George Rony – Russian Filmmaker with a Message
Russian Adventurer To Address Executives Club
From early childhood first-hand knowledge of the horrors of revolution and wars, of misery and starvation, of extensive traveling and dangerous adventures, has been the lot of George J. Rony, Russian-born motion picture producer, who is to talk before the Missoula Executives club on Monday, October 2.
Mr. Rony has encountered death on the snowy steppes of Siberia, in the streets of Petrograd, and he narrowly missed death on the roads from Paris to Lisbon as Nazi Stuka bombers roared overhead as refugees fled from France. A fugitive from three dictatorships, George Rony has filmed and known Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Hindenburg, Mussolini, Blum, Daladier and many others. He has built what is considered by some authorities to be the world’s greatest library of historical film on contemporary Europe.
The above notice appeared in the Daily Missoulian on September 27, 1944
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Third War Is Begun Says Rony
“You in America still don’t know what it is all about, because the nightmare of what is happening in Europe is so fantastic that the normal mind refuses to believe it. It is worse than everything you have been told,” declared George J. Rony, Russian-born motion picture authority, who came to the United States three years ago after escaping from Nazi-occupied France.
“The day this war began,” Mr. Rony said, “Hitler started the third world war. All these massacres, all this scientific sterilization of the populations, all this rationing – even when there was no shortage, often, in fact, a surplus of food supplies, that could not be shipped, the Germans withheld these necessary vitamins – have been part of a plan. The blueprint for the third World war was to annihilate as much as possible of the civilian population, so that when that war came in 10 or 15 years, there wouldn’t be any soldiers in those countries because they would have died out as children.”
These statements, Mr. Rony said were based on authentic German documents, and he read excerpts from three reports by German military leaders, one of which also included the declaration, “The principal adversary in the next war will be the United States.”
After describing some of his own experiences and those of others, Mr. Rony said, “This is not just a war. It is a landslide, a revolution of mankind for new forms of life, new principles and philosophy of life. Each country fought and died for a future. They know now what that future is. And between them and that future is the Allies.
“We can not create a peace despite or against the people. We should recognize their rights, and especially their right to the same principles for the future that we cherish ourselves. The time has come for greatness. Honesty and sincerity and loyalty and truth must guide us.
“They don’t want Communism. They have been close to it, and they know it is impossible. But they have suffered as a community, and know it will happen again and again if the old forms are restored.”
In conclusion, Mr. Rony asked that each and every one make to all freedom-loving nations the pledge expressed in the closing lines of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “That these dead shall not have died in vain, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The above article appeared in the Daily Missoulian on October 3, 1944.
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The larger-than-life George Rony continued to befuddle audiences with stories of what he’d witnessed, and what he feared for the future. For more on him, and his life, see the website below: