As a member of the U.S. Navy’s Office of Strategic Services Field Photographic Branch during World War II — the unit run by John Ford — Budd Schulberg helped transform raw, horrific wartime footage into prosecutorial evidence. After witnessing the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Schulberg and his colleagues worked with the Soviet-controlled custodian Georgy Avenarius at Babelsberg to obtain captured German newsreels and propaganda. The Field Photo team assembled two films that were presented at the Nuremberg Trials: Nazi Concentration Camps, built from Allied footage taken during liberations, and The Nazi Plan, compiled from German sources. In the course of that work Schulberg was directly involved in rounding up figures tied to propaganda; he reported arresting famed filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, and bringing her in to identify faces in the footage. Riefenstahl’s now-familiar line — that she was “misunderstood” and not political — met Schulberg’s blunt wartime scrutiny. The episode sits at an awful crossroads of cinema and atrocity: filmmakers’ images became evidence of crimes against humanity, and a generation of cinema professionals were swept from studio lots into courts where film itself helped convict perpetrators.
Preparing the daily feature…
AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1940s
The OSS Film Unit at Nuremberg: Schulberg, John Ford, two evidentiary films and the arrest of Leni Riefenstahl
Budd Schulberg / Field Photographic Branch (OSS) / 1940s
As a member of the U.S. Navy’s Office of Strategic Services Field Photographic Branch during World War II — the unit run by John Ford — Budd Schulberg helped transform raw, horrific wartime footage into prosecutorial evidence. After witnessing the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Schulberg and his colleagues worked with the Soviet-controlled custodian Georgy Avenarius at Babelsberg to obtain captured German newsreels and propaganda. The Field Photo team assembled two films that were presented at the Nuremberg Trials: Nazi Concentration Camps, built from Allied footage taken during liberations, and The Nazi Plan, compiled from German sources. In the course of that work Schulberg was directly involved in rounding up figures tied to propaganda; he reported arresting famed filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl at her chalet in Kitzbühel, Austria, and bringing her in to identify faces in the footage. Riefenstahl’s now-familiar line — that she was “misunderstood” and not political — met Schulberg’s blunt wartime scrutiny. The episode sits at an awful crossroads of cinema and atrocity: filmmakers’ images became evidence of crimes against humanity, and a generation of cinema professionals were swept from studio lots into courts where film itself helped convict perpetrators.
The daily feature is taking an intermission. There’s still an entire archive to explore.