Red Fog / Red Mist / Roter Nebel (1943, ZFO)

The Ostland Film GmbH production company in Riga produced a 36 to 44 minute anti–Bolshevik film that outlined the sordid history of Bolshevism imposed in Latvia and the Baltic States in the 1920s, and the brutal Soviet atrocities inflicted on the civilian populations after the Red Army re-occupied those lands in early 1940. This film was aimed at the Baltic State audiences in their  own languages, and in Russian and Ukrainian for those occupied areas.

Red Fog    [ film review ]

  by  Dr. Fritz Michel Riga, October 31



Those of us who are forced to pursue the enemy agitation by professional means, know how penetrating the radio and the press have been sounding in the last few weeks that the European peoples are supposedly longing for the hour in which they can live again in the sense of the time before the outbreak of war. In doing so, they mainly make use of those persistent personalities who have emigrated from their home countries and are now busily trying to justify their escape and attitude with more or less exaggerated or completely fabricated reports for reasons of preservation.



Anyone who experienced the seriousness and deep emotion of the Latvian audience at the world premiere of the film "Roter NebeI,”  that gruesome document of the Bolshevik rule in Latvia, knows what the truth for the "longing for the time before the outbreak of war“ is about ...

With all the recent atrocity methods through which the fine agitation contaminates the ether, one speculates on the gullibility of the little spirits in the European countries, who today still have not understood what it is about. They allow themselves to be blinded by the argument that the supply and sale of their respective homeland used to be incomparably better, without admitting that it was previously completely controlled by the Anglo-Saxons and that it was more or less a capitalist plaything in the race between the great European peoples. They fail to realize that their governments used to belittle themselves as a love-servant,  and selfish to please the London policy of "divido et impera". Rather, they limit themselves to mourning their former wealth and to regard the members of the Wehrmacht and administrative leaders of the Axis powers in their midst as the originators of a materially war-related situation. They fail to recognize economic compensation, as their fear that the "golden age" of before the war would never return is greater than a better belief in a brighter and more just future.  [excerpt from the full review in the above newspaper.]

Later,  as many as twenty further versions of Red Fog aimed at specific European audiences were produced or at least planned;  including French, Finnish, Italian, English, Spanish, Polish, Serbian, Czech, Croatian, Slovakian, Danish, Greek, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Flemish, Swiss German, Norwegian, Turkish.  Swedish and Portuguese.   These versions were about half of the length of the original version produced in Riga.  Due to the fact that a forty minute documentary on the history of Baltic Bolshevism would have been too long for European audiences,  more succinct use of that footage allowed the film to establish and show Bolshevik horrors and then segue into a narrative which stated that other nationalities in Europe were also under danger.

Of these non–Baltic, non–Russian "foreign versions,"  to date  only a handful have surfaced: French, Swedish, German, and Flemish. It is not known whether most of the other language versions were in fact ever realised before the tide turned against Germany.

Inexplicably, the version for German audiences in the Reich itself was not approved by the Censorship Office until late December 1944 and published on Feburuary 24,  1945! Here is the official.announcement in the Berlin film newspaper of record Film-Nachrichten: 

Below are screenshots from the original Latvian version in our library:

The film ends with the crushing of the hated Red Army Ushanka cap with its hammer & sickle red star badge by victorious marching soldiers:

Below are screenshots from the 15 1/2 minute shorter Flemish language version in our library:

Below are three screenshots which seque the anti–Bolshevik history of the Baltic States to the pending threat to Flemish culture, churches, and heritage sites and to the Flemish people:

Proud recruits and volunteers for the Waffen–SS in defense of Flanders and Europe:

A rousing ending with chorus and flag:

 An incredible amount of primary material on Ostland Film and its associated companies can be found on this website here.