DVD97 - Through Enemy Eyes vol.6

Go behind enemy lines on a journey that traces the rise and fall of German military fortunes... the great battles, the desperate hours captured via authentic uncut newsreels, exactly as presented to German wartime cinema audiences.

Now see the Second World War as you've never seen it before: Through Enemy Eyes.

All newsreels have been transferred from original 35 millimeter and 16 millimeter German prints and have been accurately translated and electronically subtitled in English.

Through Enemy Eyes Vol. 6 (Two Disk DVD Set)

DISK 1: Aug 13, 1941 - Sept 24, 1941

NEWSREEL 571: Volunteer Legions From France, Flanders and Denmark Join the Crusade Against Bolshevism; Masses of Soviet Soldiers Captured in Ukraine; Wehrmacht rapidly advances on all Eastern Fronts; German Troops reach Gulf of Finland; Soviets are Routed from the Baltic States; Luftwaffe Bombing Raids in the Lake Ilmen Area;

NEWSREEL 573: German Planes Attack the Port of Murmansk; Romanian Troops March on Odessa; Panzer Units Reach the Black Sea Port of Nikolayev; Battle of Gomel -- 90,000 Soviet Prisoners Taken; Heavy Combat Along the St.Petersburg - Moscow Railroad; Novgorod Captured by German Assault Troops.

NEWSREEL 574: New U-boats Launched to Reinforce the Atlantic Front; Admiral Dönitz Decorates Victorious U-boat Commanders; Narva and Luga Fall to Germans; Wehrmacht Troops Advance to Leningrad; Mussolini and Hitler Tour the Eastern Front; Waffen-SS Forces Sweep into the Port of Kherson; After Fierce Resistance Germans Capture Gomel;

NEWSREEL 577: Stukas Destroy Bridges in the Murmansk Area; Finnish Troops Liberate Viipuri (Vyborg), Old Capital of Karelia; German Troops Approach the Outskirts of Leningrad; Four Soviet Armies Encircled by Guderian's and Von Kleist's Panzer Armies; Heavy Fighting Rage for the Cities of Kremenchug and Chernigov; German Troops Fight their Way into Kiev.

DISK 2: Oct 1, 1941 - Nov 20, 1941

NEWSREEL 578: Daring Invasion of the Islands of Ösel (Saaremaa) and Moon (Muhu) in the Gulf of Riga; German Forces Converge on Leningrad from all Directions; Italian and Romanian Troops at the Gates of Odessa; Kiev, the Capital of Ukraine, Liberated from Bolshevik Terror; The Encirclement of Four Soviet Armies in the Kiev Area nets 665,000 Prisoners.

NEWSREEL 579: Goebbels Opens the Winter Relief Fund Drive Rally in Berlin's Sportpalast; Hitler Speaks at the Rally and Blasts Warcriminal Plutocrats and Bolsheviks; Mop-up Operations in the Island of Ösel; German Artillery Pulverizes Leningrad - the Siege Begins; Army and Waffen-SS Units Advance on Valday Hills, Source Waters of the Volga River; Aftermath of the Battle in the Kiev Front - Endless Lines of Soviet Prisoners; U-boat Action in the Battle of the Atlantic.

NEWSREEL 583: Italy's Foreign Minister Count Ciano Visits Hitler at his Wolfsschanze Headquarters.; Finnish Divisions Advance South of Lakes Ladoga and Onega.; Knee-deep Mud Hampers Supply Convoys in the Leningrad Area.; Soviet Stronghold of Kaluga captured by German Troops.; The Historic Battlefleld of Borodino Penetrated by Waffen-SS and General Hoeppner's Panzers.; In the Southern Sector of the Front German Infantry Advance on Kharkov.

NEWSREEL 585: Mop-up Operations in Karelia.; Winter Clothes and Supplies Reach the Eastern Front.; Attack on Soviet Outer Defence Ring near Moscow.; The Soviet Industrial Hub of Kharkov Captured by the Wehrmacht.; German Advances in the Crimean Peninsula.; Victory Parade of Odessa Veterans in Bucharest.; General Rommel Decorates Valorous Afrika Korps Soldiers.; Naval Action on the English Channel.

8 Original German Wartime Newsreels with English Subtitles.

237 Minutes - Nearly 4 Hours on Two DVD Disks.

August 31, 1941 - November 20, 1941

SPECIAL PRICE REDUCTION!

See and hear the entire war from the German perspective!

DVD97 - Through Enemy Eyes vol.6

Details: Germany, 1941, B&W, Total running time: 237 minutes, German with English subtitles.

