Russians At War DVD

Assembled by American documentary film maker and editor Helen Van Dongan using government approved newsreel footage taken by anonymous Soviet cameramen. This pro-soviet treatment of the Russian winter offensive of 1941-42 was designed as propaganda for the American public. Red Army forces enter recently liberated Soviet towns and villages and are greeted enthusiastically by the local inhabitants. Ordinary Russian civilians: everyone from housewives to schoolchildren participate in the war effort, working around the clock in munitions factories. Partisans and regular army troops share food and tobacco behind enemy lines, German troops, holed up in a house, are surrounded, then taken prisoner. Luftwaffe pilots are also captured while Soviet propaganda leaflets are dropped behind enemy lines, guaranteeing safe haven in the Soviet Union for any Nazi serviceman who voluntarily surrenders, one of these captured pilots speaks to his comrades over a loudspeaker to “prove” he is being treated decently. Workers, infantrymen, and officers pledge up to half of their pay to the war effort. Soviet troops at the front enjoy their Saturday night bath. Mail from home and the patriotic “fighting newspaper” are delivered to the front.

USSR, 1943, B&W, 60 minutes, English narration.

NTSC Region 0 encoding (Entire World)<