October 16
5:30 PM
Thursday, October 16 Join us for this rare screening of this documentary produced in 1934 by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. who visited the Peoria Womens Club in 1939. The screening is followed by a discussion with Dr. John Williams, Professor of History at Bradley University, and includes fall-inspired dishes and a cash bar.
The Peoria Women’s Club (PWC) and the Peoria Area World Affairs Council (PAWAC) will co-host a rare public screening of Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), the first anti-Nazi documentary produced in the United States, on October 16, 2025 at the PWC Clubhouse, 301 NE Madison Avenue in downtown Peoria. Produced by journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, the film was rediscovered in 2013 in the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (CINEMATEK) after being thought lost for nearly 80 years. Since its 1934 debut, it has been publicly shown in the United States only once—at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 2014, making this Peoria program just its second U.S. public screening in more than eight decades.
The screening will be held on the newly restored first floor of PWC’s historic 1893 clubhouse. Cornelius Vanderbilt IV spoke on the theater’s stage on October 9, 1939—just one month after Hitler invaded Poland and World War II began, but Peoria’s oldest theater has been closed to the public for 54 years. Restoration efforts are now underway, and attendees will have the rare opportunity to step inside this space and take a guided tour. The program will also feature a civic dialogue led by Dr. John Williams, Professor of History at Bradley University, linking the film’s historical context to current global issues.
Cornelius Vanderbilt IV was a journalist and heir to one of America’s most prominent families, who rejected high society to pursue independent reporting. In Hitler’s Reign of Terror, he combined documentary footage, dramatization, and first-hand accounts, including a brief but chilling encounter with Hitler, to warn of Nazi brutality at a time when many Americans remained isolationist or sympathetic to Germany. The Nazi regime denounced Vanderbilt for the film, which faced censorship and bans in several U.S. cities. Preserved and restored by CINEMATEK, the surviving print offers modern audiences an unflinching view of history and a powerful reminder of the role of the press in confronting authoritarianism.
