse des 17 Juni, cars approach the dominating Siegesäule. In yet another animated sequence, the film moves to the shores of the Wannsee on a gorgeous summer’s day. Everyone is relaxed, and happy, enjoying the sun and the water despite the crowds at the shore. Children in markedly different health from the gypsies on the sidewalk in the Warsaw Ghetto play with balls, buckets and spades; men and women parade the latest bathing costumes, and another group follows what appears to be an exercise class.

In fragments of film such as these, the camera watches the activity on the streets of Berlin from a variety of angles and heights, as the traffic moves past familiar markers such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Siegesäule. As the camera observes the goings-on at the Wannsee, there is little suggestion of the ideology that lay behind the destruction of European Jewry. The footage is somewhat typical amateur film from the time: it shows an admiration for Berlin—as would any tourist—and a revelling in the summer weather that brings the shores of the lake alive. [19]  Indeed, such scenes of tourism and days of recreation at the beach are the staple of amateur film from all historical periods. [20]  This said, the footage is recognizably early 1940s: the quality of the colour, the lakeside fashions and hairstyles, the cars all betray the time of the footage’s production. [21] Similarly, we know that the footage was taken in Nazi-occupied Germany because the streets of Berlin and the lake shores are lined with swastika flags. We can also be sure that it is shot by someone of privilege. We know this because it is a privilege to have a camera and access to colour film stock at this time. [22] However, none of this information that we glean from the footage would indicate that it is shot by a Wehrmacht soldier. Indeed, it could have been shot by any visitor, even local inhabitant of Berlin. Without archival documentation, I could be forgiven for believing that if my Australian grandparents had been in Germany with a camera during the war, this is what and how they might have seen. There is nothing about this footage that documents Nazi perpetration.

While in some sequences our curiosity about the historical events taking place before the camera is piqued, in others, it is the aesthetic of the film images that catches our interest. This is particularly so when the archival footage comes close to abstraction. For example, in some images the camera glides through the skies as it follows the displays of aerial prowess from the cockpits of Allied and Nazi fighter planes alike. [23] Three, four, five, sometimes six planes soar in formation through the brilliant blue sky, and the horizon constantly shifts with the movement of the plane from which the footage is shot. The planes are in distant long shot, synchronized black shapes against the radiant sky. The camera follows these shapes in motion, and as it does so, shakily shifts its perspective from the side to the front window of the plane. True to the hastily shot, sometimes awkward images common to amateur film, these images unashamedly include many mistakes and miscalculations. For example, as the hand held camera follows the movement of other planes in formation, the image becomes accidentally obscured by the control panel, the roof, or the wing of the plane from which it is seeing. In time, however, the camera re-establishes its focus. On one occasion when, after one of these momentary glitches, objects reappear in the frame, we are treated to an aerial view of a city below. Then the camera finds the soaring fighter planes on the distant horizon once again. There are also moments when we are left with no more than the blue sky, as though it has become the protagonist of the film. This is only one example of the many in The Third Reich in Colour in which the movement of the camera, the colour of the film stock, and the celebration of seeing from a distance are brought to the foreground. They are displayed on the surface of the image and the political allegiance of the cameramen and women becomes secondary, sometimes even unidentifiable. I want to propose that in such cases this raw archival footage is of more interest aesthetically than it is supposedly ideologically transparent.

As was the case with the Warsaw Ghetto footage, when I look at these images taken from the cockpits of fighter planes, I wonder who shot them. Was it a Nazi? If so, what was the rank and position? Perhaps it was an Allied pilot? How and where did he acquire the camera? The colour film stock? And who saw the footage at the time of its production? Where, if at all, was it screened? These questions aside, there is also plenty to discover from looking at the images themselves. Perhaps most striking is the use of Agfacolor. These films are among the first shot on Agfacolor reversal film stock. Typical of the amateur films from the time, shot in Europe by Nazis and non-Nazis, Germans and non-Germans, Jewish and non-Jewish, men and women, both the footage of Berlin and that of the aerial display court the possibilities of the cyan-based film stock. The blues and greens, and the opposite colour of red, at times take over as the protagonist of these films: the fighter planes glide into distant long shot, and the brilliance of the blue sky against which they fly comes to the fore and fills the frame. And when the camera goes to the Wannsee, we are struck by the red tinges of the human skin, a red that results perhaps because the blue and green layers have faded faster through deterioration, perhaps due to a flaw in the processing. [24] The red of swastika flags that line the main thoroughfares of Berlin and stake out territory on the shores of the lake also catches our eye. It is almost as if the flags were designed with Agfacolor film representation in mind. However, linked to the creation of a society marked by health, happiness and eternal sunshine – reinforced by the exercisers on the beach at Wannsee – the flags extend beyond their ideological and political significance. Here, in this early example of amateur colour film, the swastika flag also leaves a strong visual impression. This celebration of colour and the material of film is consistent across much of the amateur footage which has now been collected in various archives around the world. In so much of the footage we are struck by the beauty of the turquoise-blue sky, the rich green of lakes, the grains of the surface, the tactility of early colour images, so rich in temperature, tone and hue. It is as though they have been carefully hand-painted. These images pose infinite questions and are aesthetically suggestive to the inquisitive eye of the film historian. The questions, like the footage, do not have to be over-determined by the presence of the Nazi filmmaker.

