In April 1936, the bodies of five British schoolboys were found half-buried in the snow in the German Black Forest. The truth behind this appalling tragedy quickly became lost in a dense matrix of popular mythology and political expediency. It would take 80 years and the persistence of two men to reveal the simple but shocking facts.
This film doesn’t just tell a shocking story of its own time, it reminds us that Truth has always been a minority interest, and that pursuing it can be hard and thankless work, but probably the most important thing any of us can ever do. Well-researched and excellent narration.
This film doesn’t just tell a shocking story of its own time, it reminds us that Truth has always been a minority interest, and that pursuing it can be hard and thankless work, but probably the most important thing any of us can ever do. Well-researched and excellent narration.
Quote:00:00 Intro
02:03 'Just a Springtime Hike'
04:36 The First Warning
07:45 The Second Warning
11:08 The Final Ascent
14:47 A Sound in the Darkness
17:48 A Media Storm
21:33 Germany, 1936
23:21 Wait, is this... a cover up?
27:22 This is definitely a cover up
30:30 A Tragedy Forgotten
This video is based on research by Bernd Hainmüller, and this documentary has been created with his kind permission and support. He has personally gathered and verified all primary and secondary sources, which you can find in his excellent book about this tragedy, ‘Tod Am Schauinsland’ (Death on Schauinsland: The “English Misfortune”): https://amzn.to/3T2Wh4y.
20:34 This should say ‘Nationalist Socialist’ publication, not socialist publication.
32:12 'Englanderunglück' is more accurately translated as the 'the English disaster'. I was going to make a broader point here about the irony of 'unglück' (which does literally mean 'un-luck' in German) being used, given what we now know, but it got cut, as so now it just reads as bad translation.
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." – Thomas Sowell