Who do you know who deserves to receive this donation? I have historical documents that should be preserved.

Oh Dark Thirty

Somewhere lost in the rubble of Nazi Germany or possibly in some warehouse of captured documents and artifacts like the one depicted in Raiders of the Lost Ark, are the remnants of the propaganda pumped out during World War II by Paul Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry. Somehow miraculously, two fragile filmstrips found their way into my hands and I'm wondering what to do with them. 

Both filmstrips are Photographic Reports of the Week, one for Week 42 of 1939 and the other for Week 47 of 1941. My father claimed that they had been given to him by a family friend who had carried them back from the war among his souvenirs. I have wondered in later years if this was true inasmuch as he had been a Nazi sympathizer before the United States entered the war. He liked to pretend that he was German, indeed claiming that was his parents' origin. In fact, they were Slovak immigrants who worshiped at the German Lutheran Church. He hung out at the Deutches Haus German Restaurant and Social Club in Baltimore until it was closed during the war. (I have no knowledge or evidence that any organization that assembled at the Deutches Haus was guilty of crimes any more than the Japanese who were interred during WWII.)

Deutches House, Baltimore, Maryland

I can imagine these filmstrips being presented at the Deutches Haus. The filmstrip for Week 47 of 1941 could have arrived in the mails about the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II. In later years, my father waxed poetic about the prospect of a better world had Hitler won the war.

I'm guessing that they were presented to the German public by members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) – National Socialist German Worker's Party (NAZI) – reading from prepared scripts. Unfortunately, the scripts didn't accompany the filmstrips and I have yet to locate copies through Internet searches. The time lines for these two weeks found on Wikipedia provide events that seem to align with some of the images.

Week 42/1939 – October 15 to 21

• Oct 16: First air attack on Great Britain, aimed at ships in the Firth of Forth, Scotland
  


• Oct 18: First Soviet forces enter Estonia. During the Umsiedlung (Resettlement), 12,600 Baltic Germans leave Estonia
  


• Oct 19: Portions of Poland are formally inducted into Germany; the first Jewish ghetto is established at Lublin
  


• Oct 20: The Phoney War: French troops settle in the Maginot Line's dormitories and tunnels; the British build new fortifications along the gap between the Maginot Line and the Channel
  


• Oct 20: Pope Pius XII's first encyclical condemns racism and dictatorships
  

Week 47/1941 – November 16 to 27

• Nov 17: Joseph Grew, the United States Ambassador to Japan, cables the State Department that Japan had plans to launch an attack against Pearl Harbor, Hawaii (his cable is ignored)
  


• Nov 17: Ernst Udet, head of the Luftwaffe's Production and Development, commits suicide over his perceived inability to properly perform his mission
  


• Nov 18: Operation Crusader: British Commonwealth and other Allied troops cross into Libya and at least temporarily relieve the Siege of Tobruk
  


• Nov 19: Australian light cruiser HMAS Sydney and the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran sink each other off the coast of Western Australia. All 648 crewmen on HMAS Sydney are lost.
  


• Nov 22: Rostov-on-Don, an important hub on the southern front, is taken by the Germans.
  


• Nov 22: Britain issues an ultimatum to Finland to end war with the Soviet Union or face war with the Allies
  


• Nov 22: Rommel starts a counteroffensive, retaking Sidi Rezegh (south of Tobruk) which the Allies had taken a few days earlier. British tank losses are heavy.
  

Many years ago, I chopped both filmstrips into individual frames and preserved them in slide mounts for viewing in modern projectors. Inasmuch as these devices are now disappearing, I have digitized the images by photographing them while displayed on a homemade rear projection screen. Not the best reproductions, but the paid service I used returned tiny digital files that produced tiny images on computer screens.

I am willing to entertain offers from reputable historical scholars and institutions who would like to add them their collections. I would donate them rather than see them destroyed. The images will be preserved at least for a time on this posting in my blog, but I can't imagine that this website will outlive me by much...