The Movie
The movie was produced by the U.S. Army Signal corps, and was a "bitter and angry anti-German propaganda film", that characterized the German mind as "diseased".
The film urged against fraternization with the German people, who are portrayed as thoroughly untrustworthy. It reminds its viewers of Germany's history of aggression, under "Führer Number 1" Otto von Bismarck, "Führer Number 2" Kaiser Wilhelm II and "Führer Number 3" Adolf Hitler. It argues that German youth were especially dangerous because they had spent their entire lives under the Nazi regime.
The policy of non-fraternisation (where U.S. soldiers were forbidden to speak even to small children) was first announced to the soldiers in this movie.
- "The Nazi party may be gone, but Nazi thinking, Nazi training and Nazi trickery remains. The German lust for conquest is not dead.... You will not argue with them. You will not be friendly.... There will be no fraternization with any of the German people"
The basic theme that the German people could not be trusted derived from the peace policy that emerged from the Second Quebec Conference.
The movie was first screened to the top Generals, from General Dwight D. Eisenhower down. Reportedly General George Patton walked out of his screening, saying "Bullshit!"
Read more about this topic: Your Job In Germany
Famous quotes containing the word movie:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)