Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet ("Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area"), unofficially Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt ("The Führer Gives a City to the Jews"), is a black-and-white projected Nazi propaganda film.

Theresienstadt was a Nazi ghetto in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the German-occupied Czech lands—built inside a repurposed fortified town, Terezín.

[3][6] In an attempt to preserve its credibility and preeminence as a humanitarian organization while reports on the mass extermination of Jews continued to reach the Western Allies, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) requested to visit Theresienstadt in November 1943.

In preparation for the visit, the Germans "beautified" and cleaned the camp prior to arrival and arranged cultural activities to give the appearance of a happy, industrious community.

To cover up the endemic overpopulation of the camp, thousands of people were deported to Auschwitz before the arrival of the Red Cross delegation.

[8][a] Rossel gave copies of photographs he took during the visit to the German Foreign Ministry, which used them to claim that Jews were treated well under Nazi rule.

[10] Preparations for a second Theresienstadt film, again sponsored by Günther rather than Goebbels, began concurrently with the "beautification" of the ghetto prior to the Red Cross visit.

[14] Kurt Gerron, a leading German Jewish actor and director, had fled to the Netherlands and was deported from Westerbork to Theresienstadt in February 1944.

While the script has traditionally been credited to Gerron, it closely adhered to Weil's draft and the dictates of the SS; his creative role was minimal.

Eyewitnesses report that Gerron was constantly urging Jews to behave as mirthfully as the Germans wished and organizing mass scenes.

The final cut bore little resemblance to Gerron's July script, his later editing proposal, or his creative vision for the film.

In March, Aktualita sent a crew to the camp in order to collect some samples of "Jewish music", including snippets of the work of Felix Mendelssohn, Jacques Offenbach, and the children's opera Brundibár by Theresienstadt prisoner Hans Krása.

The music was performed under the direction of Danish Jewish composer Peter Deutsch, who had experience with film soundtracks before the war.

The Ghetto Swingers, a jazz band, plays outside, and "prominent" prisoners enjoy food and beverages on a terrace and in a sham coffee house.

[23] Margry argues that "the film's blatant dishonesty turns on what it did not show: the hunger, the misery, the overcrowding, the slave work for the German war economy, the high death rate, and, most of all, the transports leaving for the East".

[23] The film was not intended to be shown in Germany; the Nazi propagandists hoped to distribute it in neutral countries to counter Allied news reports about the persecution of Jews.

[32] An alternative interpretation was that by the time it was completed, the film was intended for a much more select audience and narrowly focused on the cinematic portrayal of "prominent" prisoners who had in fact been murdered at Auschwitz in order to persuade the ICRC that they were still alive.

It was shown at Theresienstadt on 6 April to a Red Cross delegation including Otto Lehner and Paul Dunant, accompanied by Swiss diplomat Buchmüller; Frank's subordinate Erwin Weinmann was also present.

[33] At Pečený's recommendation, the SS deposited 25 crates of film footage in Favoritfilm's warehouse in Holešovice shortly before the Prague uprising broke out.

Also in 1964, Schönbach provided a copy to Michael Bornkamp, a West German journalist, who subsequently used the footage in a documentary So schön war es in Terezin (It was so nice in Terezín), which was screened at the 1965 Oberhausen Film Festival.

[36] In 1965, the Czechoslovak authorities made their own documentary based on the footage, Město darované (The Given Town), which is still used by the Terezín Ghetto Museum today.

Fragments of the footage including the title sequence were discovered in a former Gestapo building in Prague by former prisoner Jiří Lauscher at an unknown date and transferred to an Israeli archive, where they were rediscovered in 1987.

[41][f] It has also been claimed that Heinrich Himmler was closely involved in the production of the film and showed it to the Western Allied agents with whom he was conducting secret negotiations in late 1944.

However, the only evidence suggesting that he knew of the film's existence is a letter between his secretary, Rudolf Brandt, and personal masseur, Felix Kersten, in March or April 1945.