‘RED DAWN’ DRAWS FIRE IN WEST GERMANY

Cinema houses in a dozen West German cities have refused to screen the American film “Red Dawn” and an anti-fascist group has demanded a total blackout of the movie as vicious, Nazi-style propaganda.

The Frankfurt-based Anti-Fascist League said the American film is spreading “warlike and national antagonisms as horrendous, slanderous and barbaric as we experienced under Nazi rule.”

The movie, titled “Die rote Flut” in its German translation, depicts a brutal invasion and subjugation of the United States by Soviet and Cuban forces and a heroic resistance by American teen-agers.

“It is a dangerous propaganda instrument of militant anti-communism that is supposed to psychologically prepare the West German population for an atomic war,” the anti-fascist group charged.

Theaters in Frankfurt, Munich, West Berlin, Ludwigshafen, Heidelberg, Bielefeld, Duesseldorf and Bochum have dropped the film.

The league called on the West German government to denounce the movie and demanded that it be removed from all West German theater houses on grounds it violates a constitutional ban on incitement to war.

“Obviously this hate film is supposed to help West Germans more easily digest the basing of American first-strike weapons,” the league said, comparing the film’s message to the rabid anti-communism of Nazi propaganda czar Joseph Goebbels.