In addition to revelling in the possibilities of filmmaking in colour, the amateur film is constantly in motion. It pans, tracks, and loves the view outside plane windows, revels in the vista of the Wannsee alive on a perfect summer’s day. Toward the end of the short sequence at the lake, the camera pans parallel to the shore, unfolding its enthusiasm for movement. It celebrates the activity of the people it films and its own ability to pan. When the camera of the colour amateur footage is not in motion, it is mesmerized by objects that are: planes, trams, children, traffic. This fascination with movement and colour tell of cameramen and women who are pioneers in the development of their medium. This preoccupation with motion can, in part, be attributed to technological developments. Not only are these images shot at an historical juncture when colour film stock has come onto the market for everyday use in the home, but it is also a moment when portable cameras are available for the first time to the amateur filmmaker. Previously this technology was only to be found in the hands of the professional-usually news reporters-cameramen. In the footage shot from the cockpits we appreciate the difficulties of wielding a hand-held camera. From the colour distortions of the bathers at the Wannsee our attention is drawn to the difficulties of balancing the image composition when negotiating the properties of different colour film stock, and the challenges posed by the unpredictability of natural sunlight. And if we go back to the archival images taken in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1941 and 1943 we will learn of the challenges posed to the amateur not only in composing the image, but also in editing it. In the archival copies of these fragments, interspersed with the images of the starving children, we see shots of unidentifiable objects repeatedly filling the frame, the face of a Nazi officer rotated right, at first in extreme close-up, then in medium shot, then again in close-up. [25] This footage offers us insight into both the early development of a colour film aesthetic, the challenges faced by early amateur users of camera equipment, and the difficulties of both in-camera and post-production editing. We can look at it and learn from the focus on certain colours, the use of colour for compositional purposes, the mistakes that were common to the amateur film. The same exploration of possibilities and teething problems with colour film stock and its usage were encountered by amateur filmmakers all over Europe and the United States during these years. [26]  The presence of Nazi ideology is not the only motivating force of the images.

Recycling for television

In The Third Reich in Colour, this same fragmentary, often unidentifiable documentary footage is edited together to form what becomes a visual backdrop to a sombre voiceover narration that tells a history of World War II. The same images of people in high angle long shot moving through the streets of the ghetto are now accompanied by the voice of Robert Powell. In a voice that carries all the weight and devastation of the Holocaust in its pitch, tone and command, Powell tells us that the cameraman “filmed the Jewish population as if he were aiming at them with a gun.” He continues: “indeed these people stigmatized by the Nazis had been condemned.” And that “around this time, Actian T-4, the code name for a euthanasia program initially targeting infants with mental and physical disabilities, also began in Germany.” The secrecy and clandestine nature of what appeared to be forbidden images are lost to the fact that the cameraman has shot them as though with a gun. This is, in itself, an absurd and insensitive claim we have heard many times before. [27] Perhaps the cameraman was surveying the ghetto inhabitants, but certainly, there is no indication that he is inflicting bodily harm. Similarly, because there is no record of the exhibition or use of these films, it would be irresponsible to speculate on their intention as surveillance. The charge levelled at the image by the voiceover of The Third Reich in Colour offers little insight into the intrigues shown in the image: the old Chasidic Jew turning to follow the woman, the other one stopping to converse with the Jewish police.

Dirge-like music further adumbrates the when it articulates the inhuman destruction we know will take place in the ghettos. The music, credited to Thorsten Rejzec, that overlays the later images of the bustling activities of market day also alters our perception of the ordinariness of daily life. Hauntingly provocative, yet irritatingly pre-emptory, the score reminds of a slowed-down remix of Klezmer music. It evokes the serenades, the Rabbis’ processions played on solo fiddles, cornets and clarinets, music that rose to the height of its popularity in the final years of freedom and integration, that is, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The musical score carries all the melancholia and yearning of traditional Yiddish folk music. The effect of the music is transformative: the otherwise objective images of unremarkable people pursuing unremarkable activities is duly dramatized. Their movements are slowed down as they move through the ghetto, and as they sell their wares in the mid-afternoon sun. This deceleration of human movement instils every step with significance as though it is the last. The images become eerie, haunted, filled with mysticism. The music overlaying ghetto market-day works, on the one hand, to emphasize the ordinariness of daily life: the goings-on become even more ordinary and the people more lethargic in their movements as though made drowsy from the sun. On the other hand, the images are curiously injected with the horror of the annihilation that awaits those they capture.

The images are overwhelmed by this careful interlacing of voiceover and music. The voiceover tells us that the German governor of Warsaw predicted that “only a cemetery will remain of the Jewish question” when he declared an area of the city ‘the Jewish Quarter.’ The sectioned off area contained 400,000 people who were forced to live packed together in the ghetto. As two men lift what appears to be merchandise from their market stall onto a horse-drawn buggy, we are informed that “death by starvation or by typhus was commonplace.” The same sounds of tragic longing are then repeated on the double bass. They consume the soundtrack.

In a similar way, the pleasure had on the summer’s day excursion to the Wannsee is forgotten. According to the voiceover, these images are indicative of the lack of interest of a whole section of the German population in a war taking place elsewhere. The once light-hearted shots of relaxation and pleasure have become acerbic vindications of German indifference. Likewise, the extraordinary pan across the Wannsee is irrelevant to this television documentary. Like the questions surrounding the colour deterioration which contribute to the cultural history of the film medium, and in particular amateur film technology, the fascination of a sweeping camera movement is lost to a history of war time Germany, a history told through a very familiar lens. When The Third Reich in Colour turns to the footage of the starving children in the Warsaw Ghetto, it explains that the footage was taken by a group of Nazi ethnologists who “took a special research interest in the neglected and starving children of the ghetto.” Through the voiceover, the television documentary does offer information regarding the provenance of the footage. However, ultimately, what is important here is that: “by now the order to clear the Warsaw Ghetto had been given. The final solution to the Jewish problem had been found.” Thus, the voiceover dates the footage as being around Spring 1942, following the drawing up of the Final Solution. How does it know? Perhaps it doesn’t. According to the documentation that accompanies this footage in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, there is no knowing when precisely the “ethnologists” visited the ghetto. [28] It appears as though the narrative and historical identity of the amateur footage exists only at the level of the voiceover.

