- CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) -- Amateur movies shot by Adolf Hitler's pilot showing
him touring occupied Paris and consoling war wounded have surfaced in the
basement of a former U.S. army sergeant.
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- Herbert St. Goar headed an intelligence
branch of the U.S. military government in Germany when he learned of 16
cans of Hitler's home movies in 1945 and 1946.
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- St. Goar said he kept four cans as a
war souvenir and showed them to friends and civic groups over the years
before stashing them in his basement and forgetting about them.
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- A visitor from Switzerland recently persuaded
him to turn over the film to Der Spiegel magazine for an undisclosed price.
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- The movies show Hitler's travels around
Europe, from meetings with Benito Mussolini in Rome in 1938 to a quick
tour of newly occupied Paris on June 28, 1940.
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- The Paris trip includes the only known
colour shots of Hitler visiting German war wounded, Der Spiegel reported
Monday.
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- Hans Guenther Voigt from the Berlin Federal
Film Archive called the reels "authentic" and "extremely
interesting as contemporaneous documentation."
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- The Munich Institute for Contemporary
History called them an important addition to film material about Hitler.
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- St. Goar, 82, suffered seizures late
Sunday and was in the intensive care unit of Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga
on Monday, said his wife, Maria St. Goar.
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- "Maybe there was too much excitement,"
she said.
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- At home earlier Sunday, St. Goar told
WTVC-TV he was in Munich in late 1945 or early 1946 interviewing German
army officers and soldiers to learn their involvement in Nazi atrocities
when a man revealed he had been one of Hitler's pilots.
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- "He said, 'Well, I tell you a thing
I also did. I took movies of Hitler,'" St. Goar recalled. "I
said, 'What happened to those movies?' He said, 'I hid them in my back
yard in Munich.'"
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- They drove to the pilot's home and dug
up the reels. No film projector was available in the military office, so
St. Goar did not see the movies until he returned to Chattanooga in October
1946.
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- He said he gave 12 reels to his commanding
officer and kept four. Mrs. St. Goar said it was not unusual for soldiers
to keep souvenirs.
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- St. Goar, who is Jewish, was born in
Hamburg, Germany, immigrated to the United States in 1938 and became a
citizen five years later.
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