A Defeated People (1946) User Reviews

Short with a few interesting points

[JurijFedorov · 6/10 · 9 August 2022]

Another reviewer pointed out quite a few misses in this doc.

It's a 19 min propaganda doc about the rebuilding of Germany largely focused on cities in the British zone. The music is obnoxious. It focuses on how we need to support Germany and focus our wealth on Germany to re-educate them the right way and ban Nazis. So every man gets interviewed and fingerprinted. Teachers are hired. Coal is used for steel to rebuild everything. This time around Germany will not be allowed to roam freely. We see how Germans cut wood to get energy and how they live in basements under rubble. They have nothing. Even train tracks were bombed. Pretty effective propaganda. But there is not much here and it's just a dry narrator telling us about things.

They do claim a rich German family was as evil as Hitler for building the weapons for Germany. Not sure they are as evil at all. The doc also focuses on how they interview each single man so make sure he is not a Nazi. They study documents and ask specific questions. Of course this is mostly for show. Not only did the former Nazis get into power in Germany they even got into power in other countries like USA where they got to run the US space program. Actually this was something you had to allow if you wanted to rebuild Germany. USSR of course caused tens of thousands to die to punish them for being anti-Communist. But they never planned on rebuilding anything. Rather they stole everything they could and transported it to USSR while killing many young men.

If this doc was made in 1947 it would have been considerably better as the British gave the denazifaction control to Germans. In the 1950's you were already freeing former prisoners you just a few years prior were hanging left and right. So the ideas changed fully. Instead of punishing Nazis the focus was on rebuilding the country as fast as possible to make sure no wars could break out and you could defend them against Stalin. Maybe a proper doc would be 10 episodes set in each given year so explain what the rebuilding process was. You learn fast while doing this stuff. Keep in mind USA screwed it up in Iraq when they fired all Saddam party people and the military/police. You got hundreds of thousands young unemployed angry men with military training which then created ISIS and caused Iraq to nearly fall again until the West defeated ISIS for an Iraq that just couldn't do anything to stop them. Muslim terror groups then started suicide missions in Europe as revenge for this new post Iraq war. It was a huge disaster. This teaches us that just firing or killing a group to fully stop an evil power is likely a terrible idea. Men can be reeducated and most men in power have qualifications no one else has. You can't just replace them as there is no one left smart enough to replace an engineer, lawyer, or middle-manager.

Shattering document

[drlumiere · 10/10 · 20 November 2004]

This is a short film about the German people in the destroyed post-war Germany of 1946. I believe it was intended for army personal. There are lots of such films, what makes this one special are two things: The acclaimed documentarist Jennings has a very visual cinematic style that is lightyears ahead of the usual newsreel-stuff (which is the reason why many of his best shots out of this film were reused in many newsreels). Most important however, he does not attempt to create a propaganda film a la "the German people are not our friends" etc, instead it is what I summon a fairly realistic view of a defeated people and how they try to survive in a destroyed environment. It struck me as very odd that he did not even hesitate to criticize the British military government. There is some stunning footage of a completely overloaded train in Hamburg central station, which shows two completely swamped British mp's trying to get people "not to ride on the buffers". The commentary is very personal and moving at parts in describing the circumstances. One shot had me close to tears, it showed a couple of young children playing on a huge pile of debree while in the background you could see the tower of the St.Michaelis-Church of Hamburg. A spot where I often pass these days. If you have any chance to see this film (I saw it at a seminar for "Re-Educating Germany by Film") don't miss it. Jennings wrote a book about his film experiences (title escapes me) which is very worth reading (but quite rare I think).

The British in victory

[kekseksa · 21 August 2017]

Perhaps it is as well that human beings have short memories. If not it would be strange that someone from Hamburg should not notice the enormous lie with which this film begins about the "strategic" nature of British bombing at the end of the war since Hamburg was the victim of the 1943 Operation Gomorrah napalm-bombing (42,600 civilians killed, 37,000 wounded and virtually the entire city destroyed. The bombing was "strategic" only in the now-current euphemistic sense.

Although the film that follow portrays accurately enough the miserable state of Germany in 1946, the patronising and arrogant tone of the victorious is far from pleasant. The British, who had sold to the world such a modestly noble view of themselves (as though there as no such thing as an Empire) during the difficult days of the war, rather let the mask slip once the tables had definitively turned.

Another misleading claim in the film concerns the Krupp industrial empire which in fact the British and their US allies took great care to maintain intact (while bombing civilians at the end of the war thy were often carefully avoiding bombing factories and installations they thought would be important to them after the war. It is true that Alfred Krupp was arrested and tried for war-crimes but he was amnestied and freed in 1951 and the company remained in the hands of the family until the recession of the 1960s. Just as responsible for killing British soldiers as Hitler and Göring, eh? If, as William Hartnell intones, "by killing they grew rich", by keeping a low profile, they stayed that way. But then Hartnell did not yet have his telephone-box time-capsule in those days and could not foretell in 1946 the bizarrely hypocritical turn that the so-called "denazification" of Germany would take.

These are not the charming, plucky Brits of the early wartime shorts, these are the British who believed themselves specially ordained to rule three-quarters of the globe. Little surprise then that this film was not intended for the general pubic.