VERRÄTER /TRAITORS  top Third

Reich espionage propaganda film.


This offer includes 3 original items:

-- 2 original lobby cards -- very rare!!

-- the Gaufilmstelle 4 page brochure promoting the film! 

--worldwide shipping.

BELOW: The back side of one of the two lobby cards with the film title rubber-stamped on by Ufa studio. Both lobby cards have the rubber-stamp.

Two exceptionally rare original Ufa film studio 21 cm x 29 cm lobby cards printed on double–weight photographic paper for the Ritter film. These are the first lobby cards from this film which we have seen in decades. Please read the essay below to gain an appreciation of the film and it's role in boosting Karl Ritter's career into becoming one of the most important and successful of the Third Reich's film directors.  


BONUS!!! Also included, the 4 page "Gaufilmstelle" (District Film Office Network) brochure promoting the film !
This brochure is hard-to-find and a great complementary piece to own along with these two rare film stills!

VERRÄTER starred:

Lída Baarová as Marion
Willy Birgel as Agent Morris
Irene von Meyendorff as Hilde Körner
Theodor Loos as Dr. Auer
Rudolf Fernau as Fritz Brockau
Herbert A.E. Böhme as Agent Schultz
amongst others. ( Lida Baarová was by this time the lover of Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels, and also starred in Ritter's PATRIOTEN/PATRIOTS, produced the following year, which won a Gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition. )

Important Note: As the lobby cards are slightly larger in dimension that the A4 scanner used for this listing, the white border on all four sides of the photographs is only able to be shown here on the two horizontal edges. The photographs have a traditional white border around all four sides. The resolution on the photos is excellent, printed from sheet film negatives, but here on this webpage the resolution has been severely compromised to allow faster loading of the page.



Final Note: both lobby cards and the Gaufilmstelle brochure shown in the listing are included in this price, postpaid.





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...."


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.
 
The Traitor in the film title refers to the German civilian who dies on the scaffold for betraying his country, not to the foreign agents who are enemies of the Reich.
 
--- William Gillespie, author of Karl Ritter –His Life and 'Zeitfilms' under National Socialism, 2nd edition  ©2014, The Making of 'The Crew of the Dora' [Ritter's Besatzung Dora film]  ©2016; and Legion Condor – Karl Ritter's lost 1939 feature film. ©2019.