Sacrifice On The Eastern Front Film Analysis

Soviet reporters and documentarists filming footage on the Eastern Front provided the world some of its first images of the Holocaust. However, in these images, Nazi crimes against Jews were most often presented as crimes against Soviets—the anti-Semitic dimension ignored and instead presented as anti-Sovietism. Although there were roughly three million Jews murdered within the Soviet Union’s borders, the Soviet’s active suppression of the anti-Semitic factor of Nazi atrocities relegated the Holocaust within the Soviet Union to being an unrecognised event. As a result, the Holocaust within the Soviet Union was absorbed into the greater narrative of Soviet sacrifice on the Eastern Front. This non-recognition of the Holocaust also extended to

Soviet cinema, which produced very few movies pertaining to anti-Semitism of any sort. Movies that did revolve around anti-Semitism were most often censored, suppressed or outright banned for doing so. The closest Soviet filmmakers came to addressing the Holocaust was in movies that prominently featured wartime atrocities, such as Ivan’s Childhood and Come and See. These are two iconic films of the Soviet cinema which deal with children in war, and though they do not pertain directly to the Holocaust, they do present a brutal depiction of the atrocities committed on Eastern Front against innocent civilians. Being that both are part of post-Stalinist cinema, that is, cinema produced after Stalin’s death and therefore free from Stalinist censors, through using the prism of childhood, diametrically opposed to the horrors of warfare, these two films portray a harrow depiction of war’s impact on the human condition.

Soviet coverage of the German atrocities discovered on the Eastern Front most often presented these events as a unified narrative of Soviet sacrifice that did not ‘divide the dead’ by their ethnicity. Nevertheless, written reports directly referencing German crimes against Jews appeared in the Soviet press as early as August 1941, with newsreel footage featuring an excerpt from the ‘Meeting of the Representative of the Jewish People’, the first on-screen reference to a targeted attack against Jews, screened soon after for Soviet audiences. The footage of the meeting, including a speech from Soviet Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, called for resistance to the fascist invaders by all Soviet citizens, including all Jews of the Soviet Union. Jeremy Hicks notes however that the footage of this speech was edited by Soviet authorities to largely omit the section featuring Mikhoels’ reference to the Nazi’s intention to systematically destroy the Jewish population. This censorship came despite the fact that the entire meeting, including the section referencing genocide, had previously been published in written form in the Soviet press. This is a pattern that would continue throughout the war: ‘What could appear in print could not appear in the more emotive and influential form of the newsreel.’ The absorption of Nazi anti-Semitism into a greater theme of Nazi anti-Sovietism is found throughout much of the Soviet newsreel and documentary film of the Eastern Front, which consistently presented crimes, even those which had specifically targeted Jews, as crimes committed against the population for being Soviets.

The Soviet Union first began publishing images of atrocities committed by the occupying Germans on 23 December 1941 with the screening of newsreel footage from the Red Army’s 29 November 1941 liberation of German-occupied Rostov-on-Don.

However, the racial aspect of the crimes uncovered in Rostov, such as a mass execution of the town’s Jewish residents during the first few days of occupation, remained obscured in the Soviet press. Furthermore, during the liberation, the piles of discarded bodies discovered throughout Rostov, composed primarily of the thousand Jewish victims of a week-long execution spree, were presented by the press as a Soviet tragedy with no direct reference to the racial motivation behind the crimes. Similar censorship of anti-Semitic motivation occurred in the footage of atrocities discovered during the liberations of Livny, Kerch and Barvenkovo, and even eventually in Soviet documentation of the death camps throughout Poland. Furthermore, in the popular 1942 Soviet documentary Defeat of the Germans near Moscow, a section of the film depicting the remnants of liberated towns around Moscow has the narrator state the citizens had been attacked out of ‘hatred toward our Soviet people’, ignoring the overwhelming Jewish death toll in most towns. As a result of Soviet efforts throughout the war to portray German atrocities as ethnically nonspecific, Olga Gershenson notes the Soviet Union remains conspicuously absent from the overall picture of the Holocaust

despite the fact that nearly half of all Holocaust victims were killed on Soviet soil. Gershenson argues that this is perhaps attributable to the overall carnage experienced by the Soviet Union, the estimated three million Soviet Holocaust victims not considered to be an unique phenomenon in contrast to roughly 27 million Soviet civilian and combatant casualties across the Eastern Front in total. Consequently, the Holocaust became universalised as a part of the ‘overall Soviet tragedy’.

Another factor impeding Soviet acknowledgement of the Holocaust is perhaps found in the anti-Semitism held throughout the Soviet Union itself.

Frank Gruner suggests that evidence of this anti-Semitism is found in the amount of ‘countless Soviet citizens [that] were prepared to assist in one way or another from the very beginning of the German occupation in carrying out the mass murders of the Jewish population.’ Gruner goes on to further document multiple occurrences of internal violence directed against Jews in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1946. He later concludes however on the difficulty in pinpointing specific events as evidence for widespread anti-Semitism given the propensity for internal unrest in all areas of the Soviet Union during this time. The extent to which Stalin himself was an anti-Semite is another contested area of Soviet history, although Stalin’s ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaigns of the late 1940’s are often pointed to as evidence of his overt anti-Semitism. The term ‘cosmopolitan’ was paired with ‘rootless’, and increasingly took on an anti-Semitic tone under Stalin’s russification of the Soviet Union. Often derogatorily labelled as rootless cosmopolitans, Soviet Jews became increasingly portrayed as being ‘anti-patriotic’ and therefore a source of weakness to Soviet

integrity.

The Soviet’s hesitance to acknowledge the Holocaust extended to Soviet cinema, which produced very few Holocaust-related films overall, and moreover often censored or banned those few films which did feature anti-Semitism. Interestingly, however, the Soviet Union does bare the distinction of being the first to directly highlight the persecution of Jews in Germany on screen with Professor Mamlock (1938) by Herbert Rappaport and Adolf Minkin. Although the Nazi’s anti-Semitism in the film is more used as a propaganda device to support Soviet anti-Fascism, the titular character of Professor Mamlock is a German Jew who is clearly discriminated against throughout the film due to his ethnicity. Nevertheless, Professor Mamlock, as well as two other films referencing Nazi anti-Semitism, Peat Bog Soldiers (1938) and The Oppenheim Family (1939), were banned in the Soviet Union with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The next Holocaust-related films from the Soviet Union would not come until two decades after the Second World War’s as restrictions on the arts were relaxed during the 1950’s and 1960’s. However, even during this time of relative artistic freedom in the Soviet Union, some films, such as Commissar (1967), were banned for their strong depictions of Soviet anti-Semitism. Several other movie scripts were also rejected by Soviet authorities for this reason. With the retightening of control over the arts in the late 1960’s, the Holocaust returned to obscurity in Soviet cinema until the 1980’s, which saw the release of a handful of Holocaust films such as Our Father (1990). As had happened with the newsreel footage on the Eastern Front, nearly all Soviet cinema pertaining to war portrayed Nazi motivation to be anti-Soviet in nature—the anti-Semitic dimension obscured or removed entirely. Films that overtly referenced the anti-Semitism of the Nazis were most often suppressed, censored or banned.