Hitler In Colour

Found: Hitler's horrors in full colour
Sunday April 10, 2005
The Observer

Adolf Hitler stands before the Nazi faithful at Nuremberg, exhorting them to realise the destiny of the thousand-year Reich. A familiar image in grainy black and white, this time the scene is played out in full colour, a legion of swastikas set on blood-red banners which Hitler described as having 'the effect of a burning torch'.
But this is not a clip from the hit film Downfall about the last days of the führer - it is newly discovered, colour footage which renders him more vividly and uncomfortably real than ever before.

The 1938 Nuremberg rally in its brilliant and terrifying colours is just one of the dramatic images which can be seen for the first time in Hitler in Colour, a ground-breaking documentary to be released just after the 60th anniversary of his suicide on 30 April.

Exhaustive research has uncovered missing footage of often stunning clarity from archives, libraries and private collections in Germany, America and around the world. It includes film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics shot by an American spectator, a bizarre Roman-style pageant in Munich to celebrate 2,000 years of German culture and a visit by Mussolini to Berlin filmed by a Dutch tourist. Austrian villagers are shown welcoming the German army, and there is footage of Hitler's triumphant visit to a captured Polish airfield, German troops on the outskirts of Stalingrad and 15-year-olds playing around an anti-aircraft gun in Hamburg.

Narrated by the actor Brian Cox and complemented by readings from diaries and letters, including Hitler's own, the documentary charts the 12 years from Hitler's rise to power to the fall of Berlin.

It includes more familiar colour pictures of Hitler with his lover Eva Braun, as well as anti-Semitic posters, wartime Berlin, the outside of his bunker, the launch of V2 rockets and the horrifying mountain of corpses at Buchenwald concentration camp.

One of the discoveries was film shot by Hitler's pilot, Hans Baur, unearthed at a Hamburg film library which was always assumed to possess only newsreels made after 1945.

David Batty, producer of Hitler in Colour, said: 'Hitler's rise to power mirrored the rise of colour film. In the Thirties there were two colour film studios: Agfa in Germany and Kodak in America. Hitler had an eye for PR and realised the power of colour film so he handed it to his cronies.

'We believe Hitler was the most filmed person in the world up to his death.'

'Hitler in Colour' is released on DVD by Warner Vision International on 2 May.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/

Gonna buy it.