"Pimpernel" Smith

The summer of 1939. Horatio Smith, a professor of archaeology at Cambridge, takes his students to Germany on a dig. The Nazis allow the excavation because Smith says he is looking for evidence of the Aryan origins of German civilisation. His real purpose is another one: getting people out of the concentration camps. When the students find out what is going on they join him. Then a woman comes into the group and who is working for whom stops being clear. Leslie Howard both directed the film and played the lead; the story carries the Scarlet Pimpernel he had played in 1934 out of revolutionary France into pre-war Europe. The film was made in 1941, in the middle of the war. Raoul Wallenberg is said to have seen it at a private screening in Sweden and told his sister this was the kind of thing he would like to do; Wallenberg later saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest.