Witness from Hell

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Movie
Original title Witness from Hell
Gorke trave
Country of production Germany , Yugoslavia
original language German
Publishing year 1966
length 83 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Zika Mitrovic
script Frida Filipović
Michael Mansfeld
production Artur Brauner for CCC, Berlin
Aleksandar Krstic for Avala-Film, Belgrade
music Vladimir Klaus-Rajterić
camera Milorad Marković
cut Katarina Stojanović
Ursula Kahlbaum
occupation

Witness from Hell is a German-Yugoslav film drama from 1965 with Heinz Drache , Irene Papas and Daniel Gélin in the leading roles. It is one of the very few Federal Republican films that thematize the Holocaust and its aftermath on the surviving victims.

action

Public Prosecutor Dr. Hoffmann from the Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations to Investigate National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg is an extremely resolute representative of the federal republican state power when it comes to tracking down Nazi criminals. Ever since he read a book by the Yugoslav author Bora Petrovic, which has just been translated into German and wrote about twenty years ago, an older, cultivated gentleman has come under Hoffmann's sights: a doctor named Dr. Berger. This man is said to have carried out criminal experiments on inmates as a camp doctor in a concentration camp. One of these prisoners was the Polish Jew Lea Weiss. Berger is said to have sterilized her while she was in camp , and the woman is said to have been forced to work in a camp's own brothel and to render sexual services to the camp commandant and himself.

The years of the economic boom have Dr. Berger enabled a post-war career that was not atypical for the Federal Republic; today he is the scientific director of a large pharmaceutical factory, a respected citizen. The key to Berger's conviction lies in the testimony of Lea Weiss, who, once married to a French named Clement, is now widowed. But after an initial willingness to testify, Lea Clement-Weiss is now largely silent on the events of that time; The pain is too deep, the shame is too great, the pressure from the lawyer von Walden is too great. When she speaks about what happened in the past, she uses the terminology that Dr. Berger used his interrogation by Hoffmann: both consider the accusations made by the public prosecutor to be “exaggerated” and speak of “mystification” regarding the events in the camp. Hoffmann travels to Belgrade to get to the bottom of Leaa's behavior . He goes to see Petrovic, who as a young journalist wrote down Leaa's statements as soon as the war ended. The name Dr. Berger appeared frequently in Petrovic's book. If Lea continues to be silent, Hoffmann sees here his last chance to finally convict the unscrupulous doctor. Hoffmann asks Petrovic how credible he thinks Lea Weiss' remarks from then. Lea now denied everything that Petrovic had published in his book based on her statements.

Petrovic insists on the correctness of the statements, cannot make sense of Lea's silence or denial of the statements made to him. At Hoffmann's request, Petrovic accompanies him to Germany to change Lea's mind. When both men watch an interview with the concentration camp doctor, who has so far only appeared as a phantom, in which Berger blows off with jovial complacency and downplays everything, justifies himself and ultimately presents himself with his experiments as a benefactor of humanity, both react in a mixture out of disgust and bewilderment. Soon all sides start tugging at the severely traumatized woman: Public Prosecutor Hoffmann, who absolutely needs Lea's testimony to get Dr. Bringing Berger to justice, and von Walden's lawyer, sometimes gruff, sometimes velvety, but always tough and callous. Threatening phone calls intended to intimidate the fragile witness from Hell only increase the pressure on Lea. Hoffmann's intransigence in persecuting the perpetrators, which from time to time shows less and less consideration for the overall constitution of his witness, ultimately triggers an emotional catastrophe in Lea Weiss one day, which ends in suicide.

But first she wants to clean up her past and finally get rid of the fear and the trauma. And so she begins to talk. In the presence of Bora, who was increasingly uncomfortably touched during the interrogation, she gives Hoffmann information about all the details, says about Berger's sterilization experiments: "He boasted to me that this method of sterilization was his invention." Then she lets it be known that she was forced to, to survive, Dr. Berger's lover became - no: had to be. To Hoffmann and Petrovic's horror, the boundaries between good and bad, between perpetrator and victim, blur for a moment. Lea says: “I know you would have preferred your witness to be an innocent, pure victim. An angel who accuses. Regret. The little angel went through hell and scorched his snow-white wings a little. ”First of all, Leah bursts out:“ You wanted the truth? Then you will hear the truth to the end. When Berger had had enough of me, he gave me to a colleague who was also experimenting. He made hypothermic attempts. You know how it happened? ”Flashbacks show Lea Weiss in the hospital camp, a snapshot of real suffering in the concentration camp hell.

Production notes, backgrounds, interesting facts

Witness from Hell (sometimes referred to as The Witness from Hell ) was shot from August 9 to October 9, 1965 in the CCC studios in Berlin and in the studios of Avala-Film, Belgrade. The exterior shots were made in Yugoslavia. The working title was Bitter Herbs . The film opened in Yugoslavia on March 1, 1966; the German premiere took place on June 29, 1967 as part of the Berlin International Film Festival . The German mass start was on July 7, 1967. On March 8, 2001 The Witness from Hell was broadcast for the first time on German television ( ZDF ).

