Description
The Third Reich in Color
This remarkable trove of color footage, assembled from far-flung private and state collections, presents Hitler’s Europe as never seen before. Amateur film enthusiasts— soldiers, tourists, Hitler’s own pilot, even Hitler’s companion, Eva Braun—began experimenting with color film in the late 1930s, their camera eye recording the Third Reich from every angle.
Some of this film was only recently uncovered in former Soviet-bloc archives, hidden for almost 60 years; all of it, thanks to digital technology, has been newly transferred to video with surprising clarity.
Home movie segments—Hitler with his inner circle, Goebbels’ children at play, and a vacationing Marlene Dietrich on the French Riviera with a young John F. Kennedy—capture the era’s leading actors with an often unsettling intimacy.
Nazi festivals, rallies, pageants and military parades (including a bizarrely risqué Night of Amazons in Munich), Wartime coverage includes new found combat film from almost every major campaign of the war—Blitzkriegs of Poland, Norway, Yugoslavia, the invasion of Russia, Afrika Korps troops in Tunisia, day to day life of German soldiers. D-day and the final desperate defense of Germany and the fall of Berlin.
Authentic footage of the execution of partisans. The brutalities of the Eastern Front and the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, new weapons in action, including V-2 rocket launchings— these and more are here presented, uncensored and unrehearsed, with color’s startling realism. Our images of this period, long frozen in iconic black & white, will never be the same.
English commentary.
DVD or VHS, 100 minutes
