Editorial. Documenting Nazi Crimes through Soviet Film Article - Février 2025

Questions have been raised about the trustworthiness of Soviet film footage of crimes from the WWII period for as long as the Russian cinematographic archives have existed. In the past, this footage and the concerns about it were mainly discussed through the lens of the Cold War. Today, the reasons for distrust are even broader in scope, due to the possibility of digital manipulation and the activities of the contemporary Russian propaganda machine, which has instrumentalised the history of WWII as part of its onslaught against Ukraine. Furthermore, Soviet and post-Soviet compilation documentaries reproduced, ad infinitum, decontextualised images of women in mourning and close-up shots of human remains. That obscured the full quantity of original rushes that had been preserved and prevented us from assessing their significance. However, three parallel dynamics have made it possible to reinterrogate the already-familiar footage and discover new material. [...]