Camp Confidential: America's Secret Nazis

It's an introduction people, not a college course. What did you expect from a 30 minute animated short? It's something young adults can watch. Educational but not as distributing as say Schindler's List. Makes you want to learn more about the subject. For more, Google Operation Paperclip. This is what is about - I'm surprised they didn't mention it in the program.

First off, the camp is never mentioned by name. It apparently is Fort Hunt, about 4 miles south of Alexandria, VA. Secondly, these "secret Nazis" included Germans who were actually opposed to Hitler and many were willing to provide intel about Germany's (and later Russia's) rocket programs. Third, the use of animation is distracting and clearly meant to draw in younger viewers. Finally, considering the subject matter, the documentary is too short. Why not have footage of the remaining compound and fort, which is still standing and part of the National Park Service?

A fascinating subject that needs a longer running time.

A "documentary" about German scientists after the war, not about secret American Nazis.

Wernher von Braun applied for membership of the Nazi Party on 12 November 1937, and was issued membership number 5,738,692. That doesn't mean he was a Nazi per se, but rather that he didn't want to be persecuted or killed.

Were it not for von Braun John F. Kennedy's space program would have had a much harder time reaching the moon, and NASA would maybe never have become what it is today. Or rather, what it used to be before the 2000's.

My point is that the documentary makes a click bait claim of "secret Nazis" when the subjects were not killing anyone or sending them to interment camps. Could they have resisted German aggression? Maybe, maybe not. Germans resisting Hitler and his minions did not fare well at all.

POBOX1142 was a secret prison camp located near Washington that housed Nazi prisoners during World War 2 with an express view to extract information regarding Hitler v2 rocket program. Many of the guards and interrogators were Jewish refugees from Europe serving in the US Army and it's from interviews with these men this story is told. Post WW2 the dynamics of these guards and prisoners change as the Americans illegally bring in more of these Nazi scientists to work on their own programmes and suddenly the Jewish guard's relationship is to keep the Nazi's happy and serve their needs serving them drinks, taking them to the cinema and night clubs, arranging gifts for their families in Germany etc. This leads to the uncomfortable moral question of how these prisoners many of which were war criminals should have been dealt with especially by men who lost their families and homes in the holocaust. Interesting and engaging and a novel take with the use of animations. It probably deserved a longer running time and more in-depth look. 7/10.

I'm going to go out on a limb and call this documentary excellent for a number of reasons which I considered while watching the documentary. Most WW2 documentaries made in the recent past have been very sensationalized in order to to perhaps appeal to the masses rather than a narrow base who like world war two in a deep sense, learning facts and figures and small stories etc (youtubers have taken up this rolls) . Documentaries that allow veterans of the war to tell their own story are now almost impossible to make because the majority of them have died because of old age. So having a documentary that has two veterans tell the tale of their unique experience during WW2 is so pleasing but also a bit sad because it will be one of the last such documentaries. This documentary isn't the typical Battle of Normandy or Pearl Harbour documentary thats reasonably common. It looks at a smaller piece of a war that lasted almost a decade (if one includes Japan's early exploits). The story here is the how young Jewish soldiers were made to interrogate while also welcome, potentially useful scientists. I had no idea this occured. It reminded me of a Mark Felton who is a youtuber who makes small videos about the more obscure tales of World War 2. Yet its brought to life, some ww2 footage but mostly with nice animation. Which I found looked quite nice.

Thinking about the strategy of having jews trying to be handlers and interrogators, seems counter productive, but alas it happened. Anyway 9/10 for me as a great ww2 and Netflix documentary. Watch if you enjoy ww2.