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“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote English novelist L.P. Hartley in 1953. And yet, perhaps not so differently. Fascism and right-wing ideologies are on the rise worldwide these days, including here in America. It’s a good time to look at a remarkable group of films made by East Germany’s DEFA Studios in the post-WWII period which addressed the rise and rot of fascism in Germany since 1933 – even more remarkable given that they were made under strict Soviet and GDR control. All of filmmakers and actors had been directly or indirectly impacted by the war: director Falk Harnack (THE AXE OF WANDSBEK) had fought with the White Rose resistance group and lost his brother to the Nazis, while author Bruno Apitz (NAKED AMONG WOLVES) and WANDSBEK’s lead actor Erwin Geschonneck had survived the Nazi concentration camps. Other film artists had worked at the UFA studio under Nazi authorities, even producing anti-Semitic propaganda films. Fascism and WWII had marked all of them. To quote (East) German film historian Christianne Mückenberger, “Here were films made by directors of their own free will. Nobody needed to commission them. These were ‘confessional films’ ….” Shot primarily in stark black-and-white, these films – a selection of many anti-fascist films made by the DEFA Studios from 1946 to 1992 -- are pathologically obsessed with guilt, fear, and retribution, haunted by the terrors of the recent past and relentlessly asking, “How could this happen to us, to everyday people?”

Our enormous thanks to the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for collaborating with us on this release.

THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US (DIE MÖRDER SIND UNTER UNS) – 1946, 85 min., dir. Wolfgang Staudte. Lovely, sad-eyed artist Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef at her most haunting and vulnerable) returns from a concentration camp to find a traumatized former military surgeon, Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) living in her ruined apartment. While they try to piece their lives back together from the devastation all around, Dr. Mertens runs into a now-successful former comrade who triggers memories of a horrific war-time atrocity and the realization that former Nazis are all around them. Features stunning Noir-inflected photography by Friedl Behn-Grund and Eugen Klagemann, and haunted overtones of the later THE THIRD MAN (1949, dir. Carol Reed); it’s as if Alida Valli’s character from that film had her own movie. The first DEFA and post-WWII German production, this helped launch the Trümmerfilm (“Rubble film”) genre; the title intentionally references the original German title for Fritz Lang’s M. “I took my script first to the British, then to the Americans and finally to the French. Nobody wanted the material … Only the Russian Cultural Officer was interested in my project” – Wolfgang Staudte.

DEATH CAMP SACHSENHAUSEN (TODESLAGER SACHSENHAUSEN) – 1946, 40 min., dir. Richard Brandt. Not only one of the first DEFA documentaries ever made, this was also the first German film dealing with the machinery and terror of the Nazi extermination system. The film was commissioned by the Soviet military administration in Berlin while preparations for the Sachsenhausen trial were under way. Shot at the infamous Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin shortly after it was liberated, this is a harrowing, unforgettable testament to systematized murder: a stack of passports of dead inmates from Bolivia, Germany, Poland and Russia. Graphic footage and B&W photos of camp inmates, some surviving and many dead. The wooden posts in the gallows where prisoners were executed are marked for each victim. The film also includes audio commentary by a former camp official as he was being interrogated by Soviet officers. Newly restored by the DEFA Foundation for this release.

THE AXE OF WANDSBEK (DAS BEIL VON WANDSBEK) – 1951, 110 min., dir. Falk Harnack. Banned from theaters a month after it was released, THE AXE OF WANDSBEK opens with a group of children playing hopscotch in the street in front of a butcher’s shop, with “Heaven” and “Hell” scrawled in chalk on the pavement. It’s an eerie omen: the down-on-his-luck butcher, Albert Teetjen (Erwin Geschonneck) will soon agree to do a favor for an old WWI comrade and execute four Communist prisoners falsely accused of murder, so his ambitious Nazi buddy can convince Hitler to pay a visit to Hamburg. But the aftermath of the execution will come to haunt Albert at every step and mark him as an actual butcher. A bleak, relentless Stanley Kramer-like drama about the banality of evil and how it trickles down to every level of society, destroying all it touches. The film was adapted from a novel by Arnold Zweig, a German Jew who published the novel during exile in Palestine in 1943.

THE GLEIWITZ CASE (DER FALL GLEIWITZ) - 1961, 70 min., dir. Gerhard Klein. Based on a false flag operation in 1939 when a group of Nazi soldiers attacked a radio station in the town of Gleiwitz on the Polish border, thereby giving Hitler justification to invade Poland. This is one of the most visually inventive and distinctive DEFA films of the era, filled with odd camera angles and asymmetrical edits. Brilliantly depicts the emotional distancing and deadening effects of fascism that allowed the Nazis to carry out their atrocities, with a strange inexorable quality to it: a thriller without suspense, with the terrible outcome predetermined by history.

