A Nazi Prisoner Said America's Cars Were Staged. Then the Army Made Them All Watch One Film.

Summer 1943. A railroad car full of German prisoners of war rolls west out of New York. German radio has told them America is bombed and out of fuel. Then the morning shift arrives at a factory in big cars, and one man says the cars were placed there to impress them. Two years later the U.S. Army ordered every German prisoner it held in America to watch one twenty-minute film, cut from what Allied cameramen recorded when the Nazi camps were opened. Some prisoners said that was faked too. This film follows a handful of German officers from that railcar to Camp Concordia, Kansas, through a killing inside the wire, to a schoolroom at Fort Getty, Rhode Island, where Army cameras recorded prisoners speaking for themselves. The liberation footage itself is described in words and is not shown. Every picture and film clip is real archive material. Every quote is from the sources below. Chapters: 0:00 A railroad car out of New York, summer 1943 1:48 Out of Petrol 3:26 The Window 4:57 Concordia 7:43 The Dead-Line 10:56 No Publicity 13:22 First-Hand Evidence 15:32 Twenty Minutes 19:19 A Rock in the Sea 23:01 1,040 Calories 25:04 He Was My Friend Sources: Lynn Ermann, "Learning Freedom in Captivity", The Washington Post Magazine, 18 January 2004 Ulrike Weckel, "Disappointed Hopes for Spontaneous Mass Conversions: German Responses to Allied Atrocity Film Screenings, 1945-46", Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 51 (2012) Office of the Provost Marshal General, "World War II: A Brief History", chapter "Re-education of Enemy Prisoners of War" (U.S. Army, 1946) Mark P. Schock, "Bloodied Kansas: Nazi Retribution in a Kansas POW Camp" (Wichita State University, Fairmount Folio) Horst von Oppenfeld obituary, The Washington Post, 5 September 2010 General Dwight D. Eisenhower to General George C. Marshall, 15 April 1945 (Eisenhower Presidential Library) Kansas Historical Society, Kansapedia: Camp Concordia NCpedia, World War II prisoners of war in North Carolina U.S. Army Signal Corps films 111-ADC-9940 and 111-ADC-9941, Fort Getty, Rhode Island, 1945 (U.S. National Archives) Photographs: U.S. National Archives (Signal Corps, Coast Guard, Office of War Information) Film (public domain): "The Plow That Broke the Plains" (U.S. Resettlement Administration, 1936), National Archives; "A Great Railroad at Work" (Jam Handy Organization, 1942), Prelinger Archives; U.S. Army Signal Corps film, National Archives (111-ADC-140), 1943; U.S. Army Signal Corps film, National Archives (111-ADC-9890), 1943; U.S. Army Signal Corps film "Firestone Synthetic Rubber Plant, Akron, Ohio" (1944), National Archives (111-ADC-2537); U.S. Office of War Information film "Steel Town" (1944), National Archives (306.163); U.S. Army Signal Corps film 'POW School', Fort Getty, R.I., 1945, National Archives (111-ADC-9940); U.S. Army Signal Corps film 'POW School, Fort Getty', 1945, National Archives (111-ADC-9941); "Post-War Germany: 28 Months After V-E Day" (George T. Fonda, 1947), Prelinger Archives. Photographs and documents: U.S. National Archives (Army Signal Corps, Coast Guard, Office of War Information); Eisenhower Presidential Library; Wikimedia Commons. Photo credits (CC BY-SA 3.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons): Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B0527-0001-753 (Röhnert); Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J31347; Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-0822-520 (Erich O. Krueger); Deutsche Fotothek, df pk 0000262 018 (Abraham Pisarek). Narration: AI voice. Real voices: a U.S. Army instructor and German prisoners of war at Fort Getty, Rhode Island (U.S. Army Signal Corps sound film, 1945). Independent and educational. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Defense or any armed force.