The post-World War II “European Recovery Program” (ERP) –- popularly known as “the Marshall Plan” – has been described as the most ambitious and profound economic development initiative ever undertaken by a government outside its national borders. Looking at Germany and the other robust and sophisticated countries of Europe today, it is difficult to recall that they were on their knees after the war. Launched by U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall in remarks made at Harvard University in June 1947, the so-called Marshall Plan began as a proposal that Europeans cooperate to structure their own recovery program, which the U.S. would support. Officially born in April 1948 when legislation creating the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) was passed by the U.S. Congress, the Marshall Plan transferred over $13 billion of material and technical assistance to Europe—the equivalent today of nearly $90 billion U.S. dollars. The ECA/ERP phase was abruptly curtailed as a result of the invasion of South Korea in 1950. Marshall aid and Marshall Plan-inspired films would continue through 1955 under two new agencies (the Mutual Security Agency and the Foreign Operations Administration) that were focused less on economic recovery and more on international security.

The Genius of Marshall’s Vision
To understand the Marshall Plan is to realize that its genius lay not in sending money but in shipping tangible goods – fuel, fertilizer, food, farm animals, machinery – that were essential for life and for economic recovery. At a time when most European currencies could not purchase goods internationally, the Marshall Plan paid U.S. companies to ship the goods. This astute way of structuring the aid also helped American business to navigate the transition to a peacetime economy. Europeans contributed to the cost of recovery by depositing the equivalent into local “counterpart fund” accounts, and the local currencies were invested in additional infrastructure. The entire film program was funded in this fashion.

Increasing productivity – in manufacturing, mining, and agriculture – was the overarching American policy goal. Reducing protective tariffs and increasing intra-European trade was considered essential to achieving that goal. On a social and political level, this posed a much larger philosophical challenge, that of getting postwar Europeans to embrace interdependence and actively cooperate with each other to overcome language, cultural and currency differences, not to mention the legacies of two world wars. The American campaign to create a European “melting pot” – whether as a mirror of the ideal American democratic society or as a bulwark against Soviet hegemony, or both – was clearly depicted in many of the Marshall Plan films.

The main, and most profound, principle of Marshall aid was to give the Europeans the means to help themselves. Marshall’s perspicacity and vision on this one point was embraced by those Europeans who, like Marshall, saw integration as an alternative to nationalism and war. Marshall’s philosophy, which was to create a “family of nations” -- one that would include Germany as a full-fledged member -- led directly, even if it took 40 years, to the European Union.

Marshall’s firmness on this issue – the importance of European union – is presaged in his very first remarks about the program that would come to bear his name. His understanding of the fact that the aid program would only succeed if it were structured by the aid recipients themselves ran deep, as we see in the now famous speech he gave in June 1947:

“It is already evident that, before the United States Government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on its way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this Government. It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support of such a program so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all European nations…An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.”

How would they be overcome? Harlan Cleveland (later Assistant Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to NATO) was one of the men charged with structuring and administering the Marshall Plan. In his words: “It was not, of course, a ‘plan.’ It was a continuous international happening, with frequent course corrections....Real planning is improvisation on a general sense of direction. The Marshall Plan was a brilliant series of improvisations on a deceptively simple theme: Europe needed help, and only America could supply it.” 2

The Challenges Faced by the Marshall Plan Filmmakers
British historian David Ellwood, a professor at Italy’s University of Bologna, is one of the foremost experts on the aims and methods of the Marshall Plan’s public information program. According to him, the single overarching goal of the information program was to paint a convincing picture of rising expectations – a vision of a future in which Europeans could aspire to prosperity, American-style.

This was a remarkable promise in countries that had been physically and emotionally devastated by years of war. In this laboratory of hostility and hope, film was used as a medium for social change. Created in an atmosphere of experimentation and, for the most part, by people at the beginning of their careers, the Marshall Plan films found myriad entertaining ways to tell the same story: “Help is on the way, there’s hope for the future, you can do it!”

