What's  NEW in 2025 ?

In the new year of 2025, major acquisitions or smaller ones that complement or relate to existing films or special collections (such as the Gaufilmstelle, ZFO/Ostland Film GmbH; International Filmkammer, Reichsfilmkammer, Karl Ritter, our next book, etc) will be shown below. Stay tuned!

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We have lost no time in this new year in purchasing our first acquisitions. Two original Swedish small Daybill-style posters from 1937 (Zu neuen Ufern/To new Shores) and 1940 (Alaczar). The first film starred Swedish actress and singer Zarah Leander, and the story-line has her being convicted of murder in London and transported to Australia to serve her sentence at the notorious Parramatta Women's Prison.  As this one of only three Third Reich features film with an Australian story, it merited a purchase to complement the other posters for this film found in our Collection here in Sydney.  The Alcazar poster also complements our other posters for the Genina Italian propaganda film classic on the Spanish Civil War. Both posters have now been  added to our Poster Gallery.

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In over 30 years of determined collecting we have been lucky to have found all of 7 lobby cards for the 1933 propaganda film, Hans Westmar.

We have now found an 8th lobby card to add to our collection. It is not the most exciting image, but the other 7 we own thankfully are of very dramatic or moving scenes, so this one complements the others nicely.

We have also recently acquired off a Spanish website a second 1933 Zeitgeschichte Verlag folding brochure which includes the listing for the novel of Hitlerjunge Quex. This is an image we reproduced in our book on the film but this second copy is cleaner and does not have staining. We shall be using it in the next print–run of our 2nd revised edition book if and when another print–run is warranted.

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We have purchased from a seller in Barcelona the oiginal 4-page handbill advertising the film ESPAÑA HEROICA  (Helden in Spanien). We have a superb collection of original promotional materials on this film, shown here.

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The first German film poster of a German film we have purchased since mid–2023 is an ultra-rare A1-sized Offset Printed poster from 1937 entitled Opfer der Vergangenheit / Victims of the Past. The documentary film was an exposé of severely handicapped, mentally insane and physically deformed persons in asylums and medical institutions. A grim, shocking film is used to argue in favour of euthanasia as a "humane" solution to these "victims of the past" due to genetics. Because the footage is of real persons, it is even more shocking than – say – Tod Browning's infamous film Freaks.  In that film, all of the characters were real–life Variety, Sideshow and Circus performers, who were paid to appear in the film and acted with dignity and turned out to be the "good guys" and won over the sympathy of many audience members.

The last original copy of this poster we are aware of was sold at auction in Germany in April 2000. There were no press-books, marketing guides, lobby cards, press photos, or cinema programs issued –  just this poster. The film was not produced by any of the German film studios, but was rather a collaboration by the Ministry of Propaganda & Peoples' Enlightenment and the NSDAP's Racial Political Bureau. The film was made mandatory to be screened in all 5,300 movie theaters in the Reich in April/May 1937. It was still circulating a year later in rural and country areas by the Gaufilmstelle distribution network of mobile cinema vans.  It is a film often cited by historians as a prelude to the extermination of some 70,000 patients prior to 1939, and a forerunner to the victims of the concentration camps during WWII.  Very, very few original copies of this poster survived and the few we know about are all in museums.

BELOW, a Gaufilmstelle publication listing the film as a new release in rural Germany in early 1938.

 We have added a page on this film to our website here.

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The Peter Pewas design for the poster of Karl Ritter's spy thrilled, Traitor/Verräter, from 1936, is shown below.

The DIN a0-sized poster is an "Auslandsvertriebplakat" or foreign country export poster, printed in Germany but without any German language text or credits, or even film title. This was left off so that the foreign country's film distributors could over-print such information in their own language.

Peter Pewas  (1904–1984) was a  committed German proletariat who had done design work for the Rote Hilfe communist front in the 1920s, and was a huge admirer of the Moscow art scene of that time. He traveled there in 1927 as part of an artist tour and was inspired. He was also influenced by the Bauhaus scene where he was employed for some time during the Weimar years. He used collage, montage, and combined painting, graphics and black & white photographic images to produce some of the most startling film posters for the Third Reich. Check out our Pewas posters for Bismarck, Feuertaufe, Sieg im Westen, one of the DIII88 posters, and the one for Das unsterbliche Herz, for example. His pre-1945 film posters are highly sought-after, and do not surface on the market very often. After the war, Pewas was involved with the founding of the DDR (i.e. Soviet) Defa studios, which took over the facilities and grounds of the former Ufa studios at Babelsberg near Potsdam. He directed two feature films in those post-war years, but both were flops.

We are pleased to announce that we have won the above poster at auction and although it has not yet arrived Down Under, we are adding it to our Poster Gallery using the most excellent auction house catalogue image  that we have shown above. We are really delighted that we have acquired this long-sought poster and feel lucky to have done so.

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In our Hitler Youth Quex book, we quoted from a monthly magazine for boys working as apprentices in the printing trade in Germany called Graphische Jugend.  The magazine ran an article on the film in its September 1933 issue. We wrote:

" As noted earlier, for the film the character of Heini Völker was depicted as a printer’s apprentice rather than as a carpenter’s apprentice as written in the novel. The monthly magazine for young printer’s apprentices, Graphische Jugend, enthusiastically ran an article in its Se tember 1933 issue. The article noted:

'The fate of Quex, a Hitler Youth apprentice printer, should be of particular interest to young graphic artists. Not only that he learns this craft, but also that he knows how to use it in case of the greatest need, makes him appear in a special light for the graphic ' "  [pg. 198]

At the time we used that citation from Graphische Jugend, we had the full article but not the actual cover of the September 1933 issue.We did not know then that the cover would sport a photograph of Heini Völker, or that the back cover of the magazine would include the Ufa film studio advertisement for the film's Berlin premiere. We show that cover spread at right, as we have now acquired the intact issue for our archives.