National Geographic Channel Pulls ‘Nazi War Diggers’ Series Over Outcry
Source: artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com
National Geographic Channel said Monday that it would “indefinitely” pull a planned television series on unearthing Nazi war graves after days of blistering criticism from archeologists and others who said the show handled the dead with macabre disrespect.
The channel said that after “consulting with colleagues” at the National Geographic Society, it would not broadcast the series, “Nazi War Diggers,” in May as scheduled “while questions raised in recent days regarding accusations about the program can be properly reviewed.” The show was to have been broadcast globally except in the United States.
National Geographic Channel International had commissioned four episodes of the show, in which two British metal detecting specialists, a Polish relics hunter, and an American, Craig Gottlieb, who deals in Nazi World War II artifacts, hunt for the graves of German and Red Army soldiers on the Eastern Front.National Geographic Channel issued a statement Friday defending the show and saying the criticism was premature, based on early publicity materials that “did not provide important context about our team’s methodology.” The channel pulled those materials from its website.
That did not appease archeologists, battlefield historians and others, who have mounted a social-media and a letter-writing campaign aimed in particular at the National Geographic Society to derail the show.
[...]
This is treasure hunting not archaeology,” said Tony Pollard, director of the Center for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, who has appeared on National Geographic programs and other documentaries about unearthing war dead. “I have seen human remains brandished like trophies before, but in dodgy Youtube videos. The trailer on the Internet was absolutely shocking, and very damaging for National Geographic.”
Read the full article at: artbeats.blogs.nytimes.com
According to Dr Tony Pollard, the Director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at Glasgow University, the show is a ‘disgrace’.
‘I’m appalled that a major broadcaster has sunk to the levels of exploitation television,’ he said. ‘I’ve been at the forefront of battlefield archaeology for fifteen years, and I have spent much time getting the subject taken seriously.
’This just looks like they’ve gone around digging up bodies, because TV likes a dead body.’ Source
From AnonymousSwissCollector.com:
Rob Schäfer has noted that these are GERMAN war graves, not “Nazi” war graves. I agree with him completely. The word choice in the letter was meant to allude to the title of the show and, perhaps, make the recipient realize that German bodies were being treated as less than human, likely because they were German. This is an extremely important point. These are our fathers and grandfathers, people who died tragically for a tragic reