Gerhard Scheumann

Produced by DEFA and broadcast in four parts in 1968, this documentary series consists of extended interviews with ten United States Air Force and Navy pilots captured during bombing missions over North Vietnam. Filmed at Hỏa Lò Prison in Hanoi, the films focus on the pilots’ backgrounds, military service, and views on the bombing campaign and the war.

Posing as West German journalists, East German documentary filmmakers Heynowski and Scheumann pay a visit to the notorious Nazi-turned-mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, pump him with booze, and get him to talk about his life and war campaigns in Africa.

A flat as a human basic right and need; that is what Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Secretary General of the United Nations spoke of in 1987. The trilogy “The Third Skin” is about the persons concerned on five continents: people searching for flats, architects, politicians, estate agents, homeless, UNO experts, construction workers, sociologists and social workers, street kids, pastors, philosophers and jurists. The reason for working on the documentary for two and a half years was the International UNO Year 1987 of Shelter for the Homeless

Through interviews, the film reconstructs the life stories of eight former NATO generals from the FRG, France, Greece, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal.

Documentary film

At a Bach concert, a letter is read aloud in which the legation council of the Federal Republic of Germany tries to poach the musicians of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Nicosia.

Moy de Tohá and Isabel Letelier tell their story. They are the widows of two Defence Ministers of the Unidad Popular, who knew too much.

Weeks after the victory in Vietnam, first pictures of a new humanity are captured: old and sick people preparing for their future, children on their way to school.

Portrait of the industrialist Walter Hunger from Frankenberg in Saxony. He left the German Democratic Republic in 1958 with his family and closest colleagues to build up one the most significant hydraulics enterprises in the Federal Republic of Germany.

After becoming notorious world-wide for a bloody killing, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, former general and chief of the South Vietnamese police, moved to the United States and opened a restaurant outside of Washington, D.C. Contrasting images from these two phases of his life are intercut.

In the spring of 1974, a camera team from Studio H&S succeeded against the explicit orders of the Junta’s Chancellery, entered into two large concentration camps in the north of the country - Chacabuco and Pisagua - leaving with filmed sequences and sound recordings.

The goal of the American operation "Phoenix" in Vietnam was to destroy all the bases of the liberation struggle. K. Barton Osborn, a former "Phoenix" officer, who publicly disassociated himself from it, talks about his experiences as a CIA agent. They are confirmed by the statements of General Bui Van Nhu, the last chief of the South Vietnamese police

Salvador Allende’s last radio speech is given in full; nothing is interposed. The translation of the speech appears in subtitles, individual passages are placed into the center of the picture. Film scenes and photos underline Allende’s call to his citizens. The film ends with a slow close-up to the face of the President.

The story of communist Walter Zauner who in 1952 was one of the first in the Federal Republic to be convicted of sabotage of a military installation.

Heynowski and Scheumann infiltrate the ultra-right-wing Chilean organization Patria y Libertad

Chile 1985, the repression of the Chilean people by the dictatorship and the resistance, accompanied by the music of the exiled composer Angel Parra.

The desperate private war of a Vietnam veteran of the US Army. The Film explores the biggest amok run in the history of the USA at that point of time. The story of a mass murder in San Diego on July 18 1984 is told by showing reports of a local TV station. It turns out that the amok was partly caused by traumatic experiences during the Vietnam War.

An interview with Madame Buchela, a West German clairvoyant.

A card game is introduced: “Nuclear War". An entertaining, jolly card game for between two and six players, reads an ad for a game made in USA.

Le Quang Vinh, a revolutionary student leader, was arrested in Saigon in August 1961. A show trial and death sentence followed. World-wide protests altered it to “life imprisonment” on Con Son, the Devil’s Island. The humiliating “Tiger-Cages” and the methods of torture are shown.