Ufa Ton-Woche 471/38/1939

Ufa Ton-Woche 471/38/1939 is a German newsreel released on September 14, 1939. Aired just two weeks after the German attack on Poland, it presents a heavily propagandistic account of the campaign. The newsreel features Hermann Göring addressing Berlin factory workers, urging loyalty to Hitler. The retreating Polish forces are depicted as leaving behind scorched earth, while the so-called "Bloody Sunday of Bromberg" is framed as justification for severe reprisals. Antisemitic propaganda portrays Polish Jews as profiteers and criminals inciting violence against Germans, with claims that their relatives in England and France are pushing for war. The newsreel also shows Polish prisoners in camps and Adolf Hitler visiting his troops, reinforcing the narrative that Poles were deceived into fighting for British interests.

Some shots from Ufa Ton-Woche 471 were reused shortly after its release in Fritz Hippler’s Der Feldzug in Polen (The Campaign in Poland) in 1939 and in the antisemitic propaganda film Der ewige Jude (1940).

Screenshot from Calling Mr Smith (1943) using Ufa Ton-Woche 471/38/1939

Outside Germany, this footage was first repurposed as early as 1943 by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in their experimental anti-Nazi short Calling Mr. Smith. After the war, Erwin Leiser incorporated the segment showing Poles from Bromberg being arrested and marched away for execution into his seminal documentary on National Socialism, Mein Kampf (1960 film), within a section addressing Partisans during the attack on Poland. Today, these images are regarded as some of the most widely recognized visual representations of the Holocaust.

Screenshots

Screenshots of the iconic sequence about Bromberg

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  Ufa Ton-Woche 471/1939
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Popcultural references

Material from Ufa Ton-Woche 471/1939 appears in other films such as (selection): Der Feldzug in Polen (The Campaign in Poland)(1939), Der ewige Jude (1940), Mein_Kampf_(1960_film), The 81st Blow (1974), The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933–45 (1981), Genocide (1981 film),The_Number_on_Great-Grandpa's_Arm (2018), Shoah, les oubliés de l’histoire (2014), The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022).

Further reading

• Schmidt, Fabian & Alexander Oliver Zöller (2022), “Filmography of the Genocide: Official and Ephemeral Film Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews 1933–1945.” Research in Film and History. Audiovisual Traces, no. 4 (February 2022): 1–160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18245.
• Schmidt, Fabian & Alexander Oliver Zöller (2021), “Atrocity Film”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, no. 12 (March). https://doi.org/10.17892/app.2021.00012.223.
• Hornshoej-Moeller, Stig (1995), "Der ewige Jude" Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms, IWF Göttingen

External links

Digital copy of the preserved film in the Bundesarchiv