Iranian documentary reviews Hitler’s murder plot in Tehran

Iranian documentary titled ‘Long Jump’ has reviewed Adolf Hitler’s assassination plot during a conference in Tehran.

Iranian filmmaker Ata Panahi has made a documentary on a plot by the leader of the Nazi Party to assassinate the Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference.

The idea of making the documentary came to Panahi’s mind when he was working on his debut feature documentary ‘Carsten’s Letters’ in 2018.

Panahi said “In my research for the film, I stumbled upon a subject that I had never seen in any book and I had never read anything about it before.”

“I first thought that I was faced with an invented subject rather than a real documented event, but after some research I realized that when the Allied summit was scheduled to be organized in Tehran, Hitler was informed of the meeting and plotted to assassinate the Allied leaders in Tehran,” the documentarian added.

“I gained access to archives that few people have access to along with the film editor Pedram Bahrami; for example, we found a high-quality color film of the Allied summit,” Panahi also noted.

He has remade some scenes of the event to attract more attention to his film.

There are different stories about Hitler’s plot to assassinate the Allied leaders during the Tehran Conference; so Panahi spent a long time studying to uncover the most reliable one.

The Tehran Conference was a meeting between the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in Tehran on November 28-December 1, 1943.

During the conference, the leaders coordinated their military strategy against Germany and Japan and made a number of important decisions concerning the post-WWII era.

The film’s title refers to Operation Rösselsprung (Long Jump) that Germany designed to kill or kidnap Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the conference.

The plot was foiled by clever intelligence work, a drunken disclosure and a bit of good luck.

Panahi’s ‘Carsten’s Letters’ is about a German aviator and spy on a mission in Iran during WWII and his letters to his wife Liana in Germany.

MG/MG