Kluttig is keen on massacring the camp's surviving prisoners, but commandant Schwahl forbids it, fearing American retribution - although he knows of the secret resistance.

Rodenberg rejected the proposal; officially, it was due to the emphasis laid by the East German cultural establishment on depicting active resistance to Fascism rather than passive suffering.

[10] Already in April 1959, DEFA chief dramatist Klaus Wischnewski contacted Apitz with a proposition to adapt his novel for the screen, but the author was unwilling and made demands which the studio was unable to accept.

[13] Beyer originally intended to have Ernst Busch play the role of Krämer, but the singer declined because his face was half-paralyzed from injuries during a bombing raid in World War II.

[17] Beyer also retained several of the actors who performed in the television adaptation, like Wolfram Handel, Fred Delmare and Peter Sturm, who was called to depict August Rose for the second time.

The actor was very reluctant to take the role and had to be pressured by Apitz and the director,[18] Sturm, who had been twice incarcerated in Buchenwald, was badly depressed by the work on the film, falling ill after it ended.

[21] Beyer told historian Bill Niven that the ending scene's score - which was not triumphant, but rather menacing - was the only manner in which he could hint to the existence of the postwar Soviet Special Camp no.

[1] Private screenings were held in West Germany in April 1964 - for example, by the East-German-funded Uni-Doc-Verleih in Munich[25] - but although the government never banned it, a local distributor, Pegasus Film, did not purchase the rights to it until 1967.

[26] By that time, the film had already been exported to all the European countries, as well as to Canada, the United States, India, Japan, China, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Guinea.

[28] Although the Communist Party of the USSR instructed the Soviet members of the jury to award the Grand Prix to the East German entry, Naked Among Wolves narrowly lost it to Federico Fellini's 8½; allegedly, during the thirty-six-hour debate of the jury before the choosing of the winner, members Stanley Kramer, Jean Marais and Sergio Amidei threatened to leave if Beyer received the prize rather than Fellini.

"[29] On 6 October 1963, Apitz, Beyer, cinematographer Günter Marczinkowsky and art director Alfred Hirschmeier received the National Prize of East Germany, 1st degree, for their work.

[30] On 14 March 1964, actors Erik S. Klein, Herbert Köfer, Wolfram Handel and Gerry Wolf were all awarded the Heinrich Greif Prize, 1st class, in recognition of their appearance in Naked Among Wolves.

[32] A day after the premiere, Horst Knietzsch wrote in the Socialist Unity Party's newspaper Neues Deutschland that "with Naked Among Wolves, the filmmakers of our country have fulfilled a national duty.

For the first time in German cinema, the human greatness, the courage, the revolutionary fervor and the international solidarity of the political prisoners in the Fascist concentration camps are displayed and set as the main theme of a motion picture...

"[33] In a column published in East Berlin's Die Weltbühne magazine, Peter Edel noted that while it continued the tradition of DEFA anti-Fascist films like Marriage in the Shadows and Five Cartridges, Naked Among Wolves was the first such to be set in a concentration camp.

"[35] Former Buchenwald inmate and Commandant of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment, Major General Heinz Gronau, who viewed the film in a special screening for survivors before the premiere, told Neues Deutschland that he approved of the manner in which "the proletarian internationalism was emphasized.

"[36] The critic of the West German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who watched the picture in a closed screening held during the 13th Berlin International Film Festival, wrote that "it has a wide scope, and fails to cover it all...

"[37] Karl Feuerer from the Hamburg-based Die andere Zeitung wrote in 1964: "As long as the Brown past is not overcome... And people such as Globke and Bütefisch cling to their positions of power...

"[41] The reviewer of Ta Nea commented: "All the 'terrible things' we see in the studio version are not even a pale imitation of Buchenwald's reality... Of course the film was made by Germans, but does it give them the right to talk about the noose without mentioning the victims?

"[43] Philip Oakes of The Sunday Telegraph opined that Naked Among Wolves was "rough, gory and realistic, but above all meant to serve as entertainment", that it contained "propaganda" and was "a violent variation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

[46] Daniela Berghahn wrote that, as official East German discourse about the wartime persecution of Jews was subject to a Marxist interpretation of history, the topic was marginalized; in addition, the politics of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli Conflict made the theme highly sensitive.

Berghahn commented that the child was not in the center of the plot, but served as an "infantile victim" who had to be protected by the "communist heroes... Beyer's film reaffirms the official GDR conception of the Holocaust.

"[50] Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman wrote that Naked Among Wolves, like all DEFA's works, "was closely aligned to the state's official historiography and reflected changes in the Party's agenda... A canonical text.

"[53] However, the picture still conveyed conservative messages: the film's hero, Krämer, leader of the communists in Buchenwald, is contrasted with the character of August Rose, who betrays his friends.

"[56] Thomas Heimann remarked that Bogorski, who acts as the plot's deus ex machina, represents the "higher authority and wisdom of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

[58] Bill Niven wrote that the suggestion that the SS fled to West Germany was accentuated in the film more than in the novel, although Beyer was careful not to make explicit parallels between the camp and the FRG.

[59] Daniela Berghahn remarked that "the film's production history illustrates how the 'Jewish question' was utilized for political ends": in the early 1960s, during and after the Eichmann Trial, the SED sought to "maximize the propaganda value in a campaign to remind the world that many former Nazis were living in West Germany.

"[60] In 1964, the East Berlin-based Berliner Zeitung am Abend located the child upon whose story the novel was based: Stefan Jerzy Zweig, who survived Buchenwald at the age of four with his father Zacharias, with the help of two prisoner functionaries: Robert Siewert and Willi Bleicher.

When Zweig was to be sent to Auschwitz, prisoners who were tasked with compiling the deportees' list erased his name and replaced him with Willy Blum, a sixteen-year-old Sinto boy.