Väter der tausend Sonnen © DEFA-Stiftung
If You Watched Oppenheimer, You Must See This Documentary
The DEFA Film Library will make the documentary FATHERS OF A THOUSAND SUNS (1989, dir. Joachim Hellwig) available for a free one-week stream from August 12-20.
The East German documentary FATHERS OF A THOUSAND SUNS provides important context to the ongoing discussions of the War in Ukraine and the 2023 release of the Hollywood film Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan, USA). For the first time, this unique German-language film is now accessible to an English-speaking audience with subtitles that were created by Barton Byg, UMass professor emeritus, and the DEFA Film Library.
The documentary tells the story of the German scientist Klaus Fuchs (1911-1988), who, in 1941, joined the British atomic project Tube Alloys, and three years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project at the highly secret Los Alamos Laboratory located in the New Mexico desert. Fuchs became a spy for the Soviet Union while conducting nuclear research in the United States and Britain. The rediscovered documentary, FATHERS OF A THOUSAND SUNS, portrays Klaus Fuchs and other physicists in the U.S., UK, the Soviet Union, and Germany, who faced moral dilemmas in relation to atomic warfare during and especially after WWII.
Director Joachim Hellwig used footage and photos from international archives and private collections and interviewed over twenty people, including scientists involved in the American Manhattan and British Tube Alloys atomic projects, as well as Klaus Fuchs’s intelligence handlers and family members. Hellwig also included clips from a 1983 filmed interview with Klaus Fuchs that was conducted by Markus Wolf, founding member and chief of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service within the Ministry for State Security.
The film had its English-subtitled world premiere at the World Fellowship Center in Conway, NH, on Hiroshima Remembrance Day, Aug. 6.