Through its dating, identification, and imposition of a history, the authority of the television documentary’s voiceover suppresses the many layers of these Nazi amateur colour images. The assertions regarding the German indifference to World War II, facts about the fate of ghetto inhabitants, and the funereal, apocalyptic music conspire to impose a historical narrative that is nowhere to be found in the images themselves. These images are placed at a point in the narrative when the documentary tells of the implementation of the Final Solution. It is therefore irrelevant to the television documentary when precisely in 1942 the ethnologists visited the Warsaw Ghetto. What is important for The Third Reich in Colour is that these images can be manipulated as powerful illustrations of the plans to implement the Final Solution discussed at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. Images of starving and diseased children in the Warsaw Ghetto are, of course, far more potent than would be pictures of fifteen high-ranking Nazi officials sitting around a table in a villa in a Berlin suburb. Similarly, as no film footage exists of the conference at Wannsee, if this important event is to be woven into this predictable history of World War II and the Holocaust, images from elsewhere must be substituted.

This manipulation of the amateur colour film footage is only one illustration of many reuses of amateur colour fragments in The Third Reich in Colour to create a familiar history of World War II: the invasion of Poland, the Blitzkrieg, the battle of Stalingrad, the march on Berlin, and the liberation of the camps. The television documentary effectively uses the rare archival images as a platform for yet another textual narrative that strives to make sense of and to educate the public in the injustices of World War II and the Holocaust. It is another documentary that locates the violence and indecency of the Holocaust in images that, in this case, offer no such evidence.

When The Third Reich in Colour does stray from the well-rehearsed version of World War II and Holocaust history it commits its most egregious violations of the archival film images. In perhaps its most disturbing inclusion, the final images of the BBC documentary show the gorgeous yet horrifying footage of the cloud of atomic smoke against the brilliant blue skies of Nagasaki. These are images that belong to a different narrative, a narrative in which the American Allies are the aggressor in a war against the threat of Japanese domination. Nevertheless, in The Third Reich in Colour, the same evocative, melancholic Yiddish music we have heard over images of the ghetto accompanies images that must have been taken from the cockpits of American airforce carriers. The music thus binds the dropping of the atomic bomb to the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. And the voiceover to the footage of Nagasaki tells us that “World War II is brought to an end by a weapon of inconceivable destructive power. From this moment on mankind has the potential to annihilate human civilization along with its entire history.” Thus, American colour footage brings the Third Reich’s reign of terror to a close. To follow the logic of this narrative’s trajectory, the dropping of the atomic bomb is the outcome of Nazi destruction. Through its insertion at the end of the given narrative, through the dramatic claims of the voiceover and the repetition of the evocative iconic music, the BBC documentary exploits all available strategies to convince its audience of the continuity between discrete events. It is a continuity constructed by the television documentary, yet attributed to the archival images. This marriage of the Holocaust and Hiroshima/Nagasaki elides all the complexity and specificity of the events. Even more disturbingly, despite all of its implicit insistence on respect for the victims of Nazi brutality and obscenity, the television documentary violates the singularity of these crimes by coupling the victims’ suffering to the experiences of victims of another, albeit apocalyptic, event.

Documents of iconoclasm

This narrativization of supposedly opaque images, the guiding of the spectator’s understanding of and emotional response to the image through the imposition of a voiceover is, of course, the task of the documentary voiceover. Similarly, expressive music is a common melodramatic strategy used to represent emotion where, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith says, none is allowed to be present in the image. [29]  As Nowell-Smith explains, the documentary must present events objectively to remain evidential, and so introduces persuasion on its soundtrack. While avant-garde documentary film since the 1960s has struggled to eschew the appeal to extra-textual authority, [30]  other examples such as the historical television documentary have continued to reach for voiceover when making a point not inherent to the image. Similarly, while a non-diegetic score is not usually found in the experimental or historically-aware documentary, it is a staple ingredient of the more conservative products made for television. It is not unusual for historical television documentaries to use archival images illustratively, that is, as scenic background to generic descriptions of past events that are related through the voiceover narration. [31]

In her book on voice-over narration in Hollywood film, Sarah Kozloff argues that voice-over narration has traditionally been used to relativize and restrict images and their content. [32]  The voiceover is the voice of control, it is the assertion of superiority over an image and other sounds. Music can have a similarly coercive function. As Kathryn Kalinak points out, the surfeit of music in the Hollywood film does more than provide emotional support to a film’s image track. Music is made conspicuous in these films in order to bring out the excess of emotion that is not already expressed in the image. [33]  Music is used to mould “spectator response [and] bind the spectator to the screen by resonating affect between them. The lush, stringed passages accompanying a love scene are representations not only of the emotions of the diegetic characters but also of the spectator’s own response which music prompts and reflects.” [34] While it is usual for television documentaries to use voiceover narration in an ultimate gesture of didacticism, The Third Reich in Colour goes one step further: it emotionally engages its viewers such that they experience the intensity of the trauma being narrated. Thus, the distinctly non-dramatic events of the images are overlaid and overwhelmed with emotional music that reworks them into the most dramatic of narratives. Viewers thus link their responses to the images of The Third Reich in Colour when, in fact, they are formed primarily by the music and voiceover.

Once again, the appropriation of narrative strategies derived from the continuity structures of classical Hollywood film and, in this case, the melodrama, does not cast The Third Reich in Colour as an innovative or unusual broadcast television historical documentary. Indeed, these strategies are important for all television documentaries dealing with disparate, not inherently cohesive material. The television documentary is aware that it must attract the broadest possible audience, and thus, is dependent on the seamlessness of a tightly woven narration. To achieve this, it cannot afford to expose its own illusions, and, in this case, the disjunction of the events and histories told by the images. This would both detract from its authority and risk losing the viewer’s attention. Thus, when faced with the incongruities, fragmentation and mistakes of archival images, the television documentary reaches to assert its authority and control over the material in the form of a linear voiceover. And if the viewer can cathect to the emotional intensity of its chosen narrative through a melodramatic use of music, there will be no threat of disagreement with or distraction from its polemic.

