German film producer Artur Brauner dies at age 100
July 7, 2019
Renowned film producer Artur Brauner has died at the age of 100, his family announced on Sunday. Brauner produced more than 300 films as one of the industry's most productive and successful figures of the postwar period.
His work includes Die Weisse Rose (The White Rose), the 1982 film that brought the story of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose anti-fascist resistance group to a wider audience, as well as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which won an Academy Award for best foreign film in 1972.
He also produced the award-winning The Plot to Assassinate Hitler, about the failed attempt by Claus von Stauffenberg to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Born to a Jewish family in Lodz, Poland, in 1918, Brauner was able to survive the Holocaust by fleeing to the Soviet Union with his parents and four siblings in 1939. Twelve of his relatives were killed during the massacres by German forces at Babi Yar in Ukraine, a series of killings he would eventually produce a film about in 2003.
Read more: Artur Brauner: 100 years old with 250 film productions under his belt
After the war, Brauner and his brother moved to Berlin where he made a career balancing popular films that earned him money and the critically acclaimed films he was more passionate about. It was through his support of the latter that he was able to lure iconic director Fritz Lang back to Germany from Hollywood for a revival of the film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the movie that had made Brauner fall in love with cinema as a young man.
In 2010, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel opened a media center in Brauner's name, which he called "the crowning achievement of my film career."
es/ng (dpa, AFP)
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