Swastika (1973) Trailer

Scenes of BDM girls (the female branch of the Hitler Youth) and the 1938 Buckeberg Harvest Festival as researched by Lutz Becker. Lutz Becker is an advocate of the documentary as an art form. The full documentary, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was part of the syllabus of a famous course at Harvard known by students as "Krauts and Doubts". Newsreels are presented without commentary and without obvious ex post facto musical cues telling the viewer what to think. Swastika provides a window into the Reich as average citizens would have perceived it, enabling a better psychological understanding of Nazi propaganda. For this reason Swastika is controversial. This video is banned in Germany and France today unless seen in the presence of governmentally approved educators or political minders. Such is the case with restricted (Verbehaltsfilme) such as the number one film of the German 1939-1940 season, Jud Suss, or the number one film of 1942, The Great Love (Zarah Leander's most important film). The newly released DVD with extras is available quite inexpensively within the US. (Search on Swastika 1973 using Google Product Search). In one of the DVD extras, Lutz Becker describes how, at the age of 19, he discovered Eva Braun's home movies which he gained rights to from the local Bavarian authorities. While Lutz Becker's excerpts of the home movies were made available and have have been included in almost all documentaries about Hitler, the movies were later deemed inappropriate for the general public. Eva's reels were under under lock and key in the US national archives for decades. Eva's clips give us a glimpse of the Berghof when Hitler predicted after the war was won Eva would become a star in Hollywood playing herself and when Errol Flynn attended parties there. (According to "Hitler's Table Talk")
A better quality version of this trailer is available at http://histbuff.blip.tv

Other recommended DVDs researched by Lutz Becker are The Double Headed Eagle: Hitler's Rise to Power 1918-1933 (1973) and Good Morning, Mr. Hitler (1993).

Swastika opened the Biberach Film Festival in Munich in October, 2009.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/11/08/1257614959553.html

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News & Politics

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• swastika
• Lutz
• Becker
• Nazi
• Hitler