The History of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit in the Second World War

By Fred McGlade

At the beginning of the Second World War the Nazi hierarchy at an early stage, had fully recognized the importance of controlling the depiction of military conflict in order to ensure the continued morale of their combat troops by providing a bridge between the soldiers and their families. Promoting the use of photographic record also allowed the Nazis to exercise control over negative depictions of the war. In contrast, the British military and political decision makers were reluctance to embrace any potential propaganda benefits of film and photographic material in the build up to and the early months of the Second World War. Military commanders in the field were conscious that their tactical blunders could be recorded on film and still photographs and made available to the British public. Visions such as the First World War use of troops as fodder for machine guns and the ensuing mud-coated corpses of British troops were not the sort of record of the conflict that British generals in the field were willing to contemplate. British politicians and their generals feared that a realistic presentation of the horror of war could have an adverse effect on recruiting. However, pressure was to come from across the Atlantic where the refusal to allow reporting of the war was harming Britain's cause in the United States and British diplomats overseas reported that the Germans were winning the propaganda war throughout the unoccupied countries of Europe. This belated acceptance of the need for open reporting of the conflict meant that when it was finally accepted as useful the P.R.2 Section (Public Relations) at the War Office and the British Military found itself in a 'catch up' situation. Despite the disadvantages of such a slow start, the British combat cameramen grew in strength throughout the conflict, producing films such as Desert Victory, Tunisian Victory, Burma Victory, The True Glory and a huge stock of both cine and still material lodged as 'Crown Property' in the Imperial War Museum, London. The British Army Film and Photographic Unit's material represents some of the most frequently used records of historical events and key figures of the period. It is utilized by film producers and television program makers without the camera men who shot the footage being listed in program credits. This book does not seek to denigrate the work of others such as Accredited War Correspondents but it does seek to accord to the combat camera men of the A.F.P.U. the recognition they are entitled to, but have never received, for their enormous and unique contribution to the historical record of the Second World War. Based on memoirs, personal letters and interviews with the AFPU camera men, this book reveals the development of the unit and tells the human story of men who used cameras as weapons of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helion and Company
• Release date: Apr 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781907677953

Fred McGlade

Fred McGlade is an editor specializing in World War II history.

Book preview

1

An Introduction

The gathering of photographic material in conflict was not a new activity at the onset of World War Two. The first extensive photographic documentation of a war was the coverage of the Crimean War (1853-1856) by photographer Roger Fenton. Born in 1819, the second son of a mill owner and banker, Fenton studied as a painter in around 1839 with Charles Lucy, a member of the Royal Academy, and then moved to a more advanced level of study in the studio of Paul Delaroche in Paris.¹

Photography was probably the major artistic innovation of the Victorian era and Fenton was at the forefront of the campaign in England to secure for photography a status as an endeavour worthy of artistic consideration. He was commissioned to photograph the Crimean War by Thomas Agnew, an art dealer, to support the official view of the war and to describe the position of the Allies for the population at home. Under the direct patronage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert the photographs produced were intended to show the more positive side of the campaign although among the pictures he produced during the war is ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, probably the first photograph to bring home the full horror of war. The picture shows a slight gully in a battlefield in which churned up ground is seen turned to mud by the tracks of many vehicles that have run the gauntlet that was clearly a precisely located target for enemy batteries.²

The cameras used by Fenton were cumbersome, tripod-mounted affairs taking glass negatives, which had to be coated with the appropriate chemicals on the spot and developed in a mobile darkroom immediately after exposure and the slow wet-plate technique he used meant that his photographs needed carefully arranged subjects, with the adequate time and light for long exposure and a site convenient for his van. However, by the onset of the First World War improvements in photographic technology and development of communications had meant that news reached a much greater proportion of the population than ever before.³

