I stumbled upon this while browsing through YouTube. The image quality is absolutely outstanding.
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These original color film recordings of the U.S. Army show various cities and locations in Germany after the surrender in 1945. The pictures were taken under the command of George Stevens, a Hollywood director who later became famous for movies like "A Place in the Sun" and "The Diary of Anne Frank".
The image and colour restoration was carried out with the help of artificial intelligence.
Very interesting. Though I've done more than my fair share of reading about WWII, I've never seen contemporary color footage like this before, much less footage which was actually dated.
The labels were very helpful in allowing me to understand what I was seeing. However, there were two things of note in there (which were unidentified in the film) that I found of particular interest as I had only seen b/w photos before.
At 6:10 you see officers enter the Reich Chancellery, at 6:35 the top of the führerbunker and at 6:40, the ditch where they supposedly burned Hitler and Eva's bodies.
At 8:36, you see the Feldherrnhalle, an older monument converted to a Nazi shrine upon which someone had written 'K.Z. Dachau - Velden - Buchenwald ich schame mich dab ich ein deutscher bin'; 'I'm ashamed that I'm a German'. Side note, Obviously Dachau and Buchenwald were death camps but I've never heard of Velden before and I can't find any reference to it in WW II history. Does anyone know what role it played in Nazi Germany?
They all look pretty well fed and well nourished compared to the poor starving sobs that came out of those fine folks' concentration camps.
Yeah, I didn't expect that. They also tended to be well dressed and groomed with a smile on their faces which surprised me as well as I've read that German woman tended to make themselves look as unappealing as possible immediately after Germany surrendered as rapes, particularly by the Soviet forces, were very common.
They also tended to be well dressed and groomed with a smile on their faces which surprised me...
Keep in mind that the man responsible for this film footage was George Stevens, a Hollywood director. I have no doubt that many of these scenes were "staged" and/or choreographed. For example, those people in the bucket brigades seemed to be way too cheery, considering the total devastation of their surroundings and what they'd probably been through. I'm not sure what "slant" these films might've been meant to have, but even without determining it, I can still appreciate the image quality of the footage itself.
[This message has been edited by Patrick (edited 01-21-2021).]
A bit of background on George Stevens and his involvement in acquiring WW2 footage...
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When the British warship HMS Belfast fired the shot that launched the D-Day landings, it was carrying an unlikely passenger - Hollywood film director George Stevens. He was on board making a unique documentary for US Army archives.
His work at that time is the subject of the film 'George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin' made 50 years later.
It is an important historical document in several ways, not the least of which is the chance to see colour film from this era.
And here's the whole documentary. Unfortunately, the upload presented is not in HD, but it's still more than acceptable quality.
Yeah, I didn't expect that. They also tended to be well dressed and groomed with a smile on their faces which surprised me as well as I've read that German woman tended to make themselves look as unappealing as possible immediately after Germany surrendered as rapes, particularly by the Soviet forces, were very common.
There was a TV show on this last week, After Hitler that to me, helped to explain why many of the Berlin population looked so well nourished. When the allies began bombing the major German cities in earnest, early 1942 , most of the populace fled out into the countryside, to friends and relatives' homes and into smaller towns that had no military, strategic or political target value. As soon as the war ended, they began returning home and were in good physical shape compared to people that had been caught inside the bombing regions. At first, the allied military allowed them to do as they were want to do, but soon put them to work clearing rubble, rebuilding roads and railways.
