Afterimage: Film, Trauma And The Holocaust

1. Introduction to Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust

1 Introduction to Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust OF THE mass murdering of more than ten million people in German concentration camps, extermination camps, POW camps, euthanasia centers, Einsatzgruppe actions, and Jewish ghettos during the Second World War, there is only one known piece of motion picture footage, lasting about two minutes.1 It was shot in 1941 by Reinhard Wiener, a German naval sergeant and amateur cinematographer, stationed in Latvia, who had received permission from the navy to film in the area of the fleet. According to testimony given by Wiener in Israel in 1981, he had walked into the town of Liepaja one day in August of that year carrying his 8mm camera loaded with stock, as he did whenever possible , in case he saw something he wanted to film. He was walking in a wooded park near the beach when a soldier ran up to him and told him not to walk any farther, because something "awful, terrible" was happening there. Asked what it was, the man replied, "Well, they're killing Jews there." At the time, there was a Jewish forced labor detachment assigned to the naval base, and Wiener had heard stories from some of these Jews about family members who had been rounded up and killed. In fact, Wiener had a Jew working for him personally, a technician who built him a "filming installation." Told that Jews were being killed farther along the park, Wiener decided to go and see for himself. He carne to a clearing where a group of German soldiers had gathered near a trench to watch the proceedings. When a truck arrived full of people wearing yellow patches on their chests and backs, he began filming. He recorded about two minutes of film, in which one can see people running into the pit and then being shot by a firing squad. Wiener sent the undeveloped film to his family's farm in Germany, but it was inexplicably confiscated by German military police at the 1 Copyrighted Material 2 CHAPTER 1 Illustration 1.1. The Wiener film: of the mass murdering of more than ten million people by the Nazis, this is the only known piece of footage. Courtesy of Richard Trank, Executive Producer of Moriah Films, The Simon Wisenthal Center. Latvian-Lithuanian border, and disappeared for four months. In the meantime, he was transferred to a submarine school in Germany, where he was able to get the film back. He then mailed the film to an Agfa plant, where it was processed and mailed back to him. It was about this time that Himmler outlawed the filming of any activities related to the extermination of Jews, which had begun in June with mobile killing actions by Einsatzgruppe units, such as the one seen in Wiener's film, and continued with gassing in special extermination camps starting in December. Wiener testifies that he did not tell his family what he had witnessed. In 1942, however, in Germany, he did tell a few of his comrades in the navy. They did not believe him. Certain that the film would be confiscated if it was discovered at this time, he had six of his comrades swear an oath of silence, and then showed them the film. He describes their reaction. "They were depressed. I was observing their faces and saw how shocked they were. We had never seen or found out about anyCopyrighted Material Introduction to Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust 3 thing like it in the navy. The same happened to me while I was filming, I was shivering all over, I was that agitated." Wiener again sent the film to the family farm, this time successfully. When the front reached the area in 1945 and his mother had to flee, she placed her son's films in a trunk and buried it in the pigsty, covering it with dung. After the war, Wiener returned to the farm and dug up the film. It was sent to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel in 1974.2 Wiener's story and film will lead to a theory of cinema as both a transmitter of historical trauma and a form of posttraumatic historical memory. The subsequent chapters will examine a series of documentary and fiction films that made significant contributions to the development of a posttraumatic cinema of the Holocaust in Europe and the United States: primarily the documentaries, Night and...