Death Camp Sachsenhausen

Premiered in a makeshift courtroom at a Stalinist show trial, shown to tens of thousands of global visitors at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial near Berlin, recycled in one of the most critically acclaimed East German films, Konrad Wolf’s 1968 film I Was Nineteen, and embroiled in national controversy after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1947 film Death Camp Sachsenhausen, a unique early Holocaust film, has never been shown in the US. Recent archival work by CMS and German graduate student Danny Pinto has revealed Death Camp Sachsenhausen to be, despite its dogmatic Communist register and failure to mention Jewishness, the first Holocaust film to be written by a Jewish concentration camp survivor. Join the Film Studies Center and the Department of Germanic Studies for the US premiere of Death Camp Sachsenhausen on a rare 35mm print loaned from the Federal Archive of Germany. Curated by Danny Pinto as part of the Film Studies Center’s Graduate Student Curatorial Program. German language with projected subtitles. (Richard Brandt, Soviet Occupation Zone, 1947, 37min., 35mm from the Bundesarchiv)