On November 17, 2016, The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and The Hollywood Theater present a special screening of the 1946 film “The Stranger,” directed by and starring Orson Welles along with Loretta Young and Edward G. Robinson. It’s the story of a man hunting for a Nazi fugitive played by Welles. This landmark film contains documentary footage showing Nazi atrocities. “The Stranger” was the first commercial film to use documentary footage from the Nazi concentration camps.
In the 1940s, a significant percentage of the population did not believe that the Nazi death camps were real. Welles had seen the footage in early May 1945 in San Francisco as a correspondent and discussion moderator at the United Nations Conference on International Organization and wrote about it in his syndicated column for the New York Post.
“No, you must not miss the newsreels, ” wrote Welles. “They make a point this week no man can miss: The war has strewn the world with corpses, none of them very nice to look at. The thought of death is never pretty but the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay. This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.”
"It is clear that the visual power of the newsreels had struck him deeply, and it is no surprise that clips from them would be included only a few months later in The Stranger," wrote film scholar Jennifer L. Barker. Three of the four post-liberation scenes included in The Stranger are from Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), a film assembled by George Stevens, James B. Donovan and Ray Kellogg and used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials.
WESA’S Paul Guggenheimer will introduce the film which will be followed by a post-screening discussion with Guggenheimer and Bob Hoover, retired book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and an Orson Welles expert.
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