Does anyone know name of this Freikorps film?

[Von Stroheim]

Saw this clip on Youtube some suggest it is a film from the DDR seems quite big budget. Lots of detail Whippet tank etc.

[Panaldi]

My first guess would be

„Die Münchner Räterepublik“
A west German TV production from 1971.

I‘ll try to check if I find it streamed somewhere to confirm.

[Metternich]

Wow.  They did not spare money on production values.

[Golgotha]

That is a great find see also this one

[has.been]

Interesting stuff guys. Thanks for posting.

[Metternich]

A bit of "poetic license" in the film, where they show an A7V tank being used by the Freikorps to suppress the Spartacists in Berlin.  No actual A7V was used in the fighting in Berlin.  There were two lightly vehicles (mild steel only, not the armor plate of the true AZV), built post-war on the chassis of two Uberlandeswagen (the unarmored cargo carrier tractor variant of the A7V, so these two vehicles did have the same silhouette as an A7V).  The giveaway is that the armored vehicle in the film has the forward-mounted sponson with the 57mm cannon - which it fires in the film.   However, the two post-war armored vehicles were only armed with machine guns (four each) and did not have the cannon.  I suppose a tank firing a main gun has more dramatic punch (pardon the pun).  For comparison, I have attached links below to photos of each of these vehicle types.

The first photo below shows one of these Freikorps A7V variants in use by the Freikorps:
 
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a9/4e/36/a94e3688f5fa1796955e38a8bc8880ce.jpg

The second photo shows a war-time A7V with the forward-mounted sponson 57mm gun:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/18/a4/32/18a432a590a4aa1cd0b17847fbeb2390.jpg

The third photo is of an unarmored Uberlandeswagen

https://panzerserra.blogspot.com/2018/04/a7v-sturmpanzerwagen-wwi-german-tank.html


https://military.wikia.org/wiki/A7V_heavy_tank

[commissarmoody]

Cool, thanks for sharing. 

[zebcook]

It's "Ernst Thalman -- Son of His Class", East German 1954.  Youtube has the full movie in German. If you don't understand German, it is subtitled -- in Greek. 

[Von Stroheim]

Thanks.  Take it is Thalmann of Thalmann Brigade fame in the Spanish Civil War.

[Patrice]

Thanks for the link! I was a little rebuffed by the lyrics of the song in the first videos - which seem very politically intended. Now it seems the film itself was political on the other side. 

[FramFramson]

I kind of figured that was the case given it was released in the DDR.

Actually it's apparently famous as a crucial part of the DDR's hagiography of Thalmann and was required viewing for East German workers for years. There's more detail in the Wiki Article of the film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Th%C3%A4lmann_(film) which also mentioned there was a second part, concerning the events of 1930-33.

If you're still interested in watching it (the combat scenes are pretty much mostly what you see in the trailers), there's an option to auto-translate to English (or any other language). I mean, it's a Reds vs Reactionaries film and the history is very well-known (even if the film is, ah, massaging it), so I was getting the gist of it even in German, but the English subtitles aren't too bad.

[Patrice]

i had a look at it, yes it's not too difficult to follow when you know some history. I avoid subtitles when I can, they prevent from trying to understand at least a few spoken words. Anyway the political vocabulary is roughly the same in all european languages. "Rosa ist tot" is not difficult to understand...

[Von Stroheim]

Very proletarian - taking out a HMG with a windowbox.

[has.been]

taking out a HMG with a windowbox.

Just a 'small plot' point 

[Patrice]

taking out a HMG with a windowbox.

These were real war terracotta Heavy WindowBoxes intended to fight Heavy Machine Guns. The modern, plastic, Light WindowBoxes they sell now wouldn't take out a LMG.