Apparently intended as an instructional film for American forces of occupation, this film was never in fact used as such. It starts with a view of a peaceful, cultured, civilised and industrious society, but then rapidly switches to the atrocities committed by Germany during the Nazi period, using some of the most graphic images I've seen. In particular, several atrocities committed in Italy, France and Belgium are identified, and there is footage from the concentration camps which are mentioned but not dwelt upon: given the footage shown, there was no need for the commentary to say more. As an explanation of how Germany came to this, the film looks back over several hundred years of German history, accentuating its expansionist and aggressive tendencies. There is also comparison with the democracies of America, Britain and France to show how great powers could be civilised. To illustrate its thesis, it uses footage from films about Frederick the Great, Bismarck, the Kaiser and others: much of this was of a high quality, though sadly none of it is identified. Having set its stall, so to speak, the film analyses the period from the end of the Great War to the Rise of Nazi-ism. It points out the canard that Germans felt their army was not beaten in 1918, but stabbed in the back by democrats who then signed the oppressive Treaty of Versailles. The reaction to the Treaty then allowed the industrialists, militarists, landowners and bureaucrats to return to power, using the demagogic power of the uneducated Hitler. At this point the logic wavers somewhat, since Hitler had had a plan of his own since the early twenties. Having shown how Hitler wielded power (in the suppression of democratic institutions - and with a gruesome clip of a fallbein), re-armed and then lost the war, the film end with a peroration about not letting this happen again, and how Germans must be reformed before being let back into the comity of nations. Being 1945 when we were still just about friends with the Soviet Union, there is little mention of the known atrocities being committed by Stalin, or his equally repugnant and repressive techniques against any opposition or call for democracy. The film's analysis is open to criticism, but its general tone matches that of A J P Taylor in his Course of German History written in 1944: ie modern Germany was the result of 1,000 years of barbarism. Interestingly, much of the music played is by Mendelssohn, who being Jewish, was not actually played in Nazi Germany.
Review of Here Is Germany
