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Producer and screenwriter Jane Bess, sometimes spelled Jane Beß, was born Rosette Herta Rosenthal on November 28, 1891 in Poznan (then German Reich, now Poland). Her father was the Jewish dentist Max Rosenthal, who died young. Her mother, Luise, moved with the children to Berlin in 1902, where she worked as a stenotypist for a member of the judiciary. In 1910, Bess married Dr. Leonhard Holz, a lawyer. Two years later their daughter Ilse was born.
Jane Bess, still one of the great unknowns of Weimar cinema, began her career as the most prolific screenwriter of her time during World War I, when her husband had to go to the front. Having to take care of her daughter alone, she adopted the pseudonym Jane Bess in 1914, based on the name of her grandmother Johanna Besser, and began writing screenplays. Still in 1914, but with her marital name Hertha Holz she became a partner in Michael Wilhelm & Co. Filmvertrieb and after its dissolution in 1915 she founded the production company Tiger-Film Hertha Holz in Berlin. The authorized signatory of this company, whose founding documents showed her as the owner "Frau Hertha Holz, née Rosenthal", was Wolfgang Neff, with whom she was to make over 40 films in the following years (screenplay Bess, directed by Neff). Other directors with whom she repeatedly worked included Siegfried Dessauer and Willy Zeyn Sr.
Jane Bess also made one more appearance as an actress in 1919 under the pseudonym Hanna Holl in the movie "Die Erbschaft von New York" ("The Heiress of New York") which was written by her and directed by Wolfgang Neff.
She got divorced from Leonhard Holz in 1920 and one year later she married the film producer Alfons Fruchter (Ima-Films), from whom she got divorced again in 1925. Her first sound film scripts came in 1931 with "Der Tanzhusar", followed by "Hilfe! Überfall!". "Hasenklein kann nichts dafür" followed one year later. By her own account, Jane Bess wrote more than 120 screenplays. Her westerns, detective stories, melodramas, comedies and literary adaptations were often well received by audiences and critics alike.
The abrupt end of her career in 1932 was for a long time wrongly attributed to her lack of talent for the talkies, and after 1945 her work was at best worthy of a side note in film historiography. It was not until 2021 that it was discovered that Jane Bess, a Jew, had been forced to emigrate to the Netherlands in 1933 and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. It was also revealed that after her emigration to the Netherlands, Bess fled to Argentina, where she contracted angina pectoris, a disease that afflicted her for the rest of her life. The year 1935 marked not only the revocation of Jane Bess's German citizenship and the confiscation of her assets, but also the filming of her last script: "De kribbebijter" was made in the Netherlands, directed by Ernst Winar and Henry Kosterlitz. A year later, in 1936, Bess returned to Europe, where her daughter contacted Leonhard Holz, who took care of the bedridden Bess for a year. The two remarried in 1937.
Starting in 1940, Jane Bess was interned as a Jew for forced labor in various camps, including Camp de Gurs and Drancy. On March 27, 1944, she was deported on Transport No. 70 from the Drancy labor camp to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where she was murdered. Leonhard Holz died in Flossenbürg concentration camp.