We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE SCREEN WRITER
member of the NKVD, was dancing in the street with one of our WAC interpreters. “We must work closer together,” he said happily as he and his staff drove off just as the sun was coming up over the Wann-See.
The next afternoon we drove back to Babelsberg, followed by a truck. When we left that evening, the truck was full. Our toasts, thrown out upon the vodka, had brought results. Among the films we obtained that day were every single Party Day Congress from the very first one in 1923, in which Himmler and Hess appear with Hitler in short Bavarian pants looking like Hitler Jugend. There was also a Party film on the 1 932 election, with SA men patrolling the streets and an SA machine-gun unit lined up outside a trade-union headquarters. Another valuable document, marked “Geheim Oberkammando” (Secret, by order of the High Com¬ mand) , was a horrendous two-reel film depicting the rounding up of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and their inevitable burial in mass graves. German thoroughness is seen in its most frightening aspect in one shot in which a uniformed cameraman can be seen at the bottom of a mass grave getting a reverse shot as naked, emaciated bodies, including those of small children and infants, come hurtling toward him.
While our cutters, half American Navy, half German Ufa, under the direction of Bob Parrish (now back at Universal), assembled this material, which the translators and analysts were annotating, the search for other films continued. In Munich my brother uncovered not only the entire Heinrich Hoffman film library, but Hitler’s old friend Hoffman himself. Like all the other Germans we encountered, Hoffman was per¬ fectly willing to lend his services to the Allied cause, even though in this case he was helping us tighten the noose around the neck of his own son-in-law, Baldur Von Schirach, one of the 21 defendants. Hoffman’s excellent library, his cooperation and Sgt. Schulberg’s diligence produced one of the major contributions to photographic evidence at Nuremberg.
From Switzerland came word from both OWI and undercover sources that a considerable amount of Nazi film had found its way out of the German Legation into the hands of private Swiss exhibitors. From Jerry Mayer at the American Legation I learned how this had happened. In the final days of the Third Reich, with the situation at the German Legation naturally chaotic, a third assistant secretary had stolen all con¬ fidential films and sold them to various distributors in Bern and Zurich.
12