DVD99 - Through Enemy Eyes vol.8

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. 8 (Two Disk DVD Set)

DISK 1: Apr 22, 1942 - Jun 11, 1942

NEWSREEL 607: Hitler's 53rd Birthday Festivities; Luftwaffe Bombing Raid on Malta; Island of Suursaari in the Gulf of Finland Occupied by German and Finnish Troops; The Continuing Battle for Leningrad; Dnieper Power Plant Rebuilt by Todt Organization Personnel.

NEWSREEL 609: Gen. Franco Reviews a Parade in Madrid; Hitler and Mussolini meet in Salzburg and at the Berghof; German Armament Workers Honored on May Day; German Soldiers and Horses Struggle Against Mud and Flooding in Russia; Luftwaffe FW190 Fighter Planes in Action over the English Channel.

NEWSREEL 610: Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg receives Farmers from Ukraine, Belorussia, and Russia; Fight against Soviet Partisans in the Crimea; JU 52 Cargo Planes Ferry Supplies to Forward Units on the Eastern Front. U-boat Action in the Atlantic.

NEWSREEL 611: Romanian Troops Parade in Bucharest; Captain Topp's U-boat Returns to Port after Sinking 7 Allied Freighters; German and Finnish Troops in Action on the Murmansk Front; After Heavy fighting Kerch in the Crimea Captured by German Troops.

NEWSREEL 614: Hitler Flies to Finland and Meets with Finnish President Ritti and Field Marshal Mannerheim; Massed Soviet Tanks and Infantry Attack German Positions near Kharkov; German, Italian, Romanian and Hungarian Troops Counterattack and Surround 3 Soviet Armies; Nearly a Quarter of Million Soviet Soldiers Surrender.

DISK 2: Jun 18, 1942 - Jul 15, 1942

NEWSREEL 615: Funeral Services for Assassinated SS General Reinhard Heydrich in Prague and Berlin; Capture of Bir Hacheim by Afrika Korps; Siege of Sevastopol - Last Pictures of a German Cameraman Killed in Action; After Bitter Fighting, German and Romanian troops surround Sevastopol.

NEWSREEL 617: In North Africa Rommel Directs an Attack on the British 8th Army; Fierce Fighting in the Gazala Line - in 10 Days the British Lose over 10,000 men captured and 550 Tanks; German and Italian Troops Launch an Attack on British-held Tobruk; Tobruk Capitulates - Field Marshal Kesselring Enters the Captured Fortress; Advance guard reaches the Port Area of Sevastopol.

NEWSREEL 618: Volkhov Front: Soviets' Failed Attempt to Free Leningrad; Battle of Stevastopol; Africa After Tobruk Victory; Capture of Mersa Matruh.

NEWSREEL 619: Munich Art Exhibit; Advance Toward the Don; U-Boat Homecomings; Capture of Voronezh.

9 Original German Wartime Newsreels with English Subtitles.

255 Minutes - Nearly 4 Hours on Two DVD Disks.

April 22, 1941 - July 15, 1941

SPECIAL PRICE REDUCTION!

See and hear the entire war from the German perspective!

DVD99 - Through Enemy Eyes vol.8

Details: Germany, 1942, B&W, Total running time: 255 minutes, German with English subtitles.

$40.00 $30 +s/h

Of the seventy five hours of World War Two German newsreels presented in the series, “Through Enemy Eyes,” Volume 8 illustrates the great turning-point of that conflict. Until the death of SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, the Axis powers were everywhere victorious. His assassination on 4 June 1942 allowed traitors inside the Third Reich, such as the anti-Nazi chief of military intelligence, Wilhelm Canaris, to warn the Allies in advance of all Axis attacks. The inertia of Wehrmacht successes from the previous three years would carry German fortunes through the next several months. But Anglo-American and Soviet field operations would soon catch up with the flood of top secret data pouring in from their unsuspecting enemy.

Before Heydrich’s assassination, Disk 1 of Volume 8 opens with Hitler’s 53rd birthday, which he appears to have celebrated with Spartan simplicity at his field headquarters, where such notables as Herrmann Goering and Heinrich Himmler pay their respects. In a more formal celebration, Wilhelm Furtwaengler’s Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra performs the final section of the choral from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. For music lovers, seeing and hearing the incomparable Erna Berger and great Peter Anders are especially rewarding.

The action shifts to the northern sector of the Eastern Front, where SS action teams flush out Red partisans from snow drifts still piled high in late spring. Refurbishing of Army equipment, from small arms to half-tracks, provides modelers and historians with intimate views of hardware details seldom provided elsewhere, and shows that the Germans were fresh and ready for a renewal of the desperate struggle.

The same kind of revealing close-up angles highlight Focke-Wulf-190 interceptors, their pilots and crews, as they respond to an RAF attack along the Channel coast. Combat footage shows British aircraft crumbling under the 20-mm cannons of the Luftwaffe’s foremost fighter-plane of the time. Featured is Joachim Müncheberg, who would die the following year over Tunisia, when his 135th victim, a U.S.-flown Spitfire, Müncheberg’s 135th victim, exploded in front of him after a too-close burst of cannon fire. Müncheberg was something of a specialist in hunting Spitfires, eventually claiming 46 victims of this type. He was excelled in his expertise only by his comrade, Josef Priller, also appearing here, who destroyed 68 Spitfires and survived the war until 1961.

Back in Germany, Deutsche Wochenschau cameras visit the studio of Arno Brecker, the Third Reich’s most famous sculptor, and linger over his monumental statuary.

On the Eastern Front again, that Luftwaffe’s work-horse of the skies, the Junkers-52, is singled out for the invaluable services this rugged, capacious aircraft rendered throughout the campaign. On the ground, Sturmgeschuetze assault guns blast their way through Red Army defenses.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, a u-boat’s voyage to the east coast of the United States climaxes with a spectacular night-time attack on a large tanker that erupts into flames.

Hitler boards his 4-engine Focke-Wulf 200 Condor for a flight to somewhere along the Finnish border. There, he is greeted by Marshal Mannerheim, whose troops are soon after shown shoulder to shoulder with German soldiers preventing a Red Army breakout from Leningrad. It was in this battle that the Red Army General Vlasov, who afterwards raised a division of Russian volunteers for the Wehrmacht, was captured. Meanwhile, Italian, Croat and Romanian allies in the south tighten the fatal Axis pinchers around Sevastopol, as evidenced by brewed-up British tanks, the few that survived the devastated Allied convoys to Archangel.

Disk Two opens with Heydrich’s funeral, which began in Prague and ended in Berlin, at the Invaliden cemetery for the most honoured military dead. The turning-point his assasination embodied was obscured by the German steamroller’s irrepressible conquest of Tobruk, Africa’s greatest fortress, showcased here, and continuing u-boat success that accounted for more war material sunk than the U.S. could produce, as shown by the triumphant homecoming accorded Kriegsmarine submariners.

To German audiences exposed to these mid-1942 films, the final victory of their country seemed a foregone conclusion. They could not guess that such an outcome and hinged upon the death of just one man. The millions who watched Heydrich’s state funeral in person and as it appears in newsreel number 615 for 18 June never imagined that they were simultaneously observing the beginning of their ultimate defeat.

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