This 1930 documentary film, Deutsche Ostsiedlung [German Settlement in the East], promoted the bounty, industriousness, and essential Germanness of the regions of Silesia and East Prussia, which marked the eastern edge of the post-1918 German state, but which held deep historical significance for the German nation. It aimed to entice Germans to settle in these sparsely populated areas, an effort referred to as “internal colonization” that earlier German states had pursued as well. As that term suggests, advocates hoped that these settlers would both contribute to the economic development of the region and further solidify German claims to territory in an increasingly contested part of eastern Europe. The film’s script came directly from the Gesellschaft für innere Kolonisation [GFK, Society for Internal Colonization], an organization founded in 1912 to promote rural settlements and expand agricultural production, and it included footage from earlier documentaries by the prolific filmmaker Erich Puchstein, who produced over three dozen films during the last half of the Weimar Republic that conveyed various aspects of the life and landscape of East Prussia in reverential terms. The film’s intertitles provided an explicitly nationalistic framing of those bucolic images by underscoring the fact that Germans had lived in this area since the Middle Ages and by making explicit reference to the Teutonic Order, a medieval fraternity of German knights that controlled eastern outposts of the Hanseatic League. That deep German heritage notwithstanding, much of East Prussia suffered from depopulation, as people left its isolated stretches in search of better prospects to the west. This film sought to counteract that rural exodus [often referred to as Ostflucht (flight from the east) or Landflucht (flight from the land)] that had reduced the German population and prompted shrill warnings of a subterranean Polish cultural takeover. Efforts in the Weimar Republic to encourage German settlement of the eastern provinces thereby blended economic interest with both nationalism and anti-Slavic prejudice, seeing potential migrants into the area as bulwarks against the newly founded states of Poland and Czechoslovakia.