In World War One military aversion to press correspondents was driven by Lord Kitchener, who had hated war correspondents since the Sudan and was determined not to have them in France. The British General Staff had similar ideas on the role of the press. Censorship had been imposed on 2 August 1914 and Kitchener’s only concession to informing the public about the military situation was to appoint an officer, Colonel Sir Ernest Swinton, to the staff of the commander-in-chief to write reports on the progress of the war. These, after being vetted by several Generals and Kitchener himself, were released to the press under the by-line ‘Eye witness’. One editor is reported to have remarked after reading Swinton’s heavily censored dispatch, ‘Eye wash would have been a better pseudonym’.⁴ Kitchener was so opposed to war correspondents getting anywhere near the war that in early 1915 in France he ordered the arrest of a number of correspondents. One correspondent, Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle, in order to avoid Kitchener’s censorship, managed to get himself appointed as a special commissioner to the Red Cross to report on field hospitals in France. At this stage there were dozens of relief organisations in France so Gibbs reasoned that one correspondent with the right papers could lose himself easily. He was arrested on a boat about to leave Le Havre and kept under open arrest for ten days. Kitchener warned Gibbs that if he returned to France he would be put up against a wall and shot.⁵

There were three main categories of photographer in the First World War, press, official and amateur. Photographers were either given commissioned status or allowed special access on a limited basis, and the material they produced was subject to both military and civilian censorship. Considerable military and political suspicion of such freely available access to wartime depictions was a limiting influence on the work of these photographers, as were the limitations of their equipment. However, eventually there was at least one official photographer appointed to cover every theatre of the war including the most important battleground, the Western Front. The work of the official photographers was initially intended for publication in the home press and for circulation as propaganda material abroad.⁶ Whatever the limitations placed on them, these photographers managed to produce a remarkable record of the conflict.

Kitchener’s fear must surely have been that realistic depictions of the horror of war could have an adverse effect on recruiting. The deferential society in Britain at the start of the First World War was initially a relatively easy recruiting ground for the British Army. However, when the Generals, in the absence of military success, found their large armies being reduced by the trench stalemate, the constant use of troops as fodder for machine guns soon led to disillusionment among the people who had so enthusiastically supported the war at the beginning. Previously Britain, with its Defence of the Realm Consolidation Act, had created a rigid system of censorship and fostered a relationship with newspaper proprietors that led to the acceptance of and control over what was told to the public at large, in return for the rewards of social rank and political power. This control however was to lead to the undermining of public faith in the press. War correspondents, who unlike most people had knowledge of the realities and horrors of the trench war, did little to relay the truth to the nation. Sir Philip Gibbs, who had been appointed as a war correspondent by the War Office in 1915, attempted to explain, ‘Nobody believed us. Though some of us wrote the truth from the first to the last, apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of the facts, which did not come within the liberty of our pen’.⁷

Pressure was eventually to come from across the Atlantic. A letter on 22 January 1915 to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, from the former American President Theodore Roosevelt said bluntly that the British Government’s refusal to allow war correspondents to pursue their tasks was harming Britain’s cause in the United States: ‘There has been a very striking contrast between the lavish attention showered on war correspondents by the German military authorities and the point-blank refusal to have anything to do with them from the British and the French’. Eventually the Cabinet began to press the British High Command to agree to having a few ‘writing chappies’ with their armies in the field. ⁸

The first establishment of British and Imperial official photographers on the Western Front began in 1916 when Ernest Brooks was transferred from the Admiralty to the War Office and given the rank of Second Lieutenant. He was followed by John Warwick Brooke of the Topical Press agency, whose name had been put forward by the Proprietors Association of Press Photographic Agencies, an organisation formed to represent the interests of the trade. The first official photographers had been admitted the previous year but 1916 saw great expansion due to this Cabinet pressure.⁹

With this official status, however, came a high degree of responsibility. Contemporary standards of decency meant that unpleasant depictions of the wounded and the dead, while not being ignored, were focused on the less badly hurt. Photographs of fly-blown bloated corpses were taken but these were kept to a minimum as the military and the press were in tacit agreement as to what was acceptable for publishing.¹⁰

The problems of military aversion to war correspondents continued throughout the First World War and were never fully overcome. What could and could not be reported was summed up by General J.V. Charteris, Chief of Intelligence, when asked by a correspondent how much of the action he was allowed to report: ‘Say what you like, old man. But don’t mention any places or people’. Given these restrictions the war correspondent might just as well have stayed in London.¹¹

At the end of the First World War, in 1918, despite the formation of the MOI, British official photography remained a small operation trying to cover events on a huge scale and further complicated by bureaucratic tangles in the background. The Armistice in 1918 brought the speedy dissolution of the MOI and the work of the photographers ended after a brief attempt to cover the army of occupation in Germany.¹²

