Doing a little research on horror films from the Third Reich, it appears that only a handful of titles originated from it: Der Dämon des Himalaya, Der Student von Prag, Fährmann Maria, Der Hund von Baskerville, and (technically) Spuk im Schloß. (A few sources call Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse and Der Schimmelreiter horrors, but that is quite arguable, and Fascist Italy’s horror films were even fewer: Maciste all’inferno and possibly the lost film Il caso Haller.) From what I can tell, this very particular subject has attracted little more than a passing interest from Anglophone academics, and going by first impressions, none of those films looks especially political either.

Nevertheless, I know how to improvise, so I am inviting you to read about a film that is instead somewhere in the same neighbourhood as horror: propaganda that demonises us. It lacks the supernatural elements of an ordinary horror film, so you may be disappointed that it does not depict us as unfigurative monsters. That said, it does feature an early example of what I like to call “anticommunists’ ignorant view of how communists talk”, so let us not look this gift horse in the mouth, shall we?

Quoting David Welch’s Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945, pages 214–217:

Goebbels was returning to his original mission of safeguarding Europe from the ‘Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy’. Reflecting this shift was Karl Ritter’s virulently anti‐Bolshevik film G.P.U. (1942). Interviewed by Filmwelt while making the film, Ritter outlined the basic propaganda message that was to be disseminated: ‘That the German Armed Forces had destroyed the terror organization of the G.P.U. which had been established by Jewish‐Bolshevik “criminals” intent on planting the vile seeds of Bolshevik revolution throughout the world.’³¹

G.P.U. came from an original idea by the actor Andrews Engelmann, who starred in the film and wrote the script together with Ritter and Felix Lutzkendorf. Production was started in December 1941, and it had its première in Berlin on 14 August 1942. The following synopsis is taken from the Allied Commission’s Catalogue of Forbidden German Feature Films:

Olga, a White Russian refugee from Bolshevik terror, has joined the Bolshevik G.P.U. Secret Police in order to find the man who killed her parents. After many years she at last meets him in Riga and then in Kowno in the summer of 1939. He is Bokscha, one of the chief agents of the G.P.U. in Europe, instigator of numerous assassinations, uprisings, acts of sabotage, etc. Bokscha falls in love with her, she goes with him to many countries. At last in France she feels the time is ripe, denounces him to Moscow as a traitor and he is liquidated.

She goes to Moscow, refuses the decoration offered to her, discloses her real reasons for joining the G.P.U., and she too is liquidated. Interwoven is the story of a young Baltic couple whom Olga befriends; in Rotterdam they are arrested by the G.P.U. and imprisoned in the cellar of the Commercial Attaché of the UDSSR, and the film ends with the victorious advance of the German Army into Holland in May 1940 when the two young people are at last released.³²

The film is intended to reveal the Jewish influence behind Bolshevism and the brutality of the G.P.U. In the prologue to the film, G.P.U. is translated as: Grauen (horror), Panik (panic), Untergang (destruction). So as not to leave the audience in any doubt, the Programm von Heute, which accompanied the film, stressed the insidious nature of the G.P.U. in a language reminiscent of that used to describe Jews: ‘It is mid‐1939. Like the threads of a spider’s web the G.P.U. spreads out beyond the Soviet “paradise” to engulf many unsuspecting lands.’³³

In fact the term ‘G.P.U.’ was no longer employed in the USSR; it had been replaced in 1934 by NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Domestic Affairs). But of course this did not affect Goebbels’s anti‐Bolshevik propaganda. The G.P.U. was so firmly embedded in the minds of [anticommunist] Germans as the symbol of Russian barbarism that it had to be perpetuated regardless of whether it existed or not.

Moreover, the Russian Secret Police are presented as a Jewish‐directed Communist organization. This is established in the first scene where Olga Feodorovna is giving a violin recital for the International Women’s League in Riga. Introducing Olga, the Chairwoman maintains that the organization was established to further international cooperation and is ‘totally unpolitical’.