If then, there is nothing unusual about the BBC’s re-presentation of the archival footage through addition of a soundtrack, why does The Third Reich in Colour deserve our attention? Because despite its claims to be non-confrontational and politically neutral, the BBC documentary is polemical and propagates an ideological message. [35]  Through its choice to distract the audience from the many discourses with which the amateur footage engages and, simultaneously, to impose the gravity of World War II and the Holocaust onto these images The Third Reich in Colour betrays its own agenda. As Paul Arthur and other critics assert, the compilation film always represents the historical event and its images in the present as well as the past. [36] Each individual instance of recycling tells another history, the sometimes buried history of the present, and by extension, its relationship to the past. Through the renarrativization of the Nazi archival images we gain insight into the reality of the Holocaust and World War II as it is figured in the contemporary British imaginary. This imaginary is, in turn, constructed and conceived today by dominant social and cultural institutions such as BBC Television.

Here, in The Third Reich in Colour, through the appropriation of the footage to “illustrate” events that cannot always be identified in the image, the image becomes overwhelmed by a totally different history. The archival images carry the burden of the television documentary’s desire both to retell and reinforce the tragedy of WWII destruction, and to reaffirm its own audience’s absolution from responsibility for this destruction. Thus the amateur colour films become the sites of displaced fear and anxiety. The images themselves are forgotten, their importance and all we have to learn from them is ignored. Similarly, their reach beyond Nazi ideology is rendered irrelevant. The amateur colour films are redeployed to confirm a history for which (in this case) Britain would wish to take no responsibility. Nowhere, for example, is there any acknowledgement of British knowledge of the concentration camps in 1941. Rather, World War II, the Holocaust, German perpetration and the resultant devastating ruptures are all placed at a safe distance from British history and identity in the twentieth century.

This simultaneous fear and fascination for the footage tells of an unresolved relationship to the past. In turn, through the responses which can be discerned via the recyclings, The Third Reich in Colour nurtures an already existing iconoclasm towards Nazi images. [37] Through its mobilization of the paradox that pervades the treatment of Nazi documentary images – claiming them to be both authentic objective documents and subjective propagandistic representation of World War II and the Holocaust – the television documentary masks its own viewers’ potential identification with the images. The voiceover-led narrative perpetuates the myth that the Nazi image is violent and disturbing at the same time that it objectively documents what it sees. When the television documentary’s voice-over “illuminates” the ethnologists’ footage of the Warsaw Ghetto for example, the image becomes inextricably linked to the processes of annihilation that led to the Final Solution. For all of the reasons outlined above, such an assertion attributes certainty and, in turn, violence to images which are, in fact, fragmentary and elusive. Thus, not only does the narration-by-soundtrack rob the images of their potential historical and aesthetic insights, it gives them a corrosive energy they do not, and never did, have. In turn, this energy, rather than that of potential identification and curiosity, is what the viewer is encouraged to experience before the amateur fragments.

Ironically, the iconophobia expressed towards the images becomes most salient when the footage discussed above is compared to that recycled in non-Nazi images. Films such as A Painful Reminder (UK, 1985) or Memory of the Camps (UK, 1985) depict devastating images of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Ebensee captured by the Allies upon liberation. This footage is arguably more gruesome and more disturbing than that showcased in The Third Reich in Colour because of its unmitigated depiction of piles of human corpses, immobile skeletal figures, people robbed of all identity, dignity and agency. In another example, a photograph such as that of the Buchenwald survivor placed on the entrance wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is almost identical to the ethnologists’ images. The image shows a frail survivor in an oversized prisoner’s shirt, watching himself watched by the camera as he drinks soup presumably given him by the Allies. And yet, even though this and other examples that happen to be seen through Allied eyes violate the integrity of those they film, in their renarrativization the Allied images are displayed by the Museum to reveal the very opposite. [38] The Allies’ images liberate and document survival, while those of the Nazis entrap, persecute and destroy. How can this be? And within the narrative of The Third Reich in Colour, while Luftwaffe planes soar through the sky to illustrate preparation for the invasion of Poland, Allied images of the same show the restoration of civility to a devastated Europe. Here, in the attribution of radically different interpretations, different histories to almost identical images, the voiceover exposes its phobia of the Nazi image. It reinforces the myth that enables its audience to remember from a distance; the images have nothing to do with the British audience.

Through these untenable, yet very common assertions, recycled narratives such as The Third Reich in Colour burden Nazi images with a power and a responsibility that is incompatible with the fragmented, amateur nature of the images themselves. The film fragments may not be innocent, but they are certainly not stalwart enough to bear these allegations. It is not only that the recycled narrative obscures the richness and complexity of what might be opened up by the images. In addition, it somewhat unwittingly attributes a persuasive power to the Nazi images that mystifies them, and makes them even more seductive. The simple fact of their centrality to a television documentary which narrates the history of World War II is an indication of just how fascinating they must be. And yet, The Third Reich in Colour cannot dare acknowledge this reverence for these ideologically tainted images. By obscuring their potential aesthetic insights and suppressing their dialogue with the past, the documentary contradicts itself and announces that something fascinating, something irresistible must lie hidden behind these images. This is, of course, the twin concern of the iconoclastic urge: a reverence for the image that comes hand in hand with the urge to denigrate.