Military opposition to photography in the First World War extended to film, with Kitchener’s distrust of journalists making him determined to apply rigorous management to both the gathering of photographic and filmic material. With regard to film this was particularly out of step with the cooperation which had taken place between the cinema trade and the service departments prior to the outbreak of hostilities. As early as September 1900 the British filmmaker R.W. Paul had produced a series of films under the general title, Army Life, or How Soldiers Are Made. These short films, which combined factual footage and staged scenes, were made with the active cooperation of the War Office.¹³ In 1909 the Hepworth Manufacturing Company made In The Service Of The King following the career of an individual soldier, and four years later, Keith Prowse and Company, with official backing, repeated much the same story line on a larger scale with The British Army Film.¹⁴

Nicholas Reeves argues that the long months of negotiations to allow filming of the First World War can be explained in a number of ways:

Both the official propagandists and the cinema trade had been committed to the notion of a factual film propaganda from very early on in the war, but the fact that they each attempted separately to secure the necessary cooperation of the service departments obviously made a difficult set of negotiations even more complicated. Equally, for all its public commitment to film propaganda, the cinema trade itself may have been partly responsible for the delay in that it was determined to achieve a reasonable financial return on the films. But there can be little doubt that the War Office and the Admiralty were the chief stumbling blocks. Wary of releasing any news about the war, their profound ignorance of the cinema trade made it very difficult for them to trust people who, as they saw it, were engaged in the trivial, commercial enterprise of entertaining the masses. Nor did the intervention of the official propagandists serve to allay their fears – after all, as we have seen, they were probably as ignorant and as suspicious of them as they were of the trade itself. In a sense, what is remarkable about all this, is not that it took so long to negotiate these agreements, but that they were negotiated at all.¹⁵

It was 29 December 1915 before the first film Britain Prepared would be premiered. It was an immediate success and was soon exhibited in the U.K. This and subsequent releases were to be proudly advertised as ‘The Official Pictures’.¹⁶

By 4 January 1916, the cinema trade had its first opportunity to view footage shot be the first officially approved cameramen in France, Geoffrey Malins and E.C. ‘Teddy’ Tong.¹⁷ When Malins and Tong arrived in France they were attached to the Intelligence Department of GHQ, overall control of which was in the hands of Brigadier-General John Charteris. That part of the Intelligence Department responsible for publicity was known formally as I (d), although it was more commonly known as the Press Section. Captain J.C. Faunthorpe was an assistant press officer within the section and it was his responsibility to supervise the work of the official cameramen although Malins claimed that the cameramen were free to film wherever they chose. Charteris makes it clear that they were invariably conducted wherever they went and even if this was not the case, they filmed under distinct orders. The passes issued to Malins and Tong gave them access to only some particular locations. It was to be July 1918 before official cameramen were ordered to accept honorary rank. Malins and Tong wore officers’ uniform without rank or unit badges and without the distinctive green armband of the Press section.¹⁸

Film stock, cameras and tripod weighed over a hundred pounds. This made the official cameramen dependent on GHQ to provide them with cars to take them to locations. The low priority given to the needs of the cameramen meant that in practice sufficient cars were only available on average three days out of seven. The cameramen used a number of different cameras. Malins used the Debrie and Aeroscope and Brooke Carrington used a Moy. In common with most cameras of the time the Moy was large and cumbersome and could thus only be used in a fixed position, mounted on a bulky tripod. The Debrie, however, belonged to a new generation of cameras. Introduced in 1914, it was dubbed the cigar box because of its small size. It could carry 800 feet of film by mounting two four hundred foot spools side by side. It did require a tripod mounting, as it was impossible to crank and hold at the same time. The Aeroscope was also small but most importantly the film moved forward by a compressed air motor, leaving the cameraman with both hands free. It could hold 400 feet of film, which represented seven minutes filming time. A further sophistication with the Aeroscope was that it contained a built-in gyroscope, which ensured that the camera maintained its horizontal stability.¹⁹ Clearly the cameramen were enormously constrained by the limitations of their equipment and the restrictions imposed on them by the authorities. It is all the more remarkable that in their first six months at the front they had produced 26 short films of considerable variety and length, offering its audiences moments of considerable insight into the harsh reality of life at the front. By the summer of 1916 the form in which film from the front was released was radically changed. The opportunity to produce a larger more ambitious form of factual film came with the footage shot by Malins and McDowell on the opening day of the Somme offensive. What finally emerged a month later was the film Battle of the Somme. This film was 4,671 feet long, with a running time of 1 hour and 17 minutes. This film proved massively popular and the pattern initiated by Battle of the Somme was repeated twice more in the next year. All three films set out to record a chronological sequence of events in a particular engagement.²⁰ By August 1916 it was being claimed that Battle of the Somme was nothing less than ‘the greatest film in the history of kinematography’.²¹ Reaching this point had not been easy for the makers of official British propaganda. All that they had achieved was done in the context of almost constant criticism to the extent that the time spent answering the criticism seriously interfered with their work. This criticism stemmed from the reality that some of the work of the propagandists necessarily overlapped with some of the great departments of state: the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Admiralty in particular. This created an environment of suspicion and distrust, which sometimes led to overt antagonism. The propagandists required greater independence from the rest of Whitehall in order that their work would develop in terms of expertise and allow them to develop confidence in the nature of their work.²²

