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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 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/
>
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--
Brian McKenna, Ph.D.
Anthropologist
Department of Behavioral Sciences
CASL 4025
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Dearborn, Michigan
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