Close to the beginning of The Third Reich in Colour the voiceover overlays footage of a march to tell us that “the colour of these images somehow brings us closer to the evil intent of Nazi ideology and the change it wrought upon the world.” If the images are so intimate, the task of the voiceover is then to distance them again, to make sure the images don’t come too close, because it would be too dangerous if British viewers were left to see themselves or their ancestors in travelogues of Berlin, or if they marvelled at and admired the abstract beauty of fighter planes, the sumptuous earth colours of the view from a train window as it approaches the age-old city of pre-War Warsaw. These images cannot be looked at too closely or be shown too much appreciation, or else the viewer might be tempted “to see through Nazi eyes.” By extension, this viewer would position him or herself as sympathetic to the political regime with which the photographer was aligned. [39]  In one more example, if the eyes and minds of British spectators are allowed to wander around the bathers swarming the beaches of the Wannsee without being told that they represent the indifference of the German people to the brutal events of a war fought in their back yards, these spectators might imagine the indifference to war experienced by their own Allied ancestors. The voice-over and yearning, melodramatic score function as a barrier that guards against any such danger.

Fortunately for the television documentary, the Nazi amateur colour films are as distant as they are intimate. As is often the case with amateur films, the paucity of information about these colour fragments makes them anonymous records of unidentifiable events and people. This, together with their frequent abstraction, leaves them open to manipulation and re-interpretation. They are suitably malleable to the purposes of the documentary. If the documentary’s task is to make history as comfortable and palatable as possible, these ineffable visual documents lend themselves as a perfect backdrop to such a history. And so, while the intimacy of their brilliant Agfacolor brings them alive, brings them closer, their openness and incompletion sets them at an appropriate distance. Further, although it might be tempting to acknowledge the intimacy established, even encouraged, between spectators and images through the use of the yearning, melancholic Yiddish music, this music in fact also functions to distance the contemporary spectator from the images. The score may well bind spectator and narrative on an emotional register, however, both the narrative and the emotional register are separate from the images. It is a narrative of World War II conceived by the documentary compilation. To reiterate, this narrative that is imposed upon the images. Similarly, the images alone are not particularly emotionally engaging. Indeed, they can be just the opposite. When the dark, brooding string music accompanies images of tanks in extreme long shot moving towards Eastern borders, the colourful spectacle of a parade in Mannheim in 1938 shot from a sidewalk behind the crowd, or David Lloyd George’s visit to Hitler’s Berghof, it orchestrates our emotional engagement with images that are otherwise unremarkable. It encourages us to believe that all along these images were imbued with deep emotional value, that they knew of the tragedy of inconceivable dimensions that was in the making. We cannot think about the images themselves as the music as leitmotif directs our thoughts into a future beyond their frame. Thus, the television spectator is alienated from the amateur colour footage and its significance.

Recycling to Forget

The intimacy and distance, fear and simultaneous fascination that we see on the surface of The Third Reich in Colour further suggest a continued discomfort and anxiety about the past: What to do with it? How to account for it? How to negotiate its presence, its influences and resonance today? And not least of all, how, as the descendents of Allied forces, can British viewers negotiate and remember their responsibility to the past? To impose a voiceover and a dramatic, emotional score onto recently discovered colour amateur film images from the period might solve the problem: why not blame the images and burden them with responsibility? Why not identify them as belonging to the Nazis, give them a time and a place, and slot them into a convenient narrative? Such a re-narrativization will allay all fears that the image (and by extension, the past it represents) might come too close, or be too challenging. However, this solution is only temporary. Ultimately, a television documentary such as The Third Reich in Colour contributes little to the negotiation of the past, to the continued collective responsibility to remember. If it did, as it claims, bring to public awareness the extraordinary and unusual historical and aesthetic insights of the rare archival images, it might be embraced for the innovation of its perspective on a past that will not go away. But this is not how it works.

In the overwhelming of the image by the renarrativization, the responsibility for the crimes of the past is handed over to the original filmmakers. The Nazi as author of the films is designated the author of historical events. He, like the images he produces, is complicit in the perpetuation of dehumanizing crimes against the Jewish “enemy.” The Nazi cameraman becomes guilty of a knowledge that casts him as the collaborator in that which he sees through the viewfinder. In addition, the documentary’s refusal to engage with the images guards against the possibility of questioning its own relationship to the histories they tell. It ensures its distance from the events by ignoring the images. In this way, the BBC documentary refuses to remember, to memorialize and to take seriously its role in the mediation of history through recycled images. The imposition of a coherent, causal narrative mystifies the images to ensure that they are not left to speak on their own. This would be too dangerous, as the images may ultimately reveal too much about our own responsibility to heinous events, events for which it is easier to blame others.

These amateur fragments from the archive cannot exist without recontextualization. They are only given life when re-edited into new narratives of inevitably different perspectives. This is the task of the found footage filmmaker as historian. At least, this is what we are told by the most respected historians and filmmakers working within this field. [40] Up until here I have argued that this is not so, that these images are open to meaning even in their archival form: their aesthetic and historical value is not dependent upon the narratives that accommodate them. That said, however, I have nevertheless recycled the amateur film footage into a new narrative. What makes my narrative any different? What makes any recycling of the same images more or less responsible to memory and history? In the closing pages of this essay, I want to point to some alternative ways of appropriating and renarrativizing this and similar footage. In particular, I want to focus on the flexibility and openness achieved through less conservative editing techniques and sound-image relations. An approach to the archival material that respects its inconclusiveness and uncertainty gives the footage more chance of speaking on its own terms. To reiterate, The Third Reich in Colour actively discourages multiple interpretations of the images. Thus, for example, due to the imposing sound track, there is no space for the Kindertransport survivor who might see his or her family members in the footage. Neither is there any solicitation of the depth of emotion experienced by Warsaw Ghetto survivors or their children when seeing the footage. All meaning of the images is fixed by the television documentary such that they support the seamless narrative of Nazi power and destruction. All other interpretations are denied or, at best, discouraged. As Maurice Blanchot warned us nearly twenty years ago, of utmost importance to the continued memory of such inconceivable atrocities as the Holocaust is that the disaster never be foreclosed, never be assigned meaning too quickly, too soon. [41]

