Terezin: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area

("Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area"), unofficially ("The Führer Gives a City to the Jews"), was a black-and-white projected Nazi propaganda film. It was directed by the German Jewish prisoner Kurt Gerron and the Czech filmmaker Karel Pečený under close SS supervision in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and edited by Pečený's company, Aktualita. Filmed mostly in the autumn of 1944, it was completed on 28 March 1945 and screened privately four times. After the war, the film was lost but about twenty minutes of footage was later rediscovered in various archives. Unlike other Nazi propaganda films, which were under the control of Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda, Theresienstadt was conceived and paid for by the Jewish Affairs department of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, at the initiative of Hans Günther. The film, which displayed supposedly happy and healthy Jews, was part of a larger Nazi program to use Theresienstadt as a tool to discredit reports of the genocide of Jews reaching the Western Allies and neutral countries. However, it was not widely distributed and did not have the opportunity to influence public opinion. Background Theresienstadt was a Nazi ghetto in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the German-occupied Czech lands—built inside a repurposed fortified town, Terezín. Between 1941 and 1945, some 140,000 Jews were transported to the camp. Before the war, it housed about 7,000 people; during the camp's existence, the average population was about 45,000. About 33,000 died at Theresienstadt and almost 90,000 were deported to ghettos, extermination camps, and other killing centres, where they faced almost certain death.