The filmmakers of the German Reich had pioneered the use of film as a means of generating nationalist fervor. OMGUS and Marshall Plan filmmakers in Germany were keen to discredit the Nazi propaganda and to re-socialize large elements of a society that had been brainwashed by it. This was a delicate and difficult operation. Documents from the time indicate that their efforts sometimes went awry when they pushed their message too fast or too hard, an example being the film Hunger, which OMGUS authorites withdrew from theaters in response to German protests.3 OMGUS film officers also had to decide which films to allow in from the outside, and made controversial decisions like the one to ban Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair.

The Marshall Plan filmmakers, working out of 18 country missions, emphasized cross-cultural understanding, European solidarity and cooperation, and the choices each individual faces in determining how he or she will fit into the larger social fabric. The individual’s responsibility to embrace diversity, rather than fear and reject it, was proposed by the Marshall Plan filmmakers as a core democratic value. But it was also the only possible path toward healing the hatred and mourning that existed within Germany, and between Germany and its European brethren.

The techniques and forms used by Marshall Plan filmmakers ranged from straightforward information exchange to obvious propaganda. But one can discern a single thread that runs throughout, and that is a determination to, as Ellwood puts it, “awaken elites and masses alike to the universal significance of the connection Americans made [and one could add, still make] between prosperity and democracy…And cinema was the preferred medium of communication.” 4

Information Dissemination
Many of the Marshall Plan films described a specific program. Island of Faith, an extraordinarily moving film by John Ferno, describes the repairing of Dutch dikes to reclaim farmlands. It was distributed theatrically in nine European nations in eight different languages.

Technical Assistance in the Form of Film
Some films disseminated technical information, i.e., the medium was the message. Watch Georg Tressler’s winsome Hansl and the 200,000 Chicks, and you will learn how to build a simple hygienic chicken coop, and several amusing life lessons to boot.

True Fiction Films
Although the vast majority of Marshall Plan films were documentaries, the Motion Picture Section also commissioned a few remarkable fiction films, fully scripted, in which professional actors carry the main roles. Examples include George Freedland’s The Promise of Barty O’Brien (featuring the actors of Dublin’s Abbey Theater); the hilarious satire Do Not Disturb!, starring German cabaret comic Walter Gross; and Philip Mackie and Peter Hopkinson’s The Smiths and the Robinsons, which uses sly wit to make a subtle commentary on the blurring of class differences in a brave new, postwar, world.

Mutual Security, Anti-Communism, Civic Freedom
The Marshall Plan filmmakers had to contend with increasingly aggressive propaganda efforts and border and travel restrictions that the Soviets imposed on East Germany and the rest of the Eastern Bloc. The contrast between the rights of the individual in West Germany and Western Europe, on the one hand, and those in the totalitarian regimes of the East, on the other, are starkly depicted in the Marshall Plan film Whitsun Holiday, produced by Peter Baylis. It echoes the earlier OMGUS film by Wolfgang Kiepenheuer, It’s Up To You! These films and others extol the virtues and responsibilities of individual freedom as a natural bulwark against, and the best antidote to, Communism and other forms of totalitarianism.

Economic Cooperation and Unity
Many films were made to urge European economic cooperation and unity, and one cannot help but observe the groundwork for European union being laid. The most exhuberant of these, The Shoemaker and the Hatter, was created by Marshall Plan animators Philip Stapp, Joy Batchelor and John Halas. The animated films represent the Marshall Plan in its most imaginative form, yet they also hit their message home.

