Artur Brauner, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who became one of post-World War II Germany's most prominent film producers, died Sunday at age 100.
Brauner's family said he died in Berlin, the German news agency DPA reported.
Culture Minister Monika Grütters said Germany had lost one of the most important film producers of the post-war years.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
It was "a great gift for our country" that Brauner chose to make movies in Germany and support its democratic rebuilding, Grütters said. She also paid tribute to his efforts over the decades to ensure the victims of the Holocaust were not forgotten.
Brauner produced hundreds of films, including remakes of the "Dr. Mabuse" crime movies and other hits such as "Girls in Uniform," starring Romy Schneider.
Several of the films he produced had Holocaust themes, including Agnieszka Holland's Golden Globe-winning "Europa Europa" about a boy in Nazi Germany who joins the Hitler Youth in an attempt to conceal his Jewish identity.
His 2003 film "Babi Yar" centered on the 1941 Nazi massacre of Jews in Ukraine, in which several of Brauner's relatives were killed. Brauner was disappointed the film was not a box-office success in Germany.
The test of "whether the German cinema public has become politically more mature" had "clearly negative" results, he said.
Brauner also helped produce "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," set in Benito Mussolini's Italy, which won the Oscar for best foreign-language movie in 1972.
Brauner called "Morituri," a 1948 movie about a group of concentration camp inmates aided in their escape by a Polish doctor near the end of the war, his most important film. While it was not warmly received at the time, Brauner called it "practically the first film that dealt with the issue of Nazi victims."
Brauner believed his lighter post-war films were more suited to the public's taste.
"People wanted to be entertained after the terrible war, and I had a feeling for the needs of the audience," he told the Funke newspaper group in 2018.
His persistence helped. He recalled driving 36 times through communist East Germany from Berlin to Munich in his rickety Volkswagen to persuade actress Maria Schell to play the part of a penniless pregnant woman in one of his favorite films, the 1955 drama "The Rats."
Brauner said there was no one in the movie business he would never work with again, though there were plenty he would like another chance to work with, among them late director Fritz Lang, "if he would keep to my budget targets."
In recent years, Brauner was worried by the rise of right-wing populism in Europe.
"I can only recommend to young people that they don't fall into the clutches of populists around the world and stand up with all their might to nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia – now and not when it is already too late," he told DPA in 2018.
The son of a Jewish timber merchant, he was born Abraham Brauner on Aug. 1, 1918, in the Polish city of Lodz. Brauner discovered his love for the cinema at an early age and often went straight from school to a screening. After finishing school in 1936, he joined an expedition of young documentary filmmakers to the Middle East, then studied in Lodz until Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
Brauner, his parents and four siblings fled east and survived the war.
His parents later made aliyah to Israel. Brauner considered emigrating to the United States but briefly returned to Lodz before moving to Berlin with his brother, Wolf.
In West Berlin, Brauner co-founded the Central Cinema Co., which went on to become one of Europe's most important production firms, increasingly expanding into television in the 1960s.
Even as he turned 100, he continued to discuss scripts almost daily with his daughter, Alice.
"As soon as I am no longer around, I can give up working," he said.
Brauner's wife, Maria, who he married in 1947, died in 2017. He is survived by their four children, Fela, Alice, Sammy and Henry.
