G P U   by Karl  Ritter

The Great Terror could be, and  by many would be, blamed on the Jews.  –   Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, pg.108.

Karl Ritter's film GPU exposing the murderous worldwide terror network of the Soviet secret police (i.e.: formerly the Cheka, the GPU, later re-named as the NKVD, then the KGB...) is today criticised by all German film historians as a terrible film and dismissed as both crude and badly made. Ritter wrote that he compiled newspaper reports on GPU assassinations, bombings, and insurrection across Europe and used some of these actual incidents in the film.

French film authors Cadars and Courtade wrote in the 1970s that it was one of Ritter's better films and one which could have found similarities in many ways with similar Hollywood genre films.

Research by author Joseph Garncarz, in his 2022 book Begeistere Zuschauer confirms the tremendous success of the film with Third Reich audiences at the time. During the 1942/43 annual film season it was the 6th most popular film of the year across the Reich. Furthermore, it attracted between 1942 and the end of the war some 20.65 million audience members; reaching no fewer than a huge 41.2% of the entire population. It thus was seen by only 1% fewer audience than Veit Harlan's Jud Süß; which modern day Third Reich film histories consistently mention as one of the top box office draws of Nazi Germany. (Garncarz's research not only brings GPU  audience numbers under the spotlight but also the "Euthanasia film" Ich klage an, which attracted 1.6% more Germans than Jud Süß and thus was the most–seen propaganda film of the Third Reich.)

BELOW, The head of the notorious Cheka secret police, Genrikh Jagoda, and the then Deputy Chairman of the Cheka's successor organisation, the GPU. Like many leading Bolsheviks he was born of a Jewish family; and was of Polish-Russian descent. After murdering millions of innocent Russians, as well as managing Stalin's Purges in the 1930's, and thus hated and feared by millions more, he was eventually denounced as a traitor and executed in 1938. His successor was also Jewish. The Nazis stated that his real name was Yahuda. Characters in Ritter's film were modelled in him and his henchmen. 

Historian Timothy Snyder, on page 93 of his acclaimed 2010 book  Bloodlands  states that  "the heights of the NKVD [successor to the GPU] were dominated by by men whose own origins within the Soviet national minorities, Jews above all. About forty percent of high–ranking NKVD officers had Jewish nationality recorded in their identity documents, as did more than half of the NKVD generals."  The Ritter film links Bolshevism and Judaism implicitly, and in this iconic scene shown below,the anti–Communist blonde heroine, in order to ingratiate herself with leading Bolsheviks before taking her revenge on the murderers of her family in the Baltic States, dances with the Jewish Bolshevik leader at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm, under the watchful eye of Lenin.

Further irrefutable background information: Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute, says that it is important to discuss these subjects even if they make people uncomfortable. “A lot of people do not realize that there were Jews in Stalin’s secret police,” Brent said.  He continued: “This is something that really needs to be talked about. Some of these individuals had fathers who were rabbis in the shtetls.” NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda was Jewish, Brent says, and the first Minister of  Justice in Soviet Russia, Isaac Steinberg, was a religious Jew. ----“100 years on, international conferences debate Jewish role in Russian Revolution” – The Times of Israel, 28 October 2017.

Further background information by  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

"I named the leadership of the GULag in my book, GULag Archipelago. Yes, there was a large proportion of Jews among its command. (Portraits of the directors of construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, which I reproduced from the Soviet commemorative corpus of 1936, caused outrage: they claimed that I have selected the Jews only on purpose. But I did not select them, I’ve just reproduced the photographs of all the High Directors of the BelBaltlag [White Sea – Baltic Canal camp administration] from that immortal book. Am I guilty that they had turned out to be Jews? Who had selected them for those posts? Who is guilty?) I will now add information about three prominent men, whom I did not know then. Before the BelBaltlag, one Lazar Kogan worked as the head of the GULag; Zinovy Katsnelson was the deputy head of the GULag from 1934 onward; Izrail Pliner was the head of the GULag from 1936, and later he oversaw the completion of construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal (1937).

It can’t be denied that History elevated many Soviet Jews into the ranks of the arbiters of the fate of all Russians."     –– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - From Chapter 19 of  his two–volume work Two Hundred Years Together –Russian-Jewish History. (2001,2002). Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was in 1973 acclaimed for his monumental trilogy, The Gulag Archipelago, called "one of the most influential books of the 20th century" by author and fellow gulag historian, Anne Appelbaum. The trilogy has sold over 30 million copies worldwide in 35 languages.

Winston Churchill on the subject:  Quoted from the February 8, 1920, issue of the London Illustrated Sunday Herald:  "There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. "

The GPU  and its previous Trotsky-run Cheka murdered more than 30 million of its own citizens by August 1939:

[In August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed and]  “to this point the Soviet regime had been responsible for infinitely more deaths than had Nazi Germany — indeed, the greatest liquidation of the citizens of any state in world history, amounting to the deaths of thirty million or more people as the result of state policies, even including the tentative introduction of mobile gas vans to kill kulaks.”  ––Stanley G. Payne, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, A History of  Fascism  1914–1945, p.361–362.

Here is the poster as displayed for cinema owners in the "Werberatschlag" from which they could order either or both of the large A1 posters shown, or the smaller "Kleinplakat" (A3 size) for marketing the film in their theatres. 

The film's Director Karl Ritter worked with Gustav Rathje, who was the Production Leader of  GPU. Rathje also worked as PL for Ritter's Luftwaffe film Besatzung Dora, and for a 1944/45 film called Erzieherin gesucht, which was only released in the 1950's in post–war West Germany.  BELOW from our collection the fountain pen inked signatures of Rathje and Ritter on an Ufa document for Erzieherin Gesucht (dated 1 December 1944). Rathje unfortunately was captured by the Soviets at the end of the war. His sad fate as GPU's Production Leader was thus sealed when he was imprisoned at war’s end by the Soviets in Special Camp Nr. 1 in Mühlberg, where he perished in November 1947.  The real–life horrors of the Soviet Secret Police exposed in the film thus played out in real life for the film's Production Leader!

In late May  2018, we acquired the original Uƒa film studio book tie–in to the film, written by Karl Ritter collaborator, Fred Hildenbrandt. The book is extremely rare. The copy we purchased is the only one we have seen in more than 25 years of searching.

" There is no more frightful prospect for the German people than to come under the hand of Bolshevism. "  – Dr. Joseph Goebbels, 14 November 1943  Diaries entry.