NAKED AMONG WOLVES (NACKT UNTER WÖLFEN) - 1963, 124 min, dir. Frank Beyer. Inspired by the astonishing true life story of a young Jewish boy who was smuggled into the Buchenwald concentration camp in a suitcase and hidden by a group of prisoners, NAKED AMONG WOLVES was based on the acclaimed novel by Buchenwald survivor Bruno Apitz and anchored by one of the finest DEFA casts of the era, including a stellar performance by Armin Mueller-Stahl (SHINE, EASTERN PROMISES) in one of his earliest roles. An engrossing drama about camaraderie and sacrifice in the face of overwhelming danger and oppression, beautifully shot in B&W Totalvision scope. Much of it was filmed on location at the actual Buchenwald camp, lending an overwhelming sense of gravity and sadness to the story. (The boy in the novel was based on Stefan Jerzy Zweig, who went on to become an acclaimed cinematographer – watch our interview with Armin Mueller-Stahl for this release discussing his later friendship with Zweig.)

All films in German with English subtitles.

Special Features

New video interview with NAKED AMONG WOLVES actor Armin Mueller-Stahl.
“The Eyewitness Report” (Der Augenzeuge) newsreel (1946, 4 min.).
New visual essays by Ryan Verrill & Will Dodson of Someone’s Favorite Prod. and Laurent Ohmansiek.
New audio commentaries by Shelagh Rowan-Legg & Anne Golden, Dr. Elizabeth Ward, Bernardo Rondeau and Mike.
Graphic design by Beth Morris.
Deluxe Edition Bonus Content

Hard slipcase featuring new artwork by Anthony Gerace
80 pg. Illustrated booklet
New essay by Stephen Brockmann
New essay by Eli Rubin
New essay by Danny Pinto
New essay by Jim Morton
New essay by Walter Chaw

THE MAN WHO THOUGHT LIFE (MANDEN DER TÆNKTE TING) – 1969, Danish Film Inst., 97 min. A long-overlooked gem of late 1960s Sci-Fi, Danish director Jens Ravn’s eerie, hypnotic thriller opens on a respected doctor, Max Holst (Preben Neergaard) who is brought in to examine an enigmatic, arrogant man, Steinmetz (John Price). Steinmetz can miraculously make objects materialize by focusing his mind (including an expensive cigar, in the film’s recurring leitmotif). When he attempts to blackmail Dr. Holst into performing surgery to expand this sinister brainpower, Holst refuses – and Steinmetz calls to “life” a mirror image that sets out to destroy the doctor’s willpower. Brilliantly shot in B&W Scope by cinematographer Witold Leszczyński, with a disturbing minimalist score by Per Nørgaard (BABETTE’S FEAST), the film has the angular 60s Mod / Sci-Fi vibe of films like THE UNKNOWN MAN OF SHANDIGOR and TIME OF ROSES (both Deaf Crocodile releases) and British TV shows like “The Prisoner” and “The Avengers,” with labyrinthine corridors, banks of geometric lights and nurses whizzing past on electric scooters. “I will open the depths of existence to you, and will make all your ideas collapse violently," Steinmetz both promises and threatens Holst – and as we descend down the rabbit-hole of Ravn’s gripping, Stanley Kubrick-meets-Kiyoshi Kurosawa cerebral horror, we too begin to lose our grip on reality, until it may be too late. Deaf Crocodile is thrilled to present this first-ever U.S. Blu-ray release of the film, in collaboration with the Danish Film Institute. In Danish with English subtitles.

Special Features

The early Jens Ravn short film “Window Space” (Vinduesplads) (1967, 11 min.).

New video interview with Ravn’s wife and collaborator, Jette Bonnevie.

New video interview with Ravn’s close friend and co-worker, Steen Dalin.

New video interview with Thomas C. Christensen, Head of Collections - Danish Film Institute / Film Archive.

New visual essay by Danish filmmaker Reinert Kiil.

New audio commentary by Erica Shultz and Lance Schibi from Unsung Horrors podcast.

48-pg. booklet featuring essays by film critic Walter Chaw, film historian Justin Humphreys, Steen Dalin, Mikail Bakhtiyarov, Jette Bonnevie, and an archival interview with Jens Ravn.

New cover art and graphic design by Beth Morris.

Blu-ray authoring by Vital Passenger.

Limited Edition Slipcover of 1250 units, featuring new artwork by Ryan Quackenbush.

turns out the main hero is actually related to the bad guys and they decide to open up a saloon, completely ignoring everything they’ve done to say that, hey maybe our new partners aren’t so bad after all, please ignore the blackface.