Welt im Film no. 7
Welt im Film. Issue no. 7 (part)
Title: Aufstand in Prag [Uprising in Prague] The citizens of Prague rise up against the German occupiers. People tear down a German-language street sign, throw leaflets from windows, and burn a German flag. They raise British, American, and Soviet flags. Shots of captured German POWs. Czechs retake the radio station and citizens build barricades and hand out weapons. Fighting in the streets. The narrator says that while the free world celebrated the capitulation of Germany, Prague still lay in darkness. More fighting, German POWs taken prisoner. Male and female collaborators walk down the streets with their hands raised. The first Soviet troops enter Prague on the 10th of May. A crowd assembled at the train station welcomes Edvard Benes, president of Czechoslovakia, who has been living in exile for the past seven years. Benes rides through crowds of cheering people in an open car. The camera pans up to show a historic building that was shown damaged in a previous scene. Benes and his wife wave from a window.
01:04:11 Title: Verschleppte Kunstwerke aufgefunden [Stolen artworks found] American soldiers remove paintings and sculptures from bunkers near Berchtesgaden. Hermann Goering had the looted artworks placed in this location. The soldiers carry the artworks down a hill and put them in the back of an open truck. A man in civilian clothes, perhaps an art historian, removes a painting from the bunker and points out the artist's signature and other details. Soldiers remove paintings and other items from a train and put them in a truck. An American officer, identified as an art historian, reviews documents related to the artworks. Shot of a castle in Neuschwanstein, where Goering stored looted jewelry. CUs of some of the jewelry and of enamel boxes from a private French collection. A GI displays a silver bowl which had belonged to the former head of a famous French museum. The narrator notes that these items are just a few of the 23,000 that were discovered here by the Americans. He says that the Nazis took from the occupied nations not only their freedom, peace, and bread, but also what these people loved and what made them proud.
01: 07:04 Title: Nahrungsmittel fuer Holland [Food for Holland] Panning shots, then CUs, of malnourished Dutch children. The narrator states that the children of Holland have paid the price for Germany's five year occupation and that the Allies have decreed that those who have hungered the longest will be fed first. Thus Germany must wait while these children are fed. Children wait in front of a children's home with plates in hands. They are fed from large soup tureens. Children walk to school carrying soup bowls. The narration notes that they will receive a meal at lunch to supplement what they get at home. Children eat at their desks in a classroom, then pray.
Copyright: Technically the Welt Im Film [World in Film] German newsreels are not in the public domain. Rights are generally held by the Imperial War Museum. However, the Welt Im Film issues sold by the National Archives mainly contain Signal Corps footage which is in the public domain or footage of undetermined Allied forces origin to which no one can claim copyright. Researchers interested in duplication should clear rights through the Imperial War Museum if film excerpts or soundtrack have clear British origin.
Biography / History:
The Welt im Film [World in Film] newsreel series was produced by the American and British military governments to support the denazification campaign in Germany and Austria. Screening was compulsory in cinemas in the American and British zones of Germany until the late 1940s.
2008.40.1 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum purchased the film excerpts from the National Archives and Records Administration in February 2008.
National Archives & Records Administration (NARA), 306 WIF 7, reel 1
DigiBeta; Betacam SP; VHS
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