Heinrich Weidemann designed the film buildings in Berlin .

The production of The Witness from Hell took place at a time when international cinema was discovering the Holocaust and its effects on the psyche of those affected as a film theme. As a result of Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo film from 1960 , a number of films were made in the mid-1960s that seriously dealt with the Nazi racial madness, the genocide of the Jews and the psychological consequences for the survivors, including Der Pfandleiher , Der Glaskasten , L ' heure de la vérité and The 25th hour . In Germany only a few ambitious television movies were on this subject at that time produced: 1964/65 was commissioned by the NDR "A Day - Report from a German concentration camp in 1939" from the hand of Egon Monk , 1967 turned Rolf Hädrich for the WDR with “Murder in Frankfurt” is an immediate reaction to the Auschwitz trials .

The film gained additional topicality in view of the fact that ten days after shooting began in Frankfurt am Main, the first judgments in the first Auschwitz trial were made. The film was inspired by statements made by the Auschwitz trial witness Dunja Wasserström against the SS man Wilhelm Boger , the inventor of the torture instrument named after him .

Reviews

A large number of German newspapers dealt with the film project right from the start. In August and September 1965 alone, articles appeared in the following publications, among others: Ruhr Zeitung , Abendzeitung , Der Tagesspiegel , Weser Kurier , Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung , Darmstädter Echo . Numerous discussions followed shortly after the film was released in July 1967.

“The citizens of the Federal Republic are repeatedly confronted with trials against concentration camp criminals. Many say and write that the past should finally be buried. This film tries to counteract this tendency as an 'optical appeal' to civil courage and confessional courage. (...) Actually, the film is excellent. Above all, Irene Papas, the great Greek actress, in the role of the Jewess, creates a believable creation of fear, and her suicide is the logical conclusion of a development that began with her arrest. "

- Protestant film observer from November 11, 1967

The Lexicon of the International Film writes: "Despite some good approaches, the human moving film remains stuck in the ostensible due to its colportal style and its pathos."

The film's large personal lexicon highlighted individual acting performances. In Heinz Drache's biography, for example, it says: What was unusual for his filmography was the drama of coming to terms with the past, “The Witness from Hell”: There, Drache was allowed to play a public prosecutor, this time with very quiet tones, who tried to get one with the help of a former inmate To bring the former concentration camp doctor to court. In the biography of Hans Zesch-Ballott it is pointed out that the actor gave his Dr. Berger put on as a jovial former concentration camp doctor and sterilization expert.

“The psychological situation of the witnesses, who demanded the reconstruction of the sufferings they experienced and had to go through them again during the trial, is reflected in the reluctance of the main character of the film ZEUGIN AUS DER HÖLLE Lea Weiss to bring up this system of terror before a German court bring. Behind the decision on the testimony, which the witness Lea Weiss finally answered with suicide in the film, there were not only doubts about not being able to cope with reliving the suffering. Behind this was also the wish to be able to speak the whole truth, including one's own inclusion in the terror system of the camp, which had made survival in Auschwitz possible. One would think that it is not only in the film that the serious doubts of the witness and the public prosecutor are justified in dealing with this problem in the context of a trial - the Auschwitz trial. Numerous parallels between the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt and the film story about investigations and preparations for a trial in Berlin can be identified precisely. The fictional film story is about a - fictional - report by the survivor Lea Weiss, published in 1945, which in turn prompts a public prosecutor from the central office in Ludwigsburg in the mid-1960s to find the witness for a trial. (...) The fact that WITNESS FROM HELL became a movie well worth seeing, incidentally, it was a commercial failure, was mainly thanks to the outstanding acting performance of Irene Papas as Lea Weiss, who had just celebrated a huge worldwide cinema success with ALEXIS ZORBAS the year before. The role of the author Bora Petrovic was also superbly cast with the French cinema star Daniel Gelin, but in a thankless role. He does not embody an authentic figure, he is nothing more than a counterpart, a projection surface for Lea Weiss. The Ludwigsburg public prosecutor was occupied by Heinz Drache, who during these years was primarily familiar to the cinema audience as a police inspector in German Edgar Wallace films, proof of how all too clearly WITNESS FROM HELL represents the insignia of the cinema of his time. "

- Ronny Loewy: The past in the present. Confrontations with the Holocaust in the films of German post-war societies : Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF, 2001

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ronny Loewy in cine-holocaust.de ( Memento of 3 December 2013 Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexikon des Internationale Films, Volume 9, p. 4414. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987
  3. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 2: C - F. John Paddy Carstairs - Peter Fritz. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 449.
  4. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 8: T - Z. David Tomlinson - Theo Zwierski. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 531.

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