There are a number of documentaries that offer an historically aware and mutable analysis of World War II and the Holocaust through establishment of a dialectical relationship across and between image and soundtrack. [42] These documentaries take the Nazi images seriously, they do not make assumptions in advance of the images, they do not seek to link images to murderous acts. The documentaries interrogate the images, they interpret them, recontextualize them and, it must be admitted, manipulate them. This much is unavoidable. However, the documentaries also reveal that the images, and thus the histories they narrate, are open to interpretation. In doing so, these documents retain an awareness of the persuasive forces of the recycled images as historical evidence and representation. These documentaries arguably contribute to the continued memory of the Holocaust and World War II.

One such documentary made with Nazi amateur colour archival footage, Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus’ Mein Krieg (Germany, 1993), actively calls upon viewers to interpret the images for themselves. In Mein Krieg we see the films of six different amateur cameramen who belonged to the Nazi party. Each of the one-time Wehrmacht soldiers is invited to provide the voiceover to the footage he shot. The soldiers are thus given the opportunity to speak their version of their “travels” through the east, and their experiences of World War II. The film is edited in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish the voices of the soldier-cameramen. Similarly, the viewer is struck by the unreliability of the ex-soldiers’ narration: they change their minds, and question their own memories of what they see. It is also striking to note the discrepancies between the way the different soldiers relate to their footage. One chooses to remain silent when asked of his responsibility to the events witnessed by his camera. Another expresses his guilt, and a third bemoans the end of the war. He wished the German Army had continued eastwards as this was his lost opportunity to travel the world. For this soldier the odious crimes, the hatred and dehumanization inflicted by the Nazis was a by-product of his wonderful adventure through Europe. When watching Mein Krieg, the viewer is alerted to all of the uncertainty that characterizes Nazi documentation in words and images. This film exposes the flexibility, the unreliability of memory, and effectively, the anonymity of the footage. While the soldiers may speak to their images taken long ago, the unreliable and undifferentiated nature of their voiceovers give the impression that the footage belongs to no one soldier in particular. It also belongs to all of the soldiers who went to war with cameras hidden in their pockets. Through questioning the reliability of the narration, Mein Krieg also questions the role of the filmmaker as author of history, his control over the material, his authority and ability to define what it meant to be a Wehrmacht soldier with a camera. The film takes nothing for granted, and in contrast to The Third Reich in Colour, it is not tempted to impose a political ideology onto the recycled footage. Mein Krieg points up the fragility and flexibility of colour Nazi amateur films and the histories they tell in a way that the BBC documentary does not.

We must be careful not to prescribe how such documentary films should be put together, and we cannot dictate how to handle the footage. Such decisions must always be left open to the possibilities of the archival material and the demands of contemporary history. Nevertheless, it does seem appropriate to allow archival fragments, no matter their author, the opportunity to represent their own fragility and ineffability. For it is only then that we will respect the subtleties and incompletion of the histories they tell. Otherwise, the very same prejudices and power relations that documentaries and documentary studies have worked so hard to diffuse, will continue to be repeated in the most urgent of forums.

The BBC production The Third Reich in Colour does something different. It puts these rare images in the service of a narrative that actively seeks to cover over and suppress historical developments, and historical openness. It manipulates Nazi amateur colour film footage as the foundation for a coherent narrative that wants to repress and forget the historical trauma of the Holocaust. At least, it wants to forget any version of the historical trauma that destabilizes its own fragile certainty. If our public institutions sincerely wish to come closer to an understanding and remembrance of the Holocaust and World War II, their task is to stop perpetuating the mystification and their myopic perspective of these atrocious events. Rather than lauding the same version of history over and over again, it is the responsibility of institutions such as the BBC to take the risk and open up history. They must reveal it for all of its uncertainty and unpredictability. And the proliferation of rare archival images taken by self-identified Nazis would provide a perfect springboard to such revelations.

__________________________________________________

I would like to thank the audiences at Orphans III, South Carolina, Seminar für Filmwissenschaft, Freie Universität, Berlin and Visible Evidence X, Marseilles for their insights into this essay in its various stages. The essay has also benefited from ongoing conversations with Derek Paget, Katie Grant and Ruth Abbey. As always, Roger Hallas and Peter Rosenbaum contributed through their untiring engagement with my ideas and the images that inspire them. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Screening the Past who provided valuable insights and criticisms. The research for this project was carried out with the generous support of the British Academy, United Kingdom.

