Following are some excerpts from the two-hour conversation:
David McCullough: This has been a long journey for you, longer than most people might imagine. Somewhere along the line something must have just clicked for you, that you had to do this film. How did you get started? When did you go into the army? Let's start there.
Charles Guggenheim: I was drafted in the Army in May of 1943. I ended up with 106th Division, 424th Infantry Regiment. Company E, Second Battalion Company.
DM: And then your unit was sent overseas, and you were in the hospital.
CG: I had an infection in my foot. It turned out to be blood poisoning. So I was delayed, and the delay saved my life, really.
DM: And your life then went on, but somewhere along the line you then got a hint of this story. But that was many years later, yes?
CG: Actually, when the men were coming back after the war was over, I started to talk to some of my comrades -- guys that I had been in the Army with and who I'd been friends with. I said, "What happened to so-and-so?" and they said he died in a German salt mine. I think he was explicit that it was a slave labor situation, but I was not alarmed at that point, because there were so many tragedies involved in that war. That was the first time I had any indication that something was sort of strange.
And then I kept running into articles, little ones in small newspapers, Arizona or Florida someplace. There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.
DM: And where did you find the first real evidence?
CG: National Archives war crimes file. There was a war crimes trial because an American prisoner had been shot trying to escape. He had obviously been recaptured and shot, and that violated the Geneva Convention.
DM: So when you saw those records at the Archives, you knew something was there, a story that had to be told.
CG: Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.
The majority were not Jewish. 80 out of 350 were Jewish. The Germans figured if his name is Rigerio or Zaccaria ... they said, That's a strange name -- it must be a Jew, you know.
DM: There must be some part of your recollection of the war that makes you wonder, "Why me? Why was I spared?" Does it occur to you that maybe you were spared to make this film?
CG: Oh, it goes through your mind, but you want to eliminate it pretty quickly because somehow there's divine providence that says you have an obligation here.
DM: In what way?
CG: Well, once I talked to these people, I felt I owe them something.
DM: Had they been interviewed before?
CEG: Some of them had, sometimes by the local newspaper, maybe by the Army association.
DM: But you must have found that they themselves were recalling things that they hadn't thought of for a very long time. It is an extremely powerful film for anyone who sees it for the first time, and its impact, I think, is in large part because you're dealing with a relatively few people. To comprehend the scale of the larger atrocity of the Holocaust is almost more than anyone is capable of. The numbers are so enormous that it becomes ...
CG: ... Incomprehensible.
DM: ... And for any of us who see the film as Americans, to see our own guys in this nightmare strikes home. It strikes the heart in a way that nothing that I've seen quite does. What was it about them that increased your feeling of responsibility that you had to make the film? It certainly wasn't their self-pity, was it?
CG: No, it never was self-pity. It was never, "Why me?" Never. I think one thing that drew me to the picture was the Holocaust. The Holocaust was so huge, incomprehensible, and when you get things in front of you that are just so large, you're unable to absorb it in any kind of normal way, and you have a tendency to push it aside. This was the first time Americans who spoke like I did, who looked like I did, who grew up in the same country I did, were part of something that I never comprehended as being close to me. And I decided to do a film about this thing that was done to Americans -- not only Americans, but American soldiers.
DM: I think that one of the most compelling sides of the film is the seamless way you combined historic, archival material with footage that you shot in Germany in order to evoke the scene. I assume that many of those people who are playing the silent parts as extras are Germans.
CG: They are.
DM: Now, that must have posed certain problems. Was it as difficult as you expected it to be?
CG: It was less difficult than I expected it to be for a couple of reasons, which have to do with contemporary history. This is a story that took place in East Germany. East Germany was locked in time for 50 years. When I went to Germany to film in March two years ago, the Berlin Wall had come down [only a few years before]. So these young people had [until recently] been under Russian rule for 50 years. Forty percent of them were unemployed. There was very little future in their lives.
There were some older people in the towns we were working in who would come up and tell me how many American planes they shot down. But the townspeople, generally speaking, were grown people in their middle age, and I realized they hadn't even been born when the war started. So the answer to your question is, We had total cooperation.
DM: Just finding the men that you interviewed for the film must have been a task in itself. It wasn't as though they all came to a reunion or something.
CG: Biggest problem we had -- how do you start finding these people? And then you don't know where they live, or whether they're living or dead.
DM: You don't know whether they'll be willing to talk.
CG: Most of them, with mitigating circumstances, did. The thing that saved us was the National Archives, which had a list of everybody who was at Berga at the slave labor camp -- some obscure document. And we knew there are still records at the Veterans Administration. They said, "We'll tell you if they're living, but we won't tell you where they are, because that's a violation of privacy." So we took a circuitous route -- we had help from someone on the Hill who wrote to them to see if they're interested in doing this film. We got a pretty good response -- 30 or 40 percent said they'd participate. And we had great help from an army captain, Mac O'Quinn, who I'll always be indebted to. He was doing a thesis on this story and he helped us find these people.
DM: There's a point in the film where one of the survivors talks about how painful it is to remember. And then he pauses and says, "But you have to remember." We must remember. You're making it possible for all of us to remember.
CG: I don't think anybody would doubt it if you say you remember the Holocaust. But these were Americans, and we can identify with them. They're the people next door. When you hear these men testify, they're not somebody they imported from someplace. I mean, they were shopkeepers, one's a doctor, the other one is an architect, another guy is a salesman. So you say, "This could happen any place with a mindset and with a sickness." It comes upon the world every so often.
