Thomas Christoph Harlan, 25-year-old son of the notorious Nazi film producer, Veit Harlan, has written a stage play, “Bluma from Warsaw,” that extols the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
Young Harlan, who in revulsion against his father’s unrepentant attitude has become extremely pro-Jewish, declared that he was stirred to his dramatic effort when he encountered, on a visit to Israel two years ago,140 kibbutz members who survived the Warsaw ghetto revolt.
Veit Harlan, the Nazis’ favorite moviemaker, was director and producer of “Jew Suess,” the anti-Semitic film ordered by Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels to sell the concept that Jews have always been innately criminal and that it is therefore a measure of self-defense to exterminate them. Shown at the time when the deportation of Germany’s Jews to the gas chambers of Poland got under way, “Jew Suess” was to have smothered any lingering German compunctions about the deportations and about the vast butchering operations in Eastern Europe.
After the war, Harlan’s comeback was a stormy center of controversy, with clashes in Berlin, Frankfurt, Freiburg and other places between German democrats, notably students, and Harlan sympathizers. For the past two or three years, however, his films have been shown everywhere without untoward incident.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
