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About this episode

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 a potential 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 it is controversial and is banned in Germany today. The riveting newly released DVD with extras is available quite inexpensively within the US. (Search on Swastika 1973 using Froogle.) 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. Her clips give us a glimpse of the Berghof when Hitler predicted to Eva that after the war was won she would become a star in Hollywood playing herself and when Errol Flynn attended parties there. (According to "Hitler's Table Talk")

• Release Date

  Jul 3, 2008

• Runtime

  06:21