Talk:Andrew Thorndike

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by WikiProject Actors and Filmmakers (assessed as Low-importance).

Germany Low‑importance

	Germany portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Germany, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Germany on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.GermanyWikipedia:WikiProject GermanyTemplate:WikiProject GermanyGermany articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 2 external links on Andrew Thorndike. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{Sourcecheck}}).

Y An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 09:33, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The subject's ideology(-ies) glossed over

We're informed in this article's lead/summary paragraph that Thorndike, born in 1909, "directed 16 films between 1949 and 1977." It is as the man suddenly sprang to life only at the age of forty.

When we reach the "Background" section, we're told that Thorndike started as an employee of UFA in 1931 and "quickly became head of the firm's advertising film division." The remainder of the 1930s are passed over silently, and suddenly in the 1940s Thorndike is making films for "the Supreme Command of the German Army and Navy."

As it happens, UFA (originally BUFA) was formed by the WWI-era German government and War Ministry; in the 1920s it was bought by Alfred Hugenberg, business magnate and industrialist of Krupp A.G., who supported Hitler and the Nazi Party during the late '20s with both money and favorable publicity from his media empire. By January 1933 Hugenberg had been appointed Hitler's Reichminister of Economics; and he then transferred actual ownership of UFA to the Nazi Party that same year.

I think it's a fair question to ask about Andrew Thorndike's relationship to the Nazi Party throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Did he join the NSDAP? If so, when?

This is especially relevant given that Thorndike's career seems essentially to have segued from producing and directing films for the Third Reich into, post-WWII, making tendentious Marxist "documentaries" for the East German government (the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) for and about the Soviet Bloc and the USSR – for example,"Wladimir Iljitsch Uljanow Lenin," "Das russische Wunder," "Du und mancher Kamerad," and so forth.

LewisChessman (talk) 12:39, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]