- Person
- Billy Wilder
- Lived
- 1906–2002
- Field
- Film
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Billy Wilder was born in 1906 into a Jewish family in Sucha, in Galicia, and made his early career as a journalist and screenwriter in Berlin. The day after the Reichstag fire in 1933 he sold his belongings and took a train to Paris, and about a year later he reached Hollywood. He had little success persuading his relatives to leave Europe, and his mother, stepfather and grandmother remained behind.
By 1945 Wilder was one of Hollywood's leading directors, fresh from Double Indemnity. That year he returned to a defeated Germany to work with the American occupation authorities on clearing Nazi influence out of German cultural life. Among the projects of the Psychological Warfare Department of the US War Department was a film meant to confront ordinary Germans with what had been done in their name.
The result was Death Mills, or Die Todesmühlen, a 22-minute documentary built from footage shot as Allied troops liberated the camps. It is a much-shortened version of material gathered for a British government documentary, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, which was not completed until nearly seven decades later. The film opens with German townspeople at Gardelegen carrying crosses to a burial site, and shows piles of corpses, starving survivors, crematoria, mass graves and heaps of shoes, clothes and wedding rings taken from the victims. Hanuš Burger was credited as writer and director of the German version, while Wilder supervised the editing and is credited with the English-language version, though he later insisted there had been nothing to direct.
The German version was shown in the American sector of Germany in January 1946, part of the Allied effort to make sure the crimes of the camps could not be denied or forgotten. Orson Welles later used footage from it in his thriller The Stranger.
While in Germany, Wilder learned that his mother, stepfather and grandmother had died. For decades they were assumed to have been killed at Auschwitz, but in 2011 his biographer Andreas Hutter found that his mother was murdered at Płaszów in 1943, his stepfather at Bełżec in 1942, and his grandmother in the ghetto of Nowy Targ. Wilder later hoped to film Schindler's Ark as a memorial to them, and he answered Holocaust deniers by asking where, then, his mother was.
Why it matters
Death Mills was one of the first films to put the evidence of the camps before the German public, part of the Allied effort to ensure the crimes could not be denied.
About Billy Wilder
Refugee from Nazi Berlin who became Hollywood’s sharpest writer-director, making Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, and winning six competitive Oscars.
More about Billy Wilder
- Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity helped define film noirBilly Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), co-written with Raymond Chandler, became one of the defining films of film noir.
- Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend took addiction seriouslyBilly Wilder's 1945 film The Lost Weekend, a stark portrait of an alcoholic writer, won the Oscar for Best Picture and the top prize at the first Cannes festival.
- Billy Wilder co-wrote the landmark film People on SundayIn 1930 a young Billy Wilder co-wrote People on Sunday, a low-budget film about ordinary Berliners on a day off that became a landmark of realist cinema.
- Billy Wilder stood up for blacklisted colleaguesIn 1947 Billy Wilder joined the Committee for the First Amendment, which defended Hollywood figures targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Sources
- Billy Wilder Wikipedia
- Death Mills Wikipedia
- Entertainment icons Milton Berle and Billy Wilder die J. The Jewish News of Northern California
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