Despite the valuable lessons learned by the production of film and photographic material in the First World War, at the onset of World War Two no military structure existed for the recording of photographic combat material. Very little was known of First World War propaganda as almost all the relevant papers were inaccessible and what information there was, was often misleading. However, the core principles of wartime propaganda were identified in the pre-war period. In addition to propaganda, the MOI would have to provide for the issue of news and for such control of information as may be demanded by the needs of security. The problem with this twin emphasis derives from the fact that news and censorship are driven by contradictory imperatives. News is about making information available, censorship about restricting access to information.²³ As a plurality of opinions was a vital characteristic of Britain’s democratic politics any restriction of that plurality would undermine the very values that were at stake in the war.²⁴

Britain was ill-prepared in the field of information control for a war with an enemy who shared none of the concerns of a democratic nation. The carnage of the First World War had left an indelible print on the minds of the British people and British political parties. Memories of one million dead in the mud soaked trenches of that war had created a desire to avoid further conflict and led to a popular policy of appeasement in the 1930s. The Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, was persuaded that neither Britain nor France had the will to fight and this encouraged him to implement his expansionist policies. However, his army’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 was the catalyst which was to propel a reluctant and ill-prepared Britain into World War II.²⁵

The mood of the British people in that September of 1939 is captured in the GPO’s hastily produced film The First Days 1939, assembled with contributions from Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings assisted by Pat Jackson. The film was given its final shape by Alberto Cavalcanti and R.Q. McNaughton and despite its speedy construction, it remains an evocative reminder of London as a city forced reluctantly into war. However, this depiction of a reluctant people forced into a war by a determination to defend democracy was not a viewpoint fully supported in all sections of British society. Many right wing circles were hoping that Hitler’s aggression would halt the spread of Communism, and there also remained a hope that a reasonable agreement could be obtained which would avoid the heavy loss of life that conflict would almost certainly bring.²⁶ The First Days was, however, to receive little attention from the public who saw its approach as too consciously artistic.²⁷ Clearly the newly formed MOI needed to learn from this error and quickly get to grips with its role of distributing information regarding the war and presenting the case at home and abroad in a manner that would reach the masses.

The War Office in London had since 1937 contained a Directorate of Public Relations (DPR), responsible for filming and photography, although these functions were subordinate functions and were grouped together in a branch, Public Relations 2 (PR2). The DPR’s main functions still remained the coordination and control of its own Public Relations officers in commands at home and overseas and press contacts at the War Office. It now had the additional task of liaising with the MOI²⁸

On 10 September 1939 the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, issued an order prohibiting photography of every imaginable military subject. This ban was to provide particular difficulties at a time when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was leaving for France and it appears to have prompted the DPR to appoint the first Official War Office Cinematographer, Harry Rignold, on 11 September.²⁹

