Kolberg (film)

External images

Screenshot of a scene showing general Gneisenau (Horst Caspar) making a speech on the market square in Kolberg[1]

Official film poster (1945)[2]

Screenshot of an army scene(the statists for these scenes came directly from the battlefields of the ongoing Second World War)[3]

Kolberg is a 1945 German historical film directed by Veit Harlan. One of the last films of the Third Reich, it was intended as a Nazi propaganda piece to buoy the will of the German population to resist the Allies.

The film is based on the autobiography of Joachim Nettelbeck, mayor of Kolberg in western Pomerania, and on a play drawn from the book by Paul Heyse. It tells the story of the defence of the besieged fortress town of Kolberg against French troops between April and July 1807, during the Napoleonic Wars. In reality, the city's defense, led by then-Lieutenant Colonel August von Gneisenau, held out until the war was ended by the Treaty of Tilsit. In the film, the French abandon the siege.

The film begins in 1813 after the phase of the Napoleonic Wars known in German as the Befreiungskriege (War of Liberation). The opening scenes show Prussian Landwehr and volunteers marching down the streets of Breslau through enthusiastic crowds. This is followed by a dialogue between King Frederick William III of Prussia and Count August von Gneisenau, in which Gneisenau explains that the siege of Kolberg taught the importance of citizen armies. Ending with the admonition that kings who cannot lead must abdicate, the scene switches to Vienna in 1806 to show the abdication of the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II of Austria, whom the script has Gneisenau call "an Emperor who abandoned the German people in their hour of need".