Julien Hequembourg Bryan (1899-1974) was an American documentarian and filmmaker. Bryan traveled widely taking 35mm film that he sold to motion picture companies. In the 1930s, he conducted extensive lecture tours, during which he showed film footage he shot in the former USSR. Between 1935 and 1938, he captured unique records of ordinary people and life in Nazi Germany and in Poland, including Jewish areas of Warsaw and Krakow and anti-Jewish signs in Germany. His footage appeared in March of Time theatrical newsreels. His photographs appeared in Life Magazine. He was in Warsaw in September 1939 when Germany invaded and remained throughout the German siege of the city, photographing and filming what would become America's first cinematic glimpse of the start of WWII. He recorded this experience in both the book Siege (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1940) and the short film Siege (RKO Radio Pictures, 1940) nominated for an Academy Award in 1940. In 1946, Bryan photographed the efforts of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency in postwar Europe.
Released in 1940 by RKO as a newsreel in the Reelism Series,"Sieg" is the first non-Nazi film of the start of World War II to be seen in American theaters. It was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Short, one reel) in 1941 and placed on the 2006 National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in December 2006. After an exhaustive search, the USHMM believes that this 35mm print is the best surviving and most complete film element of"Siege" See FIlm and Video departmental files for more information. This film was preserved with a 2008 National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) cash grant. Transferred at 24 FPS Additional photographs are available in the USHMM Photo Archives.
In this ten minute film, Julien Bryan, the last neutral reporter remaining in Poland on September 1, 1939, records the horror and confusion of Warsaw during the German attack on Poland. Through actual footage taken during the siege, Bryan poignantly describes the frightening chain of events that finally resulted in the capitulation of Warsaw and Poland. During the early stages of the blitzkrieg, civilians were commandeered to dig ditches, set tank traps and shore up fortifications. Then, as the Polish soldiers retreated, Warsaw was surrounded and besieged. German planes, triumphant in the skies, wreaked destruction on the city with aerial and incendiary bombs, while heavy artillery guns kept up an incessant bombardment. Hospitals and churches were ultimately targets and women were machine gunned from planes while digging potatoes for their hungry families.
Documentary about the German invasion and siege of Poland