Ober Ost: The Forgotten Colony in the Heart of Europe

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War Documentary with no narration published by Arte in 2017 - English language

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While we are reminded of the First World War with its battles on the Western Front, the war that took place in the East at the same time has largely been forgotten. In the course of the armed conflicts, a peculiar, state-like entity emerged, a German colony in Eastern Europe: the so-called Land Ober-Ost. However, the further course of German history up to the Second World War can hardly be understood without this episode, because Ober-Ost prepares the ground for the murderous plans of National Socialism for conquest and repopulation. The First World War is still in the public consciousness today, and it is primarily visually present: trench warfare, barbed wire, the use of machine guns, poison gas, tanks. On the one hand the Germans, on the other French and British, later the Americans. This is what the war looked like – on the western front. Less well known is the simultaneous war in the east: field battles were fought here against the armies of the Russian tsar; the German force was victorious and conquered land, much land. And this region was not only to be exploited, but reprogrammed: to become a satellite state of the German Empire, a German colony in the middle of Europe. During the First World War, a special state unit called Ober Ost was created in the Baltics. After the defeat of the Russian army, the Germans entered here almost as liberators, they were determined to modernize and culturally uplift the backward country, only to enslave it as part of the war effort and exploit it as crudely as possible for several years... Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, which is now a member of the European Union. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Lithuania became the toy of the big powers. During the First World War, Vilnius, then known as Vilna, was part of the already forgotten state of Ober Ost. It was the only larger city of this country, a military state founded by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, Ober Ost occupied the territory of today's Lithuania, parts of Latvia and Belarus. Exploitation and forced labor were the order of the day here. This military experiment had only a short duration from 1915 to 1918. Ludendorff had railways and bridges built, the population and livestock registered, administered and exploited. The occupied area was to become a productive state that was completely under military rule, a state that was to serve not least as a staging area for the coming war that was already being considered. Ober Ost, Erich Ludendorff's military utopia, is largely forgotten today. The further course of German history up to the Second World War can hardly be understood without this episode. Ober Ost is important in the history of Germany for two reasons. First, it offers one of the most extreme examples of how the First World War was responsible for the radicalization of Germany and how this total war took the country in a new, brutal and ruthless direction. Secondly, the state of Ober Ost offers a key connection between the old imperial regime of Emperor Wilhelm II, and Adolf Hitler's plans for the east twenty years later. In a way, Ober Ost prepares the ground for the murderous plans of conquest and repopulation that National Socialism wanted to implement in Eastern Europe. "OBER OST" - THE FORGOTTEN COLONY follows in the footsteps of Ober Ost using fascinating resources dug out of the archives alongside newly filmed material. A Florianfilm Co-Production with ZDF and ARTE

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Video Codec: H.264 CABAC High@L4
Video Bitrate: 3 731 Kbps
Video Resolution: 1920x1080
Display Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Frames Per Second: 25.000 fps
Audio Codec: AAC (LC)
Audio Bitrate: 128 kb/s VBR 48000 Hz
Audio Streams: 2
Audio Languages: english
RunTime Per Part: 52 min 18 s
Number Of Parts: 1
Part Size: 1.41 GB
Source: WEB DL
Capper: DocFreak08