Directed by: Karl Ritter
Written by: Andrews Engelmann, Felix Lützkendorf and Karl Ritter
Produced by: Karl Ritter
Cinematography: Igor Oberberg
Edited by: Conrad von Molo
Music by: Norbert Schultze and Herbert Windt
Production company: UFA
Distributed by: Deutsche Filmvertriebs
Release date: 14 August 1942
Running time: 99 minutes
Country: Germany
Language: German
Cast:
Laura Solari: Olga Feodorowna
Will Quadflieg: Peter Aßmuss
Marina von Ditmar: Irina
Andrews Engelmann: Nikolai Bokscha
Karl Haubenreißer: Jakob Frunse
Hans Stiebner: inquiry judge
Maria Bard: head of women’s league
Helene von Schmithberg: Tante (Aunt) Ljuba
Albert Lippert: hotel director in Kovno (Kaunas)
Lale Andersen: singer in bar in Gothenburg
Wladimir Majer: GPU chief
Nico Turoff: Frunse‘s assistant
Theo Shall: saboteur with Bokscha
Horst Winter: singer: 1st variation on “Limehouse Blues”
Ivo Veit: Soviet diplomat in Helsinki
Freddie Brocksieper with his jazz combo
Gösta Richter
Plot
Produced shortly after war broke out with the Soviet Union, the melodrama GPU draws its title from the initials for “Government Political Administration,” the Soviet state police. This dreaded organization enforced repressive laws, crushed dissent and combated the influence abroad of anti-Communist Russian émigrés. Invading the USSR in 1941, German leaders anticipated the GPU would mobilize Marxists in German-occupied Europe to sabotage the war effort. This film exposes GPU methods as criminal and subversive, of service purely to the Kremlin and detrimental to other lands. Wartime Germany’s only directly anti-Soviet feature film, GPU dramatizes the ordeal of a Baltic couple coerced into spying for Russia. The lovers find unexpected help from a female Soviet agent secretly working to avenge her family’s murder by the GPU years before. Action, suspense and romance combine to make GPU among the Third Reich’s most acclaimed motion pictures, with elements later incorporated into post-war Hollywood spy thrillers.
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