Films of deportations are a rare form of evidence about the Holocaust. Typically made under orders from German officials, such films often show the perspective of the perpetrators. Nazi authorities and their collaborators usually created these films for their own use, or fashioned them into propaganda for the German public.1 Some scholars have criticized postwar documentaries about the Holocaust that rely too much on these "perpetrator films."2
The featured footage shows the deportation of Dutch Jews and Roma and Sinti from Westerbork on May 19, 1944. Cameraman Werner Rudolf Breslauer, a German-Jewish photographer who had fled to the Netherlands with his wife and three children, was ordered by a camp commander to film different scenes of daily life in the camp, including this deportation. The film was meant to illustrate the camp's effectiveness to Gestapo officials. In September of 1944, Breslauer and his family were deported to Auschwitz via Theresienstadt, where Rudolf, his wife, and his two sons were killed. His daughter Ursula survived the war.
One of the most striking moments from Breslauer's footage captures a young Sinti girl named Settela Steinbach as she is forced to board a deportation train. Steinbach was one of the 245 Dutch Sinti killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau between July 31 and August 1, 1944, the date of the destruction and murder of Birkenau's so-called "Zigeunerlager" (literally, "Gypsy camp").3 The image of Steinbach peeking through the train doors with her head covered has become a symbol of the genocide of Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust.4
This film footage presents a unique and layered primary source: it was commissioned by perpetrators and created by a Jewish prisoner in order to document the deportation of Romani people. Is this tension and complexity evident in the perspective of the film itself? Breslauer's camera lingers briefly on individual people, but it also seems to be an impersonal record of the deportation process. How do we understand this footage? Is it simply a perpetrator film, or is it a primary source created by a fellow target of Nazi persecution? Is it possible for a source to be both things at once?