When Lord Macmillan was put in charge of the MOI in September 1939, it was clear that there was much work to do. He reported to his colleagues that the ‘Press were in a state of revolt against what seemed like an arbitrary but blanket censorship of the news’.³⁰ The problems faced by Macmillan were not just with the actual press companies. Considerable mistrust existed between the Army and the journalists who were designated as ‘Accredited War Correspondents’. Although war correspondents were subject to military orders in operational theatres, they were ultimately responsible to their respective employers. In Britain this was the five British newsreel companies – Gaumont, Paramount, Pathé, Movietone and Universal. Harry Rignold would, due to his military status, be subject to full military regulations and be unable to evade these regulations as many of the war correspondents had done, infuriating military commanders in the process. Actually converting accredited war correspondents into uniformed personnel had been considered. However, the cameramen themselves were in the main older, unfit and many already enjoyed the status of reserved occupation. It was also anticipated that the newsreel producing companies would react adversely to the Army poaching their employees, and although the Army had considerable reservations about the benefits of the war correspondents’ role, no alternative existed.³¹

It is, however, important to note that newsreel cameramen often found themselves in difficult and dangerous situations during World War Two: Frank Bayliss of Paramount was killed on the eve of the invasion of Sicily, Edward Candy was reported missing but later found unharmed, Ronnie Noble of Universal was taken prisoner in 1940, Ian Struthers of Paramount shot footage on the beaches of Sicily on the morning of the invasion and Sidney Bonnet of Gaumont, who had been the first cameraman to fly over Everest, took part in the dangerous Narvik Raid, Norway. Many other correspondents produced remarkable images of the conflict in all the theatres of the war: Sidney Bonnet, John Turner and Peter Cannon from Gaumont; Leslie Murray, Jim Gemmel and Frank Pernell from Universal; Terry Ashwood, Jack Gemmel and Charles Martin from Pathé; Jack Ramsden, Alec Tozer and Jim Knight from Movietone, to name but a few.³²

The ban on the photography of military subjects in 1939 had resulted in a lack of newsreel pictures of the BEF and this prompted Lord Strabolgi to take the matter up with Lord Macmillan in a letter dated 2 October 1939:

Dear Macmillan

Re my question on British films tomorrow in the House of Lords, I propose to refer briefly to the lack of News Reel pictures of British Forces etc. I am credibly informed that offers of wide free distribution in neutral markets of such News Reel films have been made and turned down. Also that invitations to make talkie pictures of the Prime Minister and others (perhaps of yourself) for a wide distribution have received no encouragement. You may like to check on this before the meeting of the house.³³

Lord Macmillan took this matter up with Sir Joseph Ball, at that time head of the Films Division, who responded on 3 October 1939 with a defiant reply blaming the Secretary of State’s ban for the lack of coverage of the BEF and denying that any free distribution offer had been made.³⁴ The atmosphere between the MOI and politicians at this stage was clearly a confrontational one and not one which would promote political assistance for the M.O.I’s endeavour to become a more effective department. There was simply too much self-interested manoeuvring by individuals behind the scenes at the MOI for a cohesive department to emerge.

One of the measures taken to rectify the problems at the Films Division had been to appoint Sir Joseph Ball, who had proved his credentials as a highly successful film propagandist for the Conservative Party. Ball’s appointment was not well received as his close association with the Conservative Party had led to suspicions on the political left. His well-known antipathy towards the documentary movement, the progressive left wing sector of the British Film Industry, exacerbated the problem and the failure of the Films Division to provide any guidelines for commercial producers led to increased criticism from the trade press. Given the increased flak being drawn by the Films Division, a change at the top was inevitable.³⁵ By December 1939, Sir Joseph Ball had resigned and Sir Kenneth Clark replaced him.³⁶

Problems at the Films Division would, however, continue. The coverage of the BEF’s activities in Europe did not live up to the high expectations, prior to its arrival. When the first 2700 feet (30 mins) of film of the BEF’s embarkation and landing arrived, it was to prove a disaster and was quickly seized on by the newsreel companies, labelled inferior in quality and accused of giving a very sorry picture of Britain’s war effort. A further 4000 feet arriving a week later was described as ‘so amateurish and failed so hopelessly to depict our war effort, that all the newsreels returned the material to the MOI’³⁷

