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Thank you for this Louis, I just viewed 5 minutes and it looks great. Your description makes it irresistible. I will watch it tonight with my family, before it's taken down. Best, Brian On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 2:02 PM, Louis Proyect <l...@panix.com> wrote: > Not too long ago I discovered that Werner Angress, the historian from > whose “Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for Power in Germany, > 1921–23” I have been posting excerpts, was a Ritchie boy. After he died in > 2010, The American Historical Association commemorated his life, including > information on Ritchie: > > Drafted into the army in 1941, he was trained as an interrogator > at Camp Ritchie (he is featured in the film, The Ritchie Boys, about this > remarkable institution), and parachuted (his first jump) into France with > the 82nd Airborne on D-Day. Despite his extraordinarily youthful appearance > and rather small stature, Angress was a tough and resourceful soldier who > was eventually promoted to Master Sergeant and awarded the Bronze Star and > the Purple Heart. > > In going through a backlog of DVDs received from publicists about a decade > ago, I discovered that I had one for “The Ritchie Boys”. In extracting it > from the package, it accidentally was damaged. Not willing to be deterred > from seeing the film, I got a copy through the Columbia Library and was > richly rewarded by a documentary that might be regarded as the ultimate > alternative to Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”. > > Although Werner Angress and all the other German and German-speaking > Jewish immigrants had every reason to want to kill every Nazi they got > their hands on, the allied cause was better served by them functioning as > “soft cops” to get information that could save the lives of fellow soldiers > as well as civilians. Additionally, the Ritchie boys discover that many if > not most of the German soldiers were ordinary workers forced to kill or be > killed as deserters. The same thing was true of the German civilians they > came in contact with. > > Every Ritchie boy interviewed in the film was as ethically and politically > informed as Angress, with some demonstrating the leftist politics they > probably absorbed growing up in Weimar Germany. Among the most interesting > is Si Lewin, a Polish Jew who was born in 1918 and died two years ago at > the age of 97. Like all the other Ritchie boys, including Angress whose > parachute got caught in a tree in Germany not long after D-Day, he has an > amazing story to tell. > > He was assigned to convince German soldiers to surrender by speaking to > them through high-powered speakers wired to a batteries in a jeep. > Routinely, German artillery honed in on Lewin and his comrades by > geolocating the sound of the speakers until they figured out how to > position them far from the jeep. > > I had to make a tough decision in writing an article about “The Ritchie > Boys” since it was neither available as VOD or even as a DVD with the > standard pricing. The director Christian Bauer, a German, died in 2009 and > the distribution company he founded died along with him. The only way to > see the film is to buy a DVD on Amazon that is now going for $70 when it > was available. > > I saw no alternative except to put it up on Youtube, which took a bit of > time and money to accomplish. Since the DVD is copy-protected, I had to pay > $100 to have someone bypass the copy protection and make it uploadable. I > doubt that Youtube will be hearing from anybody about copyright protection > but just in case I wouldn’t waste any time watching this film since it is > absolutely terrific. > > > full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/08/16/the-ritchie-boys-2/ > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Progressive Economics" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to pen-l+unsubscr...@mail.csuchico.edu. > To post to this group, send email to pe...@mail.csuchico.edu. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/a/ma > il.csuchico.edu/group/pen-l/. > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/ma > il.csuchico.edu/d/msgid/pen-l/b18644e2-d7a6-247d-9fc1-f1f896 > addfa3%40panix.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/a/ma > il.csuchico.edu/d/optout. > -- Brian McKenna, Ph.D. Anthropologist Department of Behavioral Sciences CASL 4025 University of Michigan-Dearborn Dearborn, Michigan _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com