National Geographic Is Wrong, This Story Has Been Told

As a World War II veteran of five campaigns in France, Belgium, and Germany, and then more recently in 2006, taking up a new “career” in filmmaking, I have produced two documentaries, Let Freedom Ring: The Lesson Is Priceless and Let Freedom Ring: Memories Of France.

These were filmed in 2006 and 2007 with young high school history teachers and combat veterans who served respectively in Belgium (Battle of the Bulge) and in France (D-Day, Normandy Invasion).

This new “career” that started at age eighty-one and has been ongoing for five years, is for the purpose of fulfilling my mission to reach young students with the message of the importance of freedom and the consequences of losing one’s freedom.

I am now seeking funding to distribute these films at no cost, which are in DVD format, primarily into the high schools in California where I live.

Now, a third documentary is planned. It is a film about the Eighth Air Force operations from England on daring daylight raids on German targets. Twenty-six thousand men were killed, more than the Marines in the Pacific.

Stories from survivors of the “Mighty Eighth,” as they were known, will be told. It will also relate experiences from relatives of perished crew-members who were hosted by a Frenchman who did arduous research of crash sites in France. The families visited these sites of loved ones who were killed when they crashed in France.

American Airlines is a participant, but additional funding is needed for a “bare bones budget.” Bare bones because I do not do these films for profit.

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Recently a film has been made and was screened on National Geographic Channel called Caught by the SS: The Wereth Eleven. It tells the story of eleven black Americans who were brutalized and murdered** during WWII as a consequence of the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium on December 17, 1945. It is a very worthwhile film, but it was claimed in this film that “their story has never been told.” This is untrue.

The following sets the record straight:

In July 2006, while filming Let Freedom Ring: The Lesson Is Priceless, we told the story of “The Wereth Eleven” as a part of our documentary, I believe for the first time on film. Wereth is a tiny hamlet in Eastern Belgium near the German border. The Wereth Eleven refers to the eleven black American soldiers who were separated from their 333rd Field Artillery unit when overrun by the Germans and fled on foot in freezing cold weather finally taking refuge, at the willingness of the Langer family, in a tiny hamlet farm house sheltering them from the cold and feeding them.

Trina Langer, who was one of ten children, and lived in the home at the time of the capture and brutalized killing of these eleven soldiers, told the entire story to us during filming. She told to us in the living room of the same home where the soldiers briefly took shelter before being captured and killed by a Nazi SS patrol.

Additionally, Adda Rittkin, who was the president of an organization that raised funds to build a monument in memory of these men, told us how and why this was done. Standing in front of the monument, she was very emotional, recalling the sacrifices of these young black American soldiers. (Adda Rittken passed away in January 2010.)

I bring this to your attention because of the fact that the film states that, “their story has never been told.”

Not only did we tell their story before National Georgraphic, but the parties involved told it without rehearsal or prompting of any kind.

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**Those bodies of the eleven soldiers were recovered by our company and buried in the temporary Henri Chapelle cemetery in Belgium. After the war, seven of them were reburied in the permanent Henri Chapelle cemetery several hundred yards from the temporary one and four were repatriated back to their families in the U.S.

Bodies of the many American soldiers who were massacred in the Malmedy, Belgium slaughter, after being taken prisoner around the same time as the Wereth Eleven, were also recovered by us and buried in the Henri Chapelle Cemetery in Belgium.