 Goebbels made sure that the films print was one of the first things  seized by the Germans when they occupied France. He referred to Jean  Renoir as "Cinematic Public Enemy Number 1". For many years it was  assumed that the film had been destroyed in an Allied air raid in  1942. However, a German film archivist named Frank Hansel, then a  Nazi officer in Paris, had actually smuggled it back to Berlin. Then  when the Russians entered Berlin in 1945, the film found its way to  an archive in Moscow. When Jean Renoir came to restore his film in  the 1960s, he knew nothing of Hansels acquisition and was working  from an old muddy print. Purely by coincidence at the same time, the  Russian archive swapped some material with an archive in Toulouse.  Included in that exchange was the original negative print. However,  because so many prints of the film existed at the time, it would be  another 30 years before anyone realised that the version in Toulouse  was actually the original negative.