Kurt Gerron

Actor · Director · Writer

Berlin, Germany

May 11, 1897

Biography

Kurt Gerron (born Kurt Gerson; 11 May 1897 – 30 October 1944) was a German Jewish actor and film director. He had a very successful career in cabaret and film before World War II, but was then forbidden to work and was sent to Theresienstadt Ghetto after the Nazis had occupied the Netherlands, where he and his family had fled to. In 1944 he was forced by the Nazis to make the propaganda film Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area, before he and his wife, Olga Gerson-Meyer, were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp and murdered. The film was completed not long before the end of the war, but was never shown to the public, and only fragments remain.