This is the most sinister of films, in execution as well as in subject matter, depicting a horror organisation from the informed angle of another, equally ruthless one. A mirror image is created – a double projection typical of Nazi (as well as many Stalin-era Soviet) films. (We might remember that according to Steinhoff’s Ohm Krüger, the noble idea of concentration camps was developed by the British.) Historian William Shirer de ned Karl Ritter as the gangster of the top directors, and there is enough of past Chicago and future Cold War kitsch in the images to justify that. Goebbels nominated Karl Ritter as “a Professor” (along with Steinhoff and Harlan) as he felt that the director had “more than anybody else celebrated relentlessly the national-socialist ideology and the heroism of the troops”. For once the honor was just. Already Ritter’s 1930s films Patrioten or Pour le mérite are ice cold and vigilantly military, with typical touches of high culture (classical music, Hölderlin) added to a professionally competent texture strangely without one single emotional moment. Stukas, the most famous of Ritter’s eight Luftwaffe films, tops them all as a grotesque oratorio of war and an open celebration of violent death.
G.P.U., or as explained by a subtitle: Grauen-Panik-Untergang (horror – panic – destruction), is a study of anarchy and chaos, a view of the underbelly of world events: unsolved murders, world-shaking assassinations and mysterious sabotage. It’s quite a travelogue, with events taking place in Riga, Amsterdam, Göteborg, Helsinki, Rotterdam (one of the highlights being the “liberation of Rotterdam”) and of course Moscow, with historical facts mutilated routinely along the way. Goebbels, always in the alert, wasn’t happy with the film: after the pause caused by the Ribbentrop pact, he obviously wanted more of the big-budget anti-communist films that the Nazi regime backed. UFA propagandists distributed G.P.U. as “a feature length documentary, strictly limited to facts”, but that didn’t work, because the film recalls too much, if on a more modest scale, mediocre Hollywood productions about gang-land Chicago. Coming back to the film’s mirror structure, it can be seen as a strange homage to the Komintern, then already at the end of its rope in real life (it became extinct in 1943) – this feeling being the only honest thing that comes through, the involuntary autobiography of a fellow architect of horror.

That said, there is much to ponder, even about the acting: Andrews Engelmann, the mysterious and cultured mastermind Boksha, had a role in one of the decisive early Nazi films, Flüchtlinge; and it is surely interesting to see Lale Andersen, the immortal interpreter of the original Lili Marlene, singing a solo.

Peter von Bagh