Films for the American Public
Of the over 260 films made for the Marshall Plan, only a few were ever seen in the United States. The Smith-Mundt law forbade the showing of these films to audiences in the United States because Americans were not to be “propagandized” with their own tax money. Films for U.S. audiences had to be specially made or re-edited. In 1952, MSA’s Paris film unit undertook production of Strength for the Free World, a series of 26 half-hour documentaries for American television, broadcast by ABC. The shows were mostly cannibalized by series producer Henry Sandoz from already-completed ECA/MSA documentaries made for European audiences. Ten of them survive: Assignment Europe, Edge of Freedom, Gun for Gaetano, Indochina Today, Keep ‘Em Flying, North Sea Harbor, Rebirth of a Nation, Small Country—Big Ideas, Three Cities, and Your Eighty Dollars. This last was designed to tout the goals and efficacy of the Marshall Plan to the American people, the title a reflection of each American’s contribution to the cost of Marshall aid. According to Al Hemsing, “MSA ran into some flak because of this series. Congress chastized Washington authorities, reminding them that the agency’s enabling legislation prohibited its films from being shown in America.” 5

Marshall Plan Film Production, Distribution, and Censorship
Article 2 of the European Cooperation Masterplan permitted the ECA authorities to engage in dissemination of information about the ERP. As Al Hemsing states in his memoir, The Marshall Plan’s European Film Unit, 1948 – 1955, 6 the motion picture division had no trouble obtaining the necessary resources: “[ECA] soon found itself with an almost unlimited supply of ‘counterpart’ funds. These were the local currencies that each nation put up to match American aid – dollar for dollar. They were intended for national reconstruction projects that required no dollar input: roads, schools, houses. It had also been agreed that five per cent of these currencies would be paid to ECA to cover its administrative expenses and information activities. No one foresaw what this levy would grow to as American aid mounted.”

Stuart Schulberg described how those funds were put to work in Making Marshall Plan Movies (Film News, September 1951). He stressed not only the films’ informational value, but also their psychological impact: “Organized in 1949, the ECA Motion Picture Unit’s original aim was to inform the Europeans about the facts and figures of Marshall Aid. [T]he directors of the Information Division… believed that ERP publicity could do as much for Europe’s mental depression as ERP shipments could do for Europe’s economic ills. An important tenet of ECA philosophy was fashioned into a slogan: ‘The Marshall Plan – helping people to help each other.’”

Schulberg reported on the commissioning process: “In every country the same basic policy was followed. An ECA Mission requested help from Paris in formulating a national information film program. In the field – to The Hague, to Athens, to Copenhagen – went motion picture specialists to work with the local information officer. Sometimes one film was suggested, sometimes a whole series. Often an outside producer was recommended, more often local artists and technicians were evaluated and assigned on the spot. Every country, every project was another production problem; no single formula could be applied to 18 different nations. A highly professional British company was left almost entirely alone (to their utter astonishment), while a wobbly German group found an ECA film man stationed right in their cutting room (to their utter chagrin). Whenever possible, contractors prepared their own scripts under ECA guidance, and each writer and director was encouraged to develop his own style and approach.”

Hemsing, in his memoir, attests to the lack of control from above: “Policy control? I recall no formal policy control mechanism, such as I had known at OWl or was to encounter later at USIA [U.S. Information Agency]. When a film was in its final cut stage we would show it to one of our Information Division chiefs and read the proposed narration out loud as the film was screened. If the film had been requested by one of our country missions, a representative of that mission was invited. We took reasonable suggestions but, essentially, the die had already been cast.”

Schulberg’s report explained how the films were distributed: “Sometimes producers contracted to secure theatrical distribution for their films; more often ECA retained these rights and placed the films commercially upon completion. At least half the subjects did double duty, and still do, by playing in their own country and in other countries too. With European integration a mainstay of ECA’s information program, films that show one nation how another nation is solving a social or economic problem are much in demand. European distributors – who are just as hard-headed as their American counterparts – say they’re always interested in good shorts. They must find ECA shorts good because they’ve attached them to top American and European features all over the continent….But quality is only half the battle on the distribution front. Taste and subtlety are important elements of propaganda technique. An unwritten ECA law stipulates that the Marshall Plan – and other informational objectives – will not be mentioned more than twice in a one-reeler and three times in a two-reeler. If Americans, seeing the English-language versions of ECA films, feel that the ‘message’ is under-played, let them remember that Europeans have still not recovered from the sledge-hammer blows of Herr Goebbels.”