00:00I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but in older Hollywood productions, there are hardly any actors who are
00:07supposed to portray Germans, except for those half-witted ones in a series from 50 years ago.
00:14And the lack of German protagonists is especially true for the soldiers in Westerns, because in those, the officers are
00:23usually noble Englishmen, the sergeants are four burly Irishmen, sometimes drunk, and the soldiers are a friendly mix of Irish,
00:33Scottish, and English.
00:34And that's despite the fact that more than 45 million residents in the United States of America have German roots.
00:42It was only the renowned director John Ford, himself of Irish descent, who allowed his actors to portray German soldiers
00:53in two of his productions.
00:55In the 1949 film, she wore a yellow ribbon, with John Wayne and the whiskey-loving Irish top sergeant Quinn
01:04Cannon standing in the middle.
01:06The correct and frugal sergeant standing on the right was named Hochbauer.
01:13The regiment's blacksmith was named Wagner, and his assistant was Fritz, and both of them even spoke a few words
01:19of German.
01:20Come on, Fritz.
01:21And in Rio Grande, from 1950, also starring John Wayne, there is the trooper Heinze, played by the well-known
01:30stuntman Fred Kennedy, who unfortunately died in 1959 during a horsefall stunt in the John Ford production The Horse Soldiers.
01:41The fact that, over time, likable German roles became increasingly rare in screenplays has, in addition to production-related reasons,
01:53other reasons that I don't need to explain.
01:56But this deliberate omission of one of the main representatives of the early wave of immigrants, to whom the USA
02:04owes so much, is hardly explainable for that reason alone.
02:08Hundreds of thousands of Americans of German descent, if not millions, have served in the armed forces of the USA,
02:15both in times of peace and in times of war.
02:18Like here, Private First Class Milburn Henry Henke, who was the first U.S. soldier in 1942, officially set foot
02:27on European soil.
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