'Nazi'
Concentration Camps on Staten
Island? by Hengist In
1981, Jack Glenn, director of the
popular 1940's newsreel series March of
Time, died at age 76. His obituary,
distributed by the Associated Press
[and published in the Bergen, New
Jersey, Sunday Record on February
15, 1981] let slip an amazing
revelation: "As senior
director for the popular movie house
newsreel, he often created world events
with actors and movie sets. One such
news feature film, Inside Nazi
Germany, made in 1938, included
footage of a "concentration camp" that
was filmed on Staten Island with scores
of New York City actors. Much of the
film's footage was shot within the
borders of the Third Reich by a
free-lance cameraman, but
[Louis] Rochement
[Glenn's producer]
felt
that the film had been censored by the
German authorities and ordered Glenn to
re-enact widely reported Nazi camp
atrocities." Millions
of Americans watching the "news"-reels in
their local theatres were convinced that
they were seeing "the real thing." How
many such images of "reality" that we see
on a regular basis are actually the
creation of movie magicians? It
is a fact that the Allies hired Hollywood
directors to produce propaganda films
after the war instead of using regular
army footage. Related
items on this website: - Faked
Dachau survivor photo
- Faked
Auschwitz "smoke from chimney"
photo
- David
Irving writes Introduction to book on
photo forgeries
-
- David
Irving writes:
- Film
Fables, Flicks, and Fleas
SOME years ago a
British television channel, BBC2 I think,
featured an exposé on Glenn's
The March of Time "documentaries."
Among the facts the British investigation
revealed were that the famous scenes of SA
Brownshirt thugs roughing up their enemies
in the streets of Berlin and forcing Jews
to scrub the streets in Vienna in 1938, of
Japanese soldiers tossing babies in the
air from their bayonets, and certain other
atrocities, were hate-propaganda filmed in
the backlots of Hollywood. (This is not
the same as saying that such things did
not happen.) Like much of the film footage
produced from GPU (Soviet secret police)
archives these shots are now
indiscriminately used by modern television
producers to flesh out their own
documentaries. They have duped the world's
public for years, and done their own bit
to ensure that the wheels of hatred keep
churning. Jonathan Swift
wrote: "So, nat'ralists observe, a flea
hath smaller fleas that on him prey, and
these have smaller still to bite 'em, and
so proceed ad infinitum." Insert whatever
word you choose instead of "flea" and the
principle remains the same. While researching
my biography
of Dr Joseph Goebbels -- no slouch
when it came to film propaganda himself --
I found that British Intelligence had
"re-enacted" the Nazi hangings of the July
20 assassins on piano wire -- using actors
of course -- and had smuggled the film
into Switzerland for secret viewings
there. All of this
reminds me that the chief cameraman on
Schindler's List explained in the
German cinematographers' trade journal, a
year or two after the film unsurprisingly
scooped the Oscars, that the reason they
had made the film in black-and-white was
that in later years people will not be
able to tell it apart from a documentary.
I will dig out the precise quote
(Action
Report
readers will recall that I printed it in a
box on one page) and post it.
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