Endnotes

[1] See, for example, Bill Nichols, “Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?” in Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1-19; Michelle Citron, “Fleeing from documentary: autobiographical film/video and the ‘ethics of responsibility’” in Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds.), Feminism and Documentary, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 271-86.
[2] Despite the proliferation of film footage taken by both professional and amateur filmmakers in Nazi Germany, Nazi documentary is often thought to begin and end with the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Thus, much of the prejudice towards documentary images taken by Nazi party members is based on a few iconic images such as Triumph of the Will (Germany, 1936). Recently, scholars have begun to redress the limitations of this scholarship in film history. See, for example, Christian Délage, La Vision nazie de l’histoire. Le cinéma documentaire du Troisième Reich, L’Age d’homme (Lausanne, 1989).
[3] See, for example, Gertrud Koch, “Film und Faktizitaet: Zur filmischen Repraesentation der Judenvernichtung,” in Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, “Ordinary men, extraordinary photos,” Yad vashem studies, no 26 (1998), 265-93. While this question is yet to be addressed with respect to Nazi documentary film, scholars have also begun to draw attention to the importance of giving serious attention to Nazi amateur photography, despite its political and ideological allegiance. In particular, critics have recognized the importance of studying such images in the ongoing search to understand the Nazi Holocaust. See, for example, Bernd Hüppauf, “Emptying the gaze: framing violence through the viewfinder,” New German Critique, 72 (Fall 1997), 3-44; Omer Bartov, “The Wehrmacht exhibition controversy: the politics of evidence,” Marianne Hirsch, “Nazi photographs in a post-Holocaust art: gender as an idiom of memorialization,” in Omar Bartov, Atina Grossmann and Mary Nolan (eds.), Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 2002), 41-60, 100-
[4] Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism 1933-1945, trans. John Broadwin and Volker Berghahn (Providence/Oxford: Berghahn Books,1996).
[5]  See, for example, the use of Walter Genewein’s photographs of the Lodz Ghetto where he was chief Nazi accountant, displayed without acknowledgement in the permanent Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London.
[6] The paradox that I am pointing up here also connects to the problem inherent to the study of documentary film. As Stella Bruzzi so concisely asserts, “Documentary is persistently treated as a representational mode of filmmaking, although at its core is the notion of film as record” It is both a representation, that is, a fiction, and a documentation that accesses an “unadulterated truth.” See Stella Bruzzi, The New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 11.
[7] See Michael Kuball, Soul of a Century (Germany, 2001), and Familienkino. Geschichte des Amateurfilms in Deutschland, vol. 2, Rowohlt, Hamburg, 1980.
[8] The Holocaust Exhibition was opened in 2000. In keeping with its role to develop awareness of the Holocaust in Britain, the Museum is also involved in accompanying initiatives such as the “Beyond camps and forced labour” conference in January 2003, a joint initiative of the University of North London and the University of Wolverhampton.
[9] Science and the Swastika (UK, Channel 4, 2001); I met Adolf Eichmann (UK, BBC2, February 2002). See also the continuing interest shown in World War II history on the BBC, and documentaries such as Winton’s Children(UK, ITV, March 27, 2003).
[10] See also, for example, the celebratory press around works such as Mark Jonathan Harris’ Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (UK/USA, 1999) in Britain, a film that represents the “mercenary” British rescue of thousands of Jewish children. The British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees following Kristallnacht in 1938 and this enabled the rescue of the children from Nazi Germany between 1938-1940. As the publicity for Into the Arms of Strangers tells us, a story of hope, survival and courage on the part of 10,000 children and their foster parents. The children were, of course, also a stolen generation, yet the film does not mention the lasting difficulties encountered by the children because of their cultural, familial and geographical displacement. Similarly, in a documentary such as Winton’s Children, the “British Schindler” is hailed as a saviour to hundreds of Czechoslovakian Jewish children. Again, there is no indication of any assimilation difficulties we now know the children faced.
[11] See, for example, Das Dritte Reich in Farbe, (Germany, Spiegel TV, 2000), ‘33-’45 in Farbe. Deutschland und Europa in Krieg und Frieden, (Germany, Polar Film + Medien, 2000).
[12] The establishment of a Jewish run ghetto administration in the hermetically-sealed Lodz enabled photographers such as Henryk Ross and Mendel Grossman to use their access to photographic facilities to produce clandestine images that were never published. See Lucjan Dobroszvcki (ed.), The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto. 1941-44, trans. Richard Lourie et.al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1984).
[13] Mendel Grossman, With a Camera in the Ghetto, Zvi Szner & Alexander Sened (eds.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1977).
[14] This is how the footage is labelled in the documentation accompanying it in the Bundesarchiv, Berlin. “Im Warschauer Ghetto,” Film number 3366, Title Number 37633. Acquired by the Bundesarchiv, 23 February 1999.
[15] Again, I would hesitate to ascribe unreservedly these fragments to a Nazi German because they can be so similar to the photographs taken, for example, by Henryk Ross in the Lodz Ghetto. A recent publication of Ross’ photographs further complicates the naïve urge to locate the photographer’s or filmmaker’s political and ideological affiliation in the image. See, Lodz Ghetto album: Photographs by Henryk Ross (London: Chris Boot Publishing/Archive of Modern Conflict, 2004).
[16] For example, in recent years, the activities of the Jewish Councils established by the Nazis in the ghettos have come into the spotlight. The complicity of these servants of Nazism was often carried out in the name of self-preservation, though it is sometimes argued that they could have done more to save their fellow Jews. See Isiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation, intro. Stephen Katz (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1996). Trunk is always sympathetic to the activities of the Jewish Councils. For insight into the struggles and conflicts caused by the hierarchical organization of Ghetto Jews, see Primo Levi, “The gray zone,” in The Drowned and the Saved (London: Vintage Books, 1989), 36-69.
[17] I am referring here to the privileges afforded the Judenrat, or Jewish government appointed by the Nazis to run the ghettos. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (London and New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985) for the initial critique of the Jewish Councils. Since Hilberg’s seminal history, many others have followed. Also, just because people walk past the children does not mean a deliberate abuse or abandonment. I am merely drawing attention to the complexity of these situations.
[18] The negotiation of this struggle of documentary film is at the core of the continuing work of the work done by the Visible Evidence scholars. See, for example, the essays in Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (eds.), Collecting Visible Evidence, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For an interesting discussion of this ambiguity, especially as it relates to compilation films, see Bruzzi, “The Event: Archive and Newsreel”, in The New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 11-39.
