Kommando 1944 draws on research conducted across multiple sites of historical memory — labour camps, transit points, and the communities that lived in their shadow. Manzanar is one of the key reference locations featured in the film's comparative historical analysis.
Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, located in California's Owens Valley. At its peak it held over 10,000 people.
The film uses Manzanar as a comparative lens — examining how different nations handled the forced displacement of civilian populations, and what forms of institutional memory (and silence) followed.
Today, Manzanar is a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service. The film crew spent three weeks documenting the site.
| Primary | Manzanar, California, USA |
| Poland | Majdanek, Kraśnik, Warsaw |
| Germany | Berlin Federal Archives |
| Israel | Yad Vashem, Jerusalem |
| France | Paris CDJC Archive |
| UK | Imperial War Museum, London |
Field research spanned 2015–2017 across five countries, with archival research beginning in 2013.
"When I stood inside the reconstructed barrack at Manzanar, I thought of the testimonies I had recorded in Kraśnik the year before. The architecture of confinement is remarkably similar across continents and regimes. That similarity is not a coincidence — it is the grammar of a system."
— Jonathan A. Fischer, Director