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NAZIS

First-ever German Anne Frank movie to premiere at Berlinale

The first German feature-length biopic on the Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank will premiere next month at the 66th Berlin film festival, organisers said Friday.

Published: 22 January 2016 15:26 CET
First-ever German Anne Frank movie to premiere at Berlinale
A page from Anne Frank's original 'Diary of a Young Girl'. Photo: DPA

“Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank” (The Diary of Anne Frank) will screen in the youth sidebar section Generation of the Berlinale, the first major cinema showcase of the year in Europe.

“This film adaptation of the eponymous historical testimony that moved the world primarily depicts the period of time that Anne spent in her family's hiding place… in Amsterdam,” the festival said in a statement.

Anne Frank, who was born in Germany and moved to the Netherlands as a child, will be played by German actress Lea van Acken, who starred as the daughter of religiously fanatical Catholic parents in the drama “Stations of the Cross”, which won best screenplay at the 2014 Berlin festival.

Hans Steinbichler will direct the picture, co-starring Martina Gedeck (“The Lives of Others”) and Ulrich Noethen (“Downfall”) and produced with the permission of the Swiss-based Anne Frank Fund, which holds the rights to the diary.

Frank and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in 1942 in a secret annexe at the back of a building owned by her father Otto Frank's company in Amsterdam, two years after German troops occupied the Netherlands.

Frank chronicled her life from June 1942 to August 1944 when the family was betrayed.

Anne and her elder sister Margot were sent first to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland, then in November 1944 to Bergen-Belsen where they died of typhus.

A tableau of life for persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, Anne's diary was first published in Dutch in 1947 by her father. More than 30 million copies have been sold worldwide.

A 1959 Hollywood adaptation of the diary won three Oscars.

German authorities announced this week that a 95-year-old former Auschwitz medic who was stationed at the camp when Frank arrived there would go on trial next month on more than 3,600 counts of accessory to murder.

The 12-day Berlin film festival will kick off February 11 with a gala screening of Joel and Ethan Coen's send-up of Hollywood's golden age “Hail, Caesar!” starring George Clooney. Meryl Streep will serve as jury president.

SEE ALSO: Refugees to star at 66th Berlinale film festival

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NAZIS

German justice contaminated by Nazis in post-war years

Germany's justice system was still filled with former Nazis well into the 1970s, as the Cold War coloured efforts to root out fascists, according a damning official inquiry presented Thursday.

Published: 18 November 2021 17:09 CET
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report
Professors Friedrich Kießling and Christoph Safferling present their report "State Security in the Cold War". Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Anspach

In the 600-page collection of findings entitled “State Security in the Cold War”, historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling focused on the period from the early 1950s until 1974.

Their research found that between 1953 and 1959, around three in four top officials at the federal prosecutor’s office, which commissioned the report, had belonged to the Nazi party.

More than 80 percent had worked in Adolf Hitler’s justice apparatus, and it would take until 1972 before they were no longer in the majority.

“On the face of it they were highly competent lawyers… but that came against the backdrop of the death sentences and race laws in which they were involved,” said Margaretha Sudhof, state secretary at the justice ministry, unveiling the report.

“These are disturbing contradictions to which our country has long remained blind.”

‘Combat mission’

It was not until 1992, two years after Germany’s national reunification, that the last prosecutor with a fascist background left the office.

“There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past” at the federal prosecutor’s office, the authors concluded, stressing “the great and long continuity” of the functions held and “the high number” of officials involved in Hitler’s regime.

Chief federal prosecutor Peter Frank commissioned the study in 2017. The federal prosecutor’s office is one of Germany’s most powerful institutions, handling the most serious national security cases including those involving terrorism and espionage.

With more than 100 prosecutors, it is “the central actor in the fight against terror,” the report authors said, underlining its growing role in the decades since the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States.

The researchers were given unfettered access to hundreds of files labelled classified after the war, and found that rooting out alleged communists was often prioritised over other threats, including from the far right.

“In the 1950s the federal prosecutor’s office had a combat mission – not a legal but a political one: to pursue all the communists in the country,” the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung said in a summary of the report.

‘Recycling’ Nazis

The fact that West Germany widely used former officials from the Nazi regime in its post-war administration had long been known.

For example, Hans Globke served as chief of staff and a trusted confidant to former conservative West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer between 1953 and 1963 and was responsible for recruitment to top posts.

However, Globke had also been a senior civil servant in the Nazi-era interior ministry and was involved in the drafting of the 1935 Nuremberg race laws that imposed the first dramatic restrictions on Jews.

In recent years, systematic digging into the past of key ministries and institutions has unearthed a troubling and previously hidden degree of “recycling” of Third Reich officials in the post-war decades.

A 2016 government report revealed that in 1957, more than a decade after the war ended, around 77 percent of senior officials at the justice ministry had been members of the Nazi party. That study, also carried out by Safferling, revealed that the number of former Nazis at the ministry did not decline after the fall of the regime but actually grew in the 1950s.

Part of the justification was cynical pragmatism: the new republic needed experienced civil servants to establish the West German justice system. Furthermore, the priorities of the Allies who won the war and “liberated” the country from the Nazis were quickly turned upside down in the Cold War context.

After seeking to de-Nazify West Germany after 1945, the aim quickly shifted to building a capitalist bulwark against the communist threat. That approach often meant turning a blind eye to Germans’ previous involvement in the Third Reich.

In recent years, Germany has embarked on a twilight attempt to provide justice for concentration camp victims, placing several former guards in their 90s on trial for wartime crimes.

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