Prisoner of Paradise

The documentary is a chronicle of the life and career of Kurt Gerron. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Gerron was a well-known cabaret and film actor in Berlin. He sang the song Mack the Knife in the initial production of The Threepenny Opera and appeared in a supporting role in Josef von Sternberg’s classic German sound film The Blue Angel, co-starring Marlene Dietrich. When the Nazis were in power, Gerron remained in Germany, in spite of serious requests from Josef von Sternberg and Peter Lorre that he should leave the country. Later, Gerron moved to Paris and Amsterdam in order to continue his entertainment career, and was in the end captured by the Germans in 1943 and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp located near Prague. At the time, this camp was being used by the Nazis with the purpose of propagating and fabricating a situation that the Jews were not being ill-treated . Gerron was recruited there to write and direct a 23-minute The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, which is a sanitized propaganda film depicting the concentration camp as a “wonderful” place. Despite his cooperation, Gerron was subsequently sent to Auschwitz concentration camp where he and his wife were eventually murdered. —wikipedia