A new documentary film, the Russian-financed ‘Ost Front’ by director Andrey Osipov, comprised solely of captured WWII German archival film, is causing fear and anguish among Jews because it doesn’t focus on what they allegedly experienced:
In the new Russian World War II documentary “Ost Front” (“Eastern Front”) Nazis are painted with their own very human brush. Stitched together almost entirely from official WWII Nazi propaganda footage, audiences are treated to scenes of Nazis skating peacefully on a frozen river, reading letters from home and passing around photos of their babies. In one segment, as their tanks advance into Soviet territory, the soldiers frolic with a black puppy that came along for the ride.
The film was financed by Russia’s Ministry of Culture and screened last month at the Russian Documentary Film Festival in New York.
Director Andrey Osipov scoured Russian archives, watching over 167 hours of German footage to cherry pick never-before-seen moments like these from the German campaign in the Soviet Union. Osipov told The Times of Israel that he wanted to get an emotional response from the audience, to bring the WWII era alive, and to raise the question of how a civilized nation could lead its army to murder millions.
“Because most filmmakers don’t have the patience or the money, the same WWII footage gets reused from one film to the next,” said Osipov. “I worked a lot in the archive, and when I watched this stuff, I realized that there are a lot of things that no one saw before. These films also show our territory, our war – even though it was recorded from the other side.”
During a telephone interview, it was clear that Osipov is no Nazi sympathizer. He has a personal connection to the war — his grandfather, who was in the Red Army, was killed in Ukraine at the age of 37, leaving behind three orphaned sons. For decades, his fate and his burial place were unknown.
“This is the case in every family. Every family [in Russia] lost someone,” Osipov said. “So I wanted to show the price that we paid for victory, to show the strength of the enemy that we defeated. There were 5 million Soviet prisoners of war, and 3 million of them were murdered.”
At the same time, the film, which presents beautifully-shot Nazi footage without any commentary, depicts the Germans in a sympathetic light. Sometimes it appears as if the soldiers are on a camping trip, enjoying the camaraderie of their buddies. They work together to pull their trucks out of the mud, warm their feet on a snowy day, and treat themselves to fresh honey from a honeycomb.
While watching the documentary, viewers wait for the Nazi war crimes to be revealed — but that moment never comes.
Osipov said that in all of the official Nazi footage from the Eastern Front, he found nothing about prison camps or ghettos, or about the execution of civilians.
“They understood that they were sinning, that they were breaking the commandments – and they didn’t film it,” Osipov said.
“Maybe it was necessary to include their evildoings in the film, but I had deadlines, and by the end of the year I was so tired,” said Osipov. “I just didn’t have the opportunity to go to that archive. But I made the film for our generation, and everyone already knows about the crimes of the Germans.”
Boruch Gorin, spokesman for the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, said that a documentary about the Eastern Front that fails to mention the murder of millions of civilians amounts to falsifying history.
“The SS actively filmed what they did to civilians, especially what they did to the Jews,” said Gorin. “So [the documentary is] missing the central part of the story that explains what made this war different — it was about the intentional extermination of civilians. Because the footage of the atrocities is missing, the film seems fake to me.”
…“I don’t know which boxes they looked in, but they had to try hard not to come across even a single scene of the Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union,” Gorin said. “By not including even a minute of footage about the Holocaust, they are helping to hide the evidence of Nazi crimes.”
…“The Nazis were not monsters who were born with horns. They were ordinary boys. I’m against turning soldiers into Satan, because it makes it seem like the Holocaust wasn’t organized by humans, and in that case that it could never happen again. But it can happen again,” said Gorin.
Jews obviously believe they have a monopoly on films and books about World War II, all of which have the “moral” obligation to repeat ad nauseum the standard Allied atrocity propaganda. They have written and edited virtually all mainstream histories of the war so as to ensure that every reader will come to the same conclusion: i.e., World War II was about the Jews and no one else. If someone writes a book about WWII and doesn’t mention the “plight” of the Jews, then it must be “fake history” or pro-Nazi propaganda.
Someone should mention to Baruch Gorin that Churchill, Eisenhower, and DeGaulle all published books about World War II, together comprising over 5,000 pages of history, yet all three failed to mention hardly a word about the Jews. Why aren’t the Jews accusing those world leaders of writing “fake history”? The answer is quite obvious: if the Jews criticize those three, it might beg the question as to why these leaders did not think that whatever happened to the Jews was a significant part of the war even worth mentioning. Could it be that the Big Three didn’t believe their own wartime anti-German propaganda?
There is no doubt that God’s hand guided Mr. Osipov in the making of this film. May it be proliferated across the earth!