36 Hours

[Albert Doyle]

I watched the movie '36 Hours' on Turner Classic Movies last night. It's a clever story about an American officer in WWII who is kidnapped by the Nazis in order to find out the date and location of the D-Day invasion. German Intelligence drugs James Garner and takes him to an entire false American Army hospital they constructed in Germany stocked with Americanized Nazis who pretended they were the real deal. The head Nazi psychiatrist tricked Garner into thinking he was finally waking up out of 6 years of amnesia and that it was 1950. The psychiatrist then told Garner trying to remember what he did right before his amnesia would help him recover. When asked about his D-Day briefings Garner spilled the Normandy location. I won't give away what happened from there because this movie is worth catching just for its obvious 1965 era Intelligence tactics consultation.

The reason I posted this in the Kennedy section is because when the Nazis brought fake 1950's newspapers in to fool James Garner the front page said "President Wallace Plans World Wide Peace Initiative" The headline next to it was a story about FDR going to Warm Springs. Knowing this was 1965 and just after the JFK assassination I couldn't help but think the liberal Hollywood creators of '36 Hours' were telegraphing Freudian association of FDR's death with Kennedy's peace initiatives. The underlying suggestion being one had something to do with the other. You know, Kennedy's renown peace efforts had something to do with his own "Warm Springs". The plot of '36 Hours' has the equivalent of MK-ULTRA scientists and Gestapo along with their political rivalries as a rather noticeable analogy.

[Tracy Riddle]

I've seen that before; it was a good film. Always liked James Garner.

That reminded me of an alternative history film called "Fatherland" -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatherland_%281994_film%29

In the prologue, the failure of the D-Day invasion forces the United States to withdraw from the war in Europe and for Dwight Eisenhower to retire in disgrace. The US still continues the Pacific war against Japan and wins. In Europe, Winston Churchill is exiled to Canada and dies in 1953; Edward VIII returns to the throne. Germany, which has corralled all European countries into a single state named "Germania," fights on against the USSR well into the 1960s. The 1960 election of US President Joseph Kennedy gives the Nazi leadership a chance to secure a better understanding with Washington in light of its clandestine support of the Soviets. As Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday on April 20, 1964 looms and President Kennedy is coming over for a summit meeting, Germania opens its borders to US media. However, some questions emerge about the supposed Jewish resettlement' in the east during the war.

A body is found floating in a lake near Berlin. SS Major Xavier March starts investigating the body and the witness who saw it being dumped. The dead person is revealed to be Josef Buehler, a retired Nazi Party official who managed the resettlement. However, the Gestapo takes over the case for "state security" reasons; the witness' death in a gymnastics accident is implied to be carried out by the Gestapo.
Meanwhile, Charlie McGuire, a member of a visiting US press entourage, runs into an old man who slips her an envelope. A picture in the envelope leads her to Wilhelm Stuckhart, but she finds him dead at his apartment. March is assigned to the Stuckhart case, but when he takes McGuire to where she found the body the Gestapo shows up and March is again taken off the case. Following up on the photo, McGuire and March visit Wannsee to learn the names of those who attended the Wannsee Conference and discover they're all dead except for Franz Luther - the man who gave her the original picture. March tells McGuire to get out as he now realizes this is a plot at the very highest levels. Luther sits beside McGuire inside a train and asks for safe passage to the US so he can reveal what he knows about the resettlement. SS troops corner Luther at Humboldthain station and kill him, while Xavier later blackmails a colleague to get Luther's file.

Posing as a US Embassy official sent to process Luther's safe passage, McGuire visits his mistress, former stage actress Anna von Hagen, and gets all of his papers, but not before learning from Von Hagen that the Jews were killed. March, who is shocked at seeing the files, plans to join McGuire in escaping Germania with his son. Seeing Gestapo chief General Globus appear with his men, March kills one operative and flees, stopping at a nearby phone booth to call his son one more time before he dies from his wounds. As Kennedy arrives at the Great Hall, a member of the press entourage helps McGuire slip the documents to the president via the US ambassador. Kennedy ponders about the materials before deciding to fly back to the US immediately.
In the epilogue, it is revealed that the narrator is actually March's now-grown son. He says McGuire was eventually arrested by the Gestapo. The revelation of the mass slaughter of the Jews derails any prospect of a strategic alliance with the USA, resulting in the Nazi regime's collapse.

[Marlene Zenker]

and Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" (novel, not movie) http://www.amazon.com/Plot-Against-Ameri...hilip+roth

Book description from Amazon

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prizewinner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family and for a million such families all over the country during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.