[19] Most of the amateur material from the period that is shot away from the battlefield remains in archives. In particular, individuals such as Kuball and Peter Forgacs have continued to collect the material in their private archives. Both collectors have reused the footage in their compilation films. See Soul of a Century, dir. Michael Kuball, Germany, 2001; The Maelstrom – A Family Chronicle, dir. Peter Forgacs, Netherlands, 1997. In a subtle and sophisticated recycling which includes colour footage from the Nazi period, Lisa Lewenz uses the film shot by her grandmother Ella Lewenz in what amounts to a biography that extends into the landscape of the very complex weave of Jewish life and culture in Nazi occupied Germany. The footage shot by Ella Lewenz of, for example, Berlin, military parades, and various public events is almost identical to that shot by Nazi party members in The Third Reich in Colour. See also A Letter Without Words, dir. Ella Lewenz and Lisa Lewenz, (USA, 1998).
[20] Subject matter such as family vacations, travels, special occasions (the most popular being childrens’ birthday parties) and days of family rest and relaxation are events repeatedly represented in amateur film from World War II onwards. See the essays collected in Roger Odin (ed.), Le film de famille. usage privé usage public (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1995).
[21] While we must assume the footage is digitally remastered for the television documentary, having seen the archival footage, I can confirm that any manipulation of the material properties serves only to bring out these qualities in the transfer to video-for-television.
[22] On the interesting question of the demographics of amateur film activities in Germany prior to World War II, see publications such as Helmut Lang, Amateur-Filme mit Erfolg, Berlin/Vienna/Leipzig: Elsner, 1939). The journals published by and in conjunction with the various amateur film clubs that thrived in Germany at this time also contain interesting details on the activities of the members. See, Jahrbuch des Kino-Amateurs, Berlin, Der Kino-Amateur, Vienna/Berlin for the relevant years.
[23] There is a substantial amount of footage in which revels in images of the sky shot from the cockpits of fighter pilots held in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin. See, for example, film number 15150 attributed to a Werner Hofe, and the anonymous footage of film number 244956.
[24] Agfacolor was at the time in the process of developing a three color processing technique. Because these processes and the film material were not yet stable, it can be expected that the dyes might run. For an explanation of the science behind this, see Gert Koshofer, “Geschichte der Farbfotografie in der Popularisierungszeit,” in Ex. Cat., Farbe im Photo. Die Geschichte der Farbphotographie von 1861 bis 1981(Cologne: Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, 1981). Brian Winston, “The case of colour film,” in Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography and Television (London: BFI, 1996), 39-57.
[25] I am referring here to the footage on the same reel (“Im Warschauer Ghetto” no. 20814) in theBundesarchiv, Berlin.
[26] See, for example, Willi Nissler, “Was machen wir nun mit dem Farbenfilm?,” in Jahrbuch des Kino-Amateurs, Willy Frerk (ed.), Photokino-Verlag (Berlin: Hellmut und Elsner, 1938), 16-24; Kurt Fritsche, “Fehler bei Aufnahmen auf Agfacolor-Umkehrfilm,” in Fotorat, no. 29 (1955), 44-48. A special issue of the journal on “Photographic mistakes and how we remedy them.”
[27] The equation between the camera and the gun was given widespread currency by Third Cinema critics in the 1980s and was taken up by cultural critics such as Paul Virilio in his then groundbreaking book on war and cinema. See Paul Willemen, “The Third Cinema question: notes and reflections,” in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds.), Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI, 1989), 1-29; Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989).
[28] As explained in footnote 12, the accompanying documentation in the archive gives the very imprecise date of 1942-1943.
[29] Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and melodrama,” Screen, vol. 18, no. 2, 113-18.
[30] See Paul Arthur, “Jargons of authenticity (three American moments)” in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York and London: AFI Film Readers/Routledge,1993), 118-26.
[31] See Bruzzi, “The event: archive and newsreel” for a useful account of some of the different uses of archival footage in compilation documentaries.
[32] Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University Press, 1988).
[33] Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), chapter 4. See also Caryl Flinn, “Music and the melodramatic past of New German Cinema,” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill (eds.), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: BFI, 1994), 107-13.
[34] Kalinak, Settling the Score, 87.
[35] Bruzzi and others argue that this type of substantive documentary “does not promote debate or argument. The audience is not invited to speculate upon the origins of the material or any possible discrepancy between original and current meaning; this use of archive is not combative or political, and the edits between images and voice offer a cumulative as opposed to a dialectical understanding of the event they represent.” However, this is where my argument diverges from Bruzzi’s, as I am arguing that there is no neutral or “cumulative”, as opposed to polemical, interpretation of these archival images. See Bruzzi, The New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, 33.
[36] Paul Arthur, “Lost and found: American avant-garde,” cited in Bruzzi, The New Documentary: A Critical introduction, 23.
[37] This iconoclasm is common among the dominant cultural institutions of what were the Allied nations.
[38] The most powerful critiques of the transgressions of the Allied films and photographs of camp inmates, both dead and alive, at liberation comes in the form of films such as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985)
[39]On seeing as though the eyes of the photographer and thus assuming his subject position, I am thinking particularly of the work of structuralist theorists such as Victor Burgin from the 1960s and 1970s, who wrote extensively on the structural positioning of the spectator in line with the point of view of the frame and, by extension, the eye behind the camera. See Victor Burgin, “Looking at photographs,” Screen Education, no. 24 (1977), 17-24.
[40] See, for example, Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge Massachusetts/London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1997). William Wees, who writes on the radicality and revolutionary nature of the experimental avant garde film due to its inherent challenge to conservative history, maintains that in Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (USSR, 1927), for example, the archival image is “bland” and “anonymous” without its recontextualization. See William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993), 43.
[41]Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
[42] Other interesting examples include Hans Beller’s Verwackelte Vergangenheit, Bundesrepublik Deutschland(Germany, 1986); Alfred Behrens, Das War unser Krieg (Germany, 1995.

Created on: Tuesday, 14 December 2004 | Last Updated: 9-Dec-06