CCC Films

CCC Film (German: Central Cinema Compagnie-Film GmbH) is a German film production company founded in 1946 by Artur Brauner. A Polish Jew who survived the Nazi era by fleeing to the Soviet Union, he lost dozens of relatives to the Nazis. His primary interest was making films about the Nazi era, but after his first such film failed at the box office, throwing him into debt, he began producing entertainment films, the commercial success of which then financed his Holocaust-related films, some of which also became successful. In 2009, Brauner donated 21 Holocaust-related films to Yad Vashem.

On September 16, 1946, Brauner founded CCC Film with Joseph Einstein, his brother-in-law, a black marketeer in Berlin, with a capital investment of 21,000 Reichsmarks in the American sector of postwar Germany. They had money, but no license from the American authorities, without which, it was impossible to produce anything. Two months later, Einstein quit the enterprise, leaving Brauner as sole owner.

The first CCC-produced film was the 1947 Herzkönig, followed in 1948 by partially self-autobiographicalMorituri, directed by Eugen York. Morituri tells the story of a Polish refugee from a Nazi concentration camp. After a few theaters were damaged, the film was boycotted by other theaters and became a box office disaster, nearly ruining CCC Film and Brauner, and causing him to begin producing "normal films" in order to pay off his debt, as he told Time magazine in 2003. Postwar German audiences, struggling with devastated cities, homelessness and hunger, wanted escapist movies in the aftermath of World War II and Brauner filled that desire with a mixture of comedies, westerns, crime stories and the occasional drama. In 1949, Brauner finally received his license from the American authorities and CCC Film produced three successful films and moved to a former Nazi munitions and poison gas factory in Haselhorst, a locality in the Spandau district of Berlin. Brauner later said, "Out of the poison-gas factory I wanted to make a dream factory."

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