Homecoming/Heimkehr 1941-2015

Last weekend, on the first anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Russian TV aired a propaganda “documentary” called Krym: vozvraschenie na rodinu, which can be translated as Crimea: Homecoming or literally Crimea: The Return to Motherland.

Let’s do a simple trick: use bab.la to translate Vozvraschenie na rodinu into German. Here’s the output: Heimkehr.

Yuri Bogomolov, the Russian film critic and the father of theater director Konstantin Bogomolov, noted on Facebook* that Gustav Ucicky produced a Nazi propaganda movie entitled Heimkehr in 1941. Bogomolov credits film historian Mark Kushnirov with pointing out this fact to him.

It was a feature film, not a documentary, so it took more time to make and was released two years after the German attack on Poland. Wiki tells us Ucicky’s movie justified “extermination of Poles with a depiction of relentless persecution of ethnic Germans, who escape death only because of the German invasion.”

Sure, and the evil US-backed Banderites set out to relentlessly persecute Russophone Crimeans, who escaped torture and humiliation only because of the Russian invasion.

Bogomolov also mentioned the anti-Serb Nazi movie Menschen im Sturm featuring Olga Chekhova (who played a Volksdeutsche lady, oh the irony) but I guess we’ll have to wait for a Russian cinematic take on Donbass to draw more parallels.


*UApress.info provides a snapshot of Bogomolov’s post, useful for those without access to Facebook. However it incorrectly claims that the documentary is an “exact copy” of the German film. Of course it is not. We’re not talking conscious plagiarism here but an unintended similarity of sentiment and message.

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