"Here is Germany" 2 of 8

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133c/133c06/133c06l03Here...

From Wikipedia:

Here is Germany was a 1945 propaganda documentary film directed by Frank Capra. Like its companion film, Know Your Enemy: Japan, the film is a full-length exploration of why one of the two major Axis countries started World War II and what had to be done to keep them from "doing it again".

The film opens with scenes of everyday life in Germany. It shows people such as housewives, policemen and farmers at work, and notes that these people weren't so different than us. Or are they? another narrator interrupts. The film then switches to a montage of Nazi concentration camps and piles of dead bodies. The narrator notes that this isn't the only time that Germany has unleashed war on the world, stating that while its generation fought the "Nazis", its fathers fought the "Huns" (pejorative term for Germany during World War I), and its grand father remembers the "Prussians". The narrator claims that its was all part of the same German lust for conquest.

Going even further back 150 years, the film informs us that while America, Britain, and France were forming their democratic traditions, Germany was a group of 300 medieval feudal states, not one of them with a constitution or parliament. The film traces the rise of Prussia from Frederick the Great through Bismarck, telling the audience that the Prussian state was dominated first by aristocratic landowners, militarists and state officials, later joined by the big industrialists. This development of a military industrial dominated state climaxes in World War I. When the above mentioned elements knew that they were beaten, according to the film, they put the democratic parties in charge in order to discredit the new republic. Once that was accomplished they found a stooge in Hitler, who would finally destroy the Weimar Republic with the addition of a 5th pillar - criminals.

The film depicts the Third Reich entirely from this perspective, seeing Nazism as simply a continuation of the aggressive German tradition, and then merely a façade for the military-industrial complex. The Nazi persecution of Jews is not explicitly mentioned, but in the initial sequence of Nazi atrocities it shows the bones of "men, women and children: sent to be exterminated in a German death factory".

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[wulfsragar]

the 18th century was very diferent then the 19th or the 20th century, to compare frederick the great with that asshole hitler is an insult at best

[PowderSoy]

They seem to forgot the black people which were also in America not equal at this time... :)

[HPBrowningBoy]

It is propaganda, it is made to not make you feel bad to kill them.

[EliasCalabretta1]

and I quote "3 generations following a 'tradition' so different from ours". that is hypocrisy at it's height!!! Now how did you end up getting the United States, and how did they end up becoming so big and world-wide influential hmmm?? disgusting if you ask me.

[romanophile1]

@rhq100 Hmmm yeah pretty much like america right??

[romanophile1]

No Elite in the history of the world has become so skilled in the art of propaganda and deceit, mass deceit, than the Anglo American Elite,

[romanophile1]

@andyjay729 who are you to say what is free and what isn't free?

[whizzles1]

At 1:36 to 1:46.“In School we learned that none of us is any better than any other American or anybody easy in the world for that matter. That there is no privileged few. That all men have equal rights.” What a joke. The film itself is explaining why our traditions and people are better than the German’s and the no privileged few line is so laughable that it needs no comment.

[andyjay729]

@PowderSoy Yes, and also remember that our ally Russia also had a long tradition of anti-democratic autocracy, which is also part of the reason why it's not exactly a free country today. A few years later during the Cold War, someone could've just as easily made a video of how Russia "has always been this way".

[heartfire451]

So, pray tell, can someone name for me one single sin the Germans commited that America has not?

[heartfire451]

So, pray tell, can someone name for me one single sin the Germans commited that America has not?