Talk:Andrew Thorndike

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Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

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The subject's ideology(-ies) glossed over

Latest comment: 7 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion

We're informed in this article's lead/summary paragraph that Thorndike, born in 1909, "directed 16 films between 1949 and 1977." It is as the man suddenly sprang to life only at the age of forty.

When we reach the "Background" section, we're told that Thorndike started as an employee of UFA in 1931 and "quickly became head of the firm's advertising film division." The remainder of the 1930s are passed over silently, and suddenly in the 1940s Thorndike is making films for "the Supreme Command of the German Army and Navy."

As it happens, UFA (originally BUFA) was formed by the WWI-era German government and War Ministry; in the 1920s it was bought by Alfred Hugenberg, business magnate and industrialist of Krupp A.G., who supported Hitler and the Nazi Party during the late '20s with both money and favorable publicity from his media empire. By January 1933 Hugenberg had been appointed Hitler's Reichminister of Economics; and he then transferred actual ownership of UFA to the Nazi Party that same year.

I think it's a fair question to ask about Andrew Thorndike's relationship to the Nazi Party throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Did he join the NSDAP? If so, when?

This is especially relevant given that Thorndike's career seems essentially to have segued from producing and directing films for the Third Reich into, post-WWII, making tendentious Marxist "documentaries" for the East German government (the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) for and about the Soviet Bloc and the USSR – for example,"Wladimir Iljitsch Uljanow Lenin," "Das russische Wunder," "Du und mancher Kamerad," and so forth.

LewisChessman (talk) 12:39, 30 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

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