Gerhard Scheumann

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.

Report on the conflicts around the People's Republic of Kampuchea

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.

Short film about General Eduardo Cano, who after the military coup became director of the Chilean central bank in the Pinochet dictatorship. Cano withdraws money from the circulation, which were described by opposition parties with resistance piles. From the Chile cycle by Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann.

Rustic weapons, centuries old traps; wreckage of U.S. bombers, a perforated “bulletproof” vest are exposed in the museums of Hanoi. “The neglected free visit to the Hanoi museums cost the American people 56,369 killed people and 146 billion dollars.”

In two chapters the film shows men in divided Germany willing to leave their country. In the first chapter, East-Germans are shown who leave their wives and children behind in order to live in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the second chapter, unmarried West-Germans try to move to the German Democratic Republic.

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.

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.

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

The epilogue to the film "The Laughing Man" (1966), which alternates between objectivity and anger, exposes the involvement of the West German mercenary Siegfried Müller in the war against the Congolese government Lumumba. In the sequel, new witnesses against Major Müller have their say, including a former school friend and a French paratrooper colonel. GDR lawyer Kaul reports on the status of the criminal proceedings against Müller, while the final images show the war criminal feeding the ducks in South Africa.

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.

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

This bullet is stamped with the inscription 'Remington Peters 12' and yet is not mentioned in Remington's catalogue. It consists of 20 small steel arrows.

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.

Reconstruction of the last hours in the presidential palace La Moneda during the coup d’état in Santiago de Chile in 1973. Salvador Allende enters his office on September 11th at 7.30 in the morning. In the early afternoon he leaves it – wrapped in a blanket, dead.

SS officer Walter Krüger talks about his career. Now he is Secretary of the „Kameradschaftsverband I. Panzerkorps der ehemaligen Waffen-SS e.V.” (Fellowship of Former Soldiers of Waffen SS 1st Tank Corps). During the interview it shows that Krüger still considers himself and his like-minded fellows to be the elite of the nation.

At the parliamentary elections that the Unidad Popular won, there were activities to overthrow Salvador Allende. By a white, supposedly clean coup, the rightwing powers of Chile tried unsuccessfully to gain a two thirds majority in the national congress. Months later, the armed, violent coup took place.

A polemical report. "Way to the neighbors" is the motto of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. In their "Remarks on the Oberhausen 66 Film Festival," the GDR documentarians Gerhard Scheumann and Walter Heynowski take the competition selection to task: They see formal experiments as "excesses on the big screen" and instead of political themes, they discover a "surge of perversity." After her own film "Kommando 52" was rejected by the festival, a criminal complaint by the GDR lawyer Friedrich-Karl Kaul against the mercenary and commander "Kongo-Müller" is the focus of a press conference. The refusal of a cinema owner to show the film was a "hint from the neighbors", the neighboring public order office, and therefore state censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Interviews with former generals of the South Vietnamese Army in the Quang Trung re-education camp, shortly after the end of the Vietnam War.

An auction in Munich, 1974, old man with crockery and knick-knacks labelled "Former property of Hermann Göring": relics of Nazism sold to the benefit of the post-war state: the west criticised by the east.

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.

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.

In a reception camp for ethnic Germans in Eisenach, the director gets to know the girl Doris S. who went to West Germany and came back. This film interview tells the story of her individual fate in a divided Germany.

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.

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.