The lack of acceptable footage clearly highlighted the difference between the newsreel cameramen, who filmed stories for immediate screening to the public, and the military cameraman Harry Rignold, whose footage was intended for a variety of uses, ranging from the immediate need for newsreel stories and technical evaluation of secret equipment, to the simple filming of historical record. Castleton Knight of Gaumont British News was told by a ministry official that, ‘if there was a good deal of apparent repetition and if some of the sequences were unduly long, the explanation may be that for record purposes the cameraman was instructed to shoot rather more material than would be required for newsreel purposes’.³⁸

Harry Rignold had clearly been handicapped by having to operate under restrictions and instructions that did not apply to the newsreel cameramen. Rignold’s background had been in documentary film but his lack of experience actually shooting scenes was seized on by the newsreel companies as further evidence that their much greater experience was preferable to the use of military cameramen.³⁹

Further shortages of good official pictures of the German advances through Belgium and France in May and June of 1940 and the BEF’s retreat to the channel ports were to exacerbate an already poor situation. The protests from the MOI about the lack of photos or film merely added to the impression that the Film section of the DPR was powerless when most needed.⁴⁰

Considerable dissatisfaction with the performance of the DPR was to surface within the Army when Major General Beith, the director of the DPR, reported that General Gort of the BEF had told him that he was extremely dissatisfied with the publicity that had been accorded the BEF since its entry into Belgium on 10 May 1940. He further added that the DPR was extremely ineffective.⁴¹

The perception of a badly run Public Relations department is supported by the Australian war correspondent Kenneth Slessor, who visited the Public Relations branch in the War Office on 20 June 1940 to obtain a licence. He was dealt with by ‘a pompous, pontifical type of staff officer, very aloof. When I showed him my Licence to proceed to base issued to me by Melbourne Headquarters, he threw it scornfully on to the table and said it would be quite impossible to get it endorsed or countersigned by any British authority, as the British Army simply did not recognise such things. If this fellow is a fair specimen of the type of officer in the War Office then heaven help Great Britain’.⁴²

Clearly much was wrong with Britain’s War Office and its internal departments and much would need to be done to create an effective administration capable of countering the enemy.

Unlike Britain, the German Führer Adolf Hitler had a clear and deliberate vision of his objectives. His Machiavellian manoeuvrings from the time he became Chancellor on 30 January 1933 were for the sole purpose of increasing his grip on power and, importantly for his long-term objectives, buying time to put in place the rearmament of the German military. Hitler’s lack of self-doubt meant that Britain’s indecisiveness would not be mirrored in Germany. He had learned from Britain’s successes and failures in manipulating propaganda in the First World War and this knowledge encouraged him to remain supremely confident that he could carry the will of the German people with him. Both Hitler and his appointed propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, who was to head the new Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP), would base Germany’s propaganda organisation on Britain’s First World War. Goebbels would follow Hitler’s lead and strive to ensure that the German Ministry of Propaganda did not make the same errors as the British model. He was well aware that the management of war correspondents was an area that would require careful handling to aid the success of his strategy. Neutral war correspondents were looked after by the Ministry’s Foreign Press Department run by Professor Karl Bonner. They were given special treatment such as extra rations, petrol and a favourable currency exchange rate. Some were even paid by the Ministry or had bills settled for them by the Ministry, and a country retreat was provided for friendly correspondents on the outskirts of Berlin. However, correspondents’ dispatches were, after publication, scrutinised by the RMVP and those who had produced what the RMVP officials deemed to be unfavourable would soon find themselves subject to a campaign of harassment and possibly imprisonment for espionage. In contrast to Britain, Goebbels had decided that Germany would not have war correspondents as such. Instead, those involved in the media industry including journalists, writers, poets, photographers, cameramen, film and radio producers, publishers, printers, painters and commercial artists, were simply conscripted into the Propaganda Division of the Army under Major General Hasso von Wedel.⁴³ There, men of the Propaganda Kompanien (PK) were subject to military training and even, when necessary, expected to fight. While the British government were dithering over plans for the future and the PR department was beset with internal problems, the PK were advancing with the German troops into Poland and the neutral war correspondents in Berlin were being fed a stream of photographs, reports and newsreels doctored by the officials of the German Ministry of Propaganda.⁴⁴ The PK had, in fact, been formed in 1938 and members were appointed by the RMVP but at the front they operated under the command of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW). However, all the film shot was at the exclusive disposal of the Ministry of Propaganda.