$40.00 $30 +s/h

Volume 6 may be the most important installment in this series, because it brackets a period when World War Two’s crucial turning-point was reached. Disk I begins with 13 and 27 August 1941, when Axis forces on the Eastern Front were everywhere victorious. In the last days of that month, however, Hitler fell seriously ill with a gastronomic complaint that temporarily isolated him from the outside world. Taking advantage of his indisposition, anti-Nazi generals in the Army withdrew German forces from Leningrad toward Moscow, degenerating the attack on the former city into a stagnating siege.

Hitler had insisted from before the launching of Operation Barbarossa and throughout the invasion that the Soviet capital must only be attacked after positions in the north (at Leningrad) and south (in the Donets) were simultaneously secured, a strategy that had guaranteed unrelieved success throughout the summer. Only after he sufficiently recovered in September did he learn that German forces had already been diverted from the north and were already spread too thin by his insubordinate generals to take either Leningrad or Moscow. Repercussions for the Axis offensive would eventually throw it off balance, thereby granting a critical breathing spell to the Soviets.

It is against this unseen backdrop that the imagery of Volume 6 must be appreciated. In Disk I, Hitler visits the front after the fall of Minsk, a major industrial city, during early August. He meets with von Bock, Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Center and one of the anti-Nazi generals, who will soon be tasked by his treasonous superiors with their misguided operation against Moscow. Combat footage is outstanding for coverage of a flak unit blasting away at attacking Red Air Force planes, and a Messerschmitt-110 shreds a Yak-9 at very close range with its 20-mm cannons. Enemy ground fire takes out the “destroyer”’s starboard motor, but the attack on a Red Army convoy continues nonetheless. Some of the Luftwaffe’s leading aces receive new decorations from Hermann Goering. On hand are Walter Oesau (127 kills) and Werner Moelders, who destroyed 27 enemy aircraft in 23 days, ending his career with 102 victories. He would die just two months later as a passenger aboard a crashed transport aircraft, virtually the identical fate that later befell other loyal officers featured in Volume 6: General Eduard Dietl and General von Schobert. The suspicious deaths of these and many other high-ranking military men close to Hitler were almost certainly engineered by the same General Staff plotters who would eventually attempt his assassination in 1944. The 3 September Wochenschau features a fly-over of the newly conquered harbor-city of Nickoliev, where a colossal 35,000-ton battleship, 10,000-ton cruisers and several monstrous submarines were weeks away from being commission by the Red Navy, which would have unquestionably dominated the Black Fleet with these vessels. The Kriegsmarine’s much smaller picket boats are nevertheless shown to good advantage, with some rapid-fire shelling of Soviet shore installations.

October 1st deals in large measure to what had by then the siege of Leningrad. Close ups of Wehrmacht small arms should prove invaluable for modelers.

Elite Italian Bersaglieri troops assault the enemy entrenched at a farmhouse in the Ukraine, where Mussolini’s soldiers fought like lions, contrary to Allied propaganda. To be sure, the pan-European nature of the Campaign is stressed in Volume 6. We see a mass-rally in Paris for volunteers in the French Waffen-SS, while Belgian SS-men parade through Brussels, and Danish recruits join the SS in Hamburg. Finnish forces circle to the north around Leningrad, observed by military representatives from Portugal and Turkey.

The November 5th Wochenschau concludes with Axis forces seizing Borodino, just sixty miles southwest of Moscow. Although these seven newsreels are concerned largely with the Eastern Front, they contain two of the entire series’ greatest highlights. Among them was a very realistic portrayal of life aboard a submarine in combat, U-46, commanded by Lieutenant Engelbert Endrass. A shoot-out with an enemy freighter, whose gunners get in some hair-raising near misses, is battle coverage at its best. Viewers are urged to crank up the volume on this outstanding vignette to really get the feel of being aboard a u-boat in action.

The other mini-masterpiece is an attack by Focke-Wulf Kondor long-distance bombers against a British convoy. “The Condor Scourge”, as Churchill referred to their operations out over the North Atlantic, is dramatically documented here, especially when the newsreel concludes with a 500-pound bomb’s direct hit on a transport ship.

Reviewer’s note: While purchasing all fourteen volumes of “Through Enemy Eyes” may be too sizeable an investment for most students of World War Two, they will find nowhere else --- in either the written or spoken word --- original source material that will provide them with a broader, more profound understanding of and appreciation for that seminal conflict. To watch it every day, from first to last newsreel, is a life-changing experience, comparable to seeing and hearing Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Whatever viewers bring with them to this collection will be expanded a thousandfold. In short, the “Through Enemy Eyes” series is by far the most important, single document to have emerged from the Second World War, bar none.

- Marc Roland

Trouble with viewing all these Wochenschau newsreels, I get so excited, I always feel like looking for a recruitment office somewhere. - Marc Roland