But an old man interrupts and claims that they are in fact organized and financed by Jewish interests in Moscow. He maintains that he has proof that they had sent greetings telegrams to the Jewish politician Litvinov‐Finkelstein.³⁴

The Chairwoman repeats that the organization is concerned only with promoting peace and freedom for all people. But the old man will not be interrupted:

OLD MAN. Don’t interrupt! I said, financed by Moscow! The conclusive evidence is the presence of this gentleman, who calls himself a Soviet diplomat. Do you know who this Consular Attaché Smirnov is? He is the murderer Bokscha, G.P.U. agent … yes, G.P.U. agent! The blood of hundreds of thousands of poor people clings to his hands. Yes, I have evidence. I also have evidence that he murdered my son … [struggle] … You will not keep me quiet! Not you! Look at him, this representative of peace and freedom! He should be caught…

The fact that the old man was seen to be violently removed from the hall by G.P.U. agents and subsequently murdered tended to substantiate his allegations. Other scenes served to highlight Jewish participation in the G.P.U. and the manner in which the Russian Secret Police carried out their subversive activities in other countries. Invariably, Bolshevik meetings would take place deep underground, where they would dispassionately plot sabotage and murder beneath portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

In Moscow, Bokscha is shown plotting the downfall of foreign politicians and the sabotage of allied shipments from Sweden. Action is needed in Finland; we are told that Molatov is waiting for a chance to give an ultimatum and then invade the country. Bokscha is sent to Helsinki, where G.P.U. agents are conspiring with Jews to find an appropriate excuse for a Russian invasion. Once again, the meetings take place in cellars where the Bolsheviks can seek refuge in the shadows:

BOKSCHA. I have a very amusing plan; an assassination attempt on Soviet employers and Soviet citizens in Helsinki. This would precipitate an ultimatum and then an invasion.
JEW. And who will carry out these assassinations?
BOKSCHA. Funny question! We will, of course, our people.
ANOTHER MAN. So you mean we should kill our comrades?
BOKSCHA. Yes!
JEW. Do they know about it up there?
BOKSCHA. Of course not, they would report to Moscow in noble indignation.
JEW. [laughing] Yes, that’s certainly very funny.
[They all start laughing and Bokscha closes the meeting. As they leave, one turns to the Jew…]
ANOTHER MAN. That’s a wonderful plan!
JEW. [throws his hands in the air] Oh, wonderful, wonderful!

The Jewish‐Bolshevik conspiracy is invoked by the fact that Bokscha is prepared to engage Jewish agents in his subversive activities. Such scenes are intended to reveal the alien beliefs and behaviour of the G.P.U., who are prepared even to murder their own comrades. The moral appears to be that the ends justify the means — a philosophy that could be equally applied to [anticommunism].

It is interesting to note in comparing these two different political systems that at no time in [the Third Reich’s] film propaganda is Bolshevism discussed in terms of Marxist‐Leninism, although ideological comparisons are implicit throughout. Rather, Bolshevism is equated with certain brutal types that recur in [anticommunist] cinema under different guises, ranging from the barbaric Chernov in Friesennot to the cynical murderer Bokscha in G.P.U.

If the [Fascists] were not prepared to enter into an ideological debate then they had to specify a target for hatred. The stereotype employed in G.P.U. is, of course, Nikolai Bokscha. Yet he is not an amalgam of either the Untermensch line or the deeply committed Communist; he is neither a racially inferior Slav nor a misguided Party member.

Instead, he symbolizes the opportunism of Bolshevism and its alienation from Western civilization. He is referred to in the film as ‘one who has made a career for himself without being either a Jew or a proletarian’. Olga summed up his value to Moscow as a ‘good executioner who is worth a great deal to the Central Bureau’. In another scene with Olga in the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki a portrait of Lenin is drawn to his attention, and he replies: ‘Oh yes! It was the era of proletarian revolution. A dark age! Fortunately one forgets!’

In G.P.U., Asiatic features have largely disappeared from the stereotype image of the Bolshevik enemy. He is now portrayed in collusion with conspiratorial Jews. In fact, in Nikolai Bokscha we have the archetypal bourgeois, albeit a brutal and cynical one. Filmwoche referred to him as ‘the bourgeois after his acre of land, and a manipulator of chaos for his own enrichment’.³⁵

(Emphasis added.)

Aside from maybe the antisemitism being too obvious, it does not sound like there is much in this film that a committed antisocialist would find objectionable: the antiutopian pretensions, a hypocritical upper‐class communist, assertions that we murder hundreds of thousands of innocents (just ’cause), assertions that we’re cannibal‐like savages who enjoy killing each other, and of course, blatant anachronisms (antisocialists are nothing if not inept at managing time). All of these are well trod tropes for those of us who made the mistake of either trying to reason with antisocialists or subjecting ourselves to their mindnumbingly brainless content.