The following list comes from Charles Burris, “WWII Was Not Fought to Save Anyone from Death Camps,” September 26, 2020.
WWII Was Not Fought To Save Anyone From Death Camps, David Swanson, September 25, 2020.
Unseasonable Truths: American Racism and Nazi Germany — Amazon book/DVD list
Franklin D. Roosevelt and The Jewish Community — Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies C-SPAN presentation.
Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust — David Wyman and Rafael Medoff C-SPAN presentation.
Authors David Wyman and Rafael Medoff discussed their book A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust, published by The New Press. Through a 12-hour interview with Peter Bergson, the authors document the campaign led by Peter Bergson, a Zionist activist and American immigrant during World War II, to inform the U.S. Government, media establishment, and American public of Nazi violence against European Jews. The authors are joined in the discussion by fellow biographers David Nasaw and Blanche Wiesen-Cook.
Voyage of the Damned — Feature Film
Voyage of the Damned is a 1976 drama film, which was based on a 1974 book written by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts with the same title. The story was inspired by true events concerning the fate of the MS St. Louis ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees from Germany to Cuba in 1939.
https://archive.org/embed/Voyage.Of.The.Damned.1976
JEWISH HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTARIES
Stark and crushing scenes of Nazi death camps in the documentary, called Memory of the Camps, 1985. Claimed by Charles Burris as the most important film that you will ever see [on the Holocuast].
This is the most important film you will ever see. Filmed by British, American, and Soviet forces in 1945 as the Nazi concentration and death camps were liberated. The searing graphic images are horrific. The wry ironic narration by the late Trevor Howard perfectly magnifies this horror.
This hour-long documentary on the liberation of the German concentration camps was assembled in London in 1945, but it was never completed. It was constructed from footage shot by the service and newsreel cameramen accompanying the British, American, and Russian armies, but it wasn’t shown until May 7, 1985, when PBS FRONTLINE first presented it to mark the 40th anniversary of the liberation. PBS FRONTLINE broadcast the film just as it was found in the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum, unedited, with the missing soundtracks, and with the title given to it by the Museum — “Memory of the Camps.” The project originated in February 1945 in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). “Memory of the Camps” was intended to document unflinchingly the conditions of the camps in order to shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people — and not just the Nazis and SS — bore responsibility.
A variety of bureaucratic and technical glitches delayed the completion of the film. In the end, it was unfinished, and the British military command felt the need for a more congenial approach to improving Anglo-German relations. They worried that the film might increase the chaos and demoralization. Despite being shelved for decades, five of the film’s six reels had survived in a 55-minute fine-cut print without titles or credits. (The quality of the print reflects the fact that the negative was lost and it was made from a nitrate positive cutting copy, the equivalent of a work-print today.) Missing was a sixth reel comprised of Russian footage of the liberation of Auschwitz and Maidanek, presumed to have been taken to Moscow.
The editing of the footage was done by a team of accomplished filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock. One of Hitchcock’s important contributions was the inclusion of wide establishing shots which support the documentary feel of the film and showed that the events in the film could not have been staged. According to Peter Tanner, one of the film’s editors, Hitchcock’s concern was that “we should try to prevent people thinking that any of this was faked…so Hitch was very careful to try to get material which could not possibly be seen to be faked in any way.”
HOLOCAUST IN FILM
Escape from Sobibor, 1987.
Schindler’s List, 1993. Directed by Steven Spielberg, one would think that you would get a better context of the camps. If you’re looking for context, then be sure to read the 1993 essay by the psychiatrist, Peter R. Breggin, titled “Psychiatry’s Role in the Holocaust.”
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005.
The movie also indicts Hitler’s People’s Court, an odd name since that was the name of a very popular American TV court drama, starring the following judges: Joseph Wapner (1981–1993); Ed Koch (1997–1999); Jerry Sheindlin (1999–2001); Marilyn Milian (2001–present).
The court was established in 1933 by order of Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, in response to his dissatisfaction at the outcome of the Reichstag fire trial in front of the Reich Court of Justice (Reichsgericht) in which all but one of the defendants were acquitted. The court had jurisdiction over a rather broad array of “political offenses”, which included crimes like black marketeering, work slowdowns, defeatism, and treason against the Third Reich. These crimes were viewed by the court as Wehrkraftzersetzung (“the disintegration of defensive capability“) and were accordingly punished severely; the death penalty was meted out in numerous cases.
San Gabriel Tutor 