Hermann Herlinghaus
1982: East German actor Erwin Gregorek travels to Hamburg to shoot screen tests for a film about the sinking of the ocean-liner Cap Arcona in 1945 - a catastrophe he himself survived as a concentration camp prisoner.
Continually smiling or laughing, this man, a self-acknowledged Nazi, proudly reveals that he went to the Congo to save Western civilization from Bolshevism -- to complete the work of the Nazis. Dressed in his military jungle uniform (with his Second World War decorations) he waxes eloquent about the "colors" of South Africa, "explains" apartheid, and freely discusses his "adventures". Shots of corpses, tortures, and executions of Blacks are intercut. It is not often that one can see and hear a real, "live" Nazi in action, talking (more or less) freely because he presumed him-self to be among friends instead of with two of the most cleverpolitical propagandists of our time, working for the other side.
A polemical report. "Way to the neighbors" is the motto of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. In their "Remarks on the Oberhausen 66 Film Festival," the GDR documentarians Gerhard Scheumann and Walter Heynowski take the competition selection to task: They see formal experiments as "excesses on the big screen" and instead of political themes, they discover a "surge of perversity." After her own film "Kommando 52" was rejected by the festival, a criminal complaint by the GDR lawyer Friedrich-Karl Kaul against the mercenary and commander "Kongo-Müller" is the focus of a press conference. The refusal of a cinema owner to show the film was a "hint from the neighbors", the neighboring public order office, and therefore state censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany.
The biography of the German socialistic politician Karl Liebknecht and his fight against World War I.
