{"id":40361,"date":"2023-07-14T20:32:11","date_gmt":"2023-07-15T00:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=40361"},"modified":"2023-07-14T20:32:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-15T00:32:11","slug":"the-bootleg-files-here-is-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/07\/14\/the-bootleg-files-here-is-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: Here is Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 836:<\/strong> \u201cHere is Germany\u201d (1945 propaganda film directed by Frank Capra). <\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> On YouTube and other online sites.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> On public domain labels.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> No copyright was ever filed on the film.<\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE:<\/strong> Nope, it is doomed to public domain hell.<\/p>\n

During World War II, the U.S. government churned out scores of nonfiction films aimed at both the enlisted military personnel and civilian audiences. Many highly regarded Hollywood filmmakers received commissions from the military and worked to create productions that would artistically drive the message about why the nation was at war and what it hoped to achieve.
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In 1942, work began on a government-produced film called \u201cKnow Your Enemy: Germany,\u201d which was designed to explain to American viewers how Germany evolved into the horrific Nazi regime. Filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch and playwright-novelist Bruno Frank worked on the project, but for unclear reasons production was halted and the film was shelved.<\/p>\n

In 1945, as Allied forces were advancing across Europe, the unfinished \u201cKnow Your Enemy: Germany\u201d was dusted off with the idea that it could be used to educate U.S. soldiers on what they could expect when they defeated and occupied Germany. Frank Capra took over the project as director and talented wordsmiths including William L. Shirer (who would later author \u201cThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich\u201d) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Anthony Veiller began working on the production. But by the time the film was ready for release, Germany had already surrendered, thus forcing the \u201cKnow Your Enemy: Germany\u201d title to be changed to \u201cHere is Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the war-weary U.S. soldiers of 1945 were not going to question the film\u2019s contents,
\n\u201cHere is Germany\u201d offers today\u2019s viewers a one-dimensional understanding of how Hitler came to power and why the German people embraced his lunacy. The film presents a significantly sketchy overview of German history with a propagandistic stereotyping of the entire German population. <\/p>\n

The film opens with scenes of what is supposedly typical life in Germany, with uncredited narrator Walter Huston detailing how the average Germans \u2013 the farmers, police officers, housewives and postal carriers \u2013 appear to be no different from their American counterparts. Germany\u2019s population is praised \u201ceducated,\u201d \u201cmusical\u201d and even \u201cclean and tidy.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then, an uncredited Anthony Veiller takes over the narration to question how such nice people could create a war machine and go out of its way to torture and kill people. The film shows graphic footage from the liberated concentration camps of the starved-to-death prisoners laying in mass graves and the artwork created by the Nazi guards on skin canvases carved from those who were tortured to death. The film shows the massacre of Italians, Belgians and U.S. prisoners of war. While the film decries the Germans for burning churches, it significantly avoids mention of the German persecution of Europe\u2019s Jewish and Romani populations.<\/p>\n

What could fuel the German fury to such horrendous extremes? The film refers to a \u201cKarl Schmidt\u201d as the average German who finds himself swept up by generations of leaders focused on using military power to crush neighboring countries. From Frederick the Great in Prussia to Clausewitz to Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II to Hitler, Germany is seen as being shaped by a succession of authority figures who saw their subjects as physically and intellectually superior to other cultures. The film also tartly observes that German history differed from American, British and French history with their respective focus on individual freedoms, and there is also a blanket blame on \u201cthe industrialists\u201d who drove the nation\u2019s economy into a military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n

The film acknowledges that over two million Germans emigrated to the U.S. to get away from that environment \u2013 clearly, the U.S. government did not want to insist all German-Americans lacked loyalty (although that respect didn\u2019t apply to Japanese-Americans during wartime). As for the ones who stayed in Germany, the film bluntly claimed that \u201cthose remaining were molded into mindless automatons.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where contemporary viewing of \u201cHere is Germany\u201d runs away from the truth. The entire German population did not embrace Hitler and many Germans were either forced to escape into exile or were imprisoned for their opposition \u2013 most notably the anti-Nazi journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a concentration camp when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for calling attention to the abuses of the Hitler regime. The level of German resistance to Nazism would not be properly documented until long after World War II ended.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere in Germany\u201d wraps with the stated hope that an Allied occupation of Germany following its unconditional surrender, complete with new state officials to run the government, could offer salvation. It also cheered the idea of new textbooks of American authorship that would steer German youth away from the policies of the past. (Never mind that the U.S. was secretly moving Wernher von Braun and roughly 1,600 German war criminal scientists across the Atlantic to work on military aerospace projects \u2013 in the Pentagon\u2019s mind, they were the good Nazis.)<\/p>\n

To create \u201cHere is Germany,\u201d Capra and his collaborators harvested U.S. newsreel footage along with slices from \u201cTriumph of the Will\u201d and generous segments from historical German epics that were seized by U.S. occupation forces \u2013 if I am not mistaken, some scenes from the color extravaganza \u201cKolberg\u201d are presented in this work in black-and-white prints. The German films were copyright protected, but the U.S. occupation force wasn\u2019t focused on maintaining intellectual property rights at that time. <\/p>\n

The 51-minute \u201cHere is Germany\u201d was released in October 1945, but it doesn\u2019t seem to have been in official circulation for very long. A similar film with a much shorter running time, the 12-minute \u201cYour Job in Germany,\u201d was also being made available to U.S. military audiences around the same time and achieved the same anvil-subtle messaging much faster.<\/p>\n

Because the films produced by the U.S. government during World War II were not registered for copyright protection, \u201cHere is Germany\u201d is a public domain work. While not as notable as other films of the genre, it has been included in wartime film anthologies on public domain labels. Perhaps the best copy of the film can be found on the National Archives YouTube page (see below). But unless you are eager to see as many World War II-era films as possible, \u201cHere is Germany\u201d should not be considered as a priority for viewing.<\/p>\n