The Nazi, the Painter, and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road

In 2005 an old canister of film was discovered in a Devon church. How it got there was a mystery and its contents were tantalizing. The grainy black and
white footage appeared to have been shot in Ukraine and Crimea in 1943, and showed the German SS and Police building a road. Aired on the BBC it caused a sensation, but there were few clues as to who the individuals in the film were or what it was they were doing. Historian G. H. Bennett spent four years piecing together the film’s story, and identifying its characters. In the process he uncovered an overlooked chapter of the Holocaust: a wartime German road-building project that exterminated Jewish and other lives while laying the infrastructure for a utopian Nazi haven in Ukraine. Bennett tells the story of the road and its builders through the experiences of Arnold Daghani, a Romanian artist who was one of the few Jewish labourers to survive.