[note: An ESSAY on the film appears at the bottom of this webpage.]

Export market poster for foreign language over–printing. A second exact original of this poster was purchased  by us from a Tokyo film dealer, so this poster was used in such foreign lands after the sheet was exported by the Third Reich for those markets.

In Germany, the poster of course had the German film title VERRÄTER printed across this same poster sheet,

as per the image reproduced from the original pressbook below:

The film was an official entry to the 1937 Paris World Exposition, along with other major films such as Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens, Das blaue Licht, etc. Verräter won a  medal at the Paris Exposition, as did Triumph des Willens.

Here is a rare original handbill listing the screening times of the films, stamped with "Free Admission" for the bearer, which includes Verräter and Triumph des Willens and other film titles on show. The handbill in is our Collection.

 ESSAY:

Verräter (Traitors, 1936)  –  The Gestapo and Abwehr as Heroes

Film director Karl Ritter (1888–1977) is universally condemned by post–WWII film historians for his militaristic, chauvinistic, and unwavering propaganda films which glorified war, aggression, and ‘senseless self–sacrifice.’ His films utilized anti–democratic, anti–Semitic and anti–communist ideological themes epitomizing the stereotypical Nazi warrior, and promoted a Greater Germany against all enemies of the Reich.  At war’s end, the Soviets demanded that he be tried for war crimes for ‘the systematic poisoning of German youth.’

In Ritter’s Traitors (Verräter, 1936) a complex British spy network fans across the Reich,  infiltrating the Heinkel aircraft factory to steal plans, if not an actual new bomber in peacetime Germany. Other spies try to obtain blueprints for a new tank, and a third agent information on Berlin's waterworks. Ritter had received a commission from Admiral Canaris, the head of Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service the Abwehr, to make this film; which for the first time since 1933 showed audiences scenes with the Third Reich’s Wehrmacht, air fleet, navy, secret police and intelligence services in a feature film.   It is one of the most suspenseful, fast–paced and dramatic of the Zeitfilms Ritter produced, with a top cast. Verräter was the special screening on 9 September 1936 at the Nürnberg Party Congress, and six days later premiered in Berlin at the prestigious Ufa Palast am Zoo. It was Germany’s main entry at that year’s Venice Film Festival, and won a special commendation for “excellent achievement” there.

Traitors boosted Karl Ritter’s reputation as one of Nazi Germany’s most successful filmmakers, and other major successes with Patriots, Operation Michael, Leave on Word of Honor, Pour le Mérite quickly followed over the next two years. The film was eventually distributed in the USA in 1941 and had relatively positive reviews from Variety and The New York Times, given that it was Nazi propaganda.  On 22 November ’36, the New York Times reviewer, Claire Trask, wrote: ‘When a film has the power of so strongly projecting its ideas or tendencies that they influence the minds of those who view it, it can safely be said to be a film of exceptional force. And such a film is "Verraeter" (Traitors), the Ufa picture which had its première last month at the Reich's Party Day at Nuremberg, the only film selected for the "cultural section of the party program." The Bavarian panegyrics shook Berlin into eager expectancy and the equally overwhelming public success of the picture here proves them justified.’

Ritter, in a public speech given in Hamburg at the time, recalled:

[Traitors] was premiered not in Germany, but rather in Venice. I had such fear about it that I did not go there, as I could not imagine that this sort of film about German interests and German educational ideas would find approval there. Everywhere shots of the Führer, von Blomberg, German destroyers, airplanes! Eyewitnesses reported that it was the first film where nobody left early, that everyone was glued to their seats, and that everyone was so completely quiet, and then so applauded. The interest was enormous. It was singled out with a medal – a sign that we have taken the right path, when the grumblers and the pessimists do not put us off. Do we think that Isi Rosenfeld in Antwerp, who is at the moment in business there, will not make a boycott; or that the Jews at the moment won’t, that is a fact, which we have ourselves established.

A 32 page study guide for high schools was published by the Propaganda Ministry, and the film was also taken up by the German High Command for Wehrmacht training in November 1936. The Gaufilmstelle regional film distribution network also showed the film in many heavy industry (rearmament) factories under their “Education and Instruction for Company Workers” program, to warn workers about espionage.

One of the traitors in the film title refers to the German civilian who dies on the scaffold for betraying his country, and to the foreign agents who are enemies of the Reich.

--- William Gillespie, author of Karl Ritter, 2^nd edition ©2014, and The Making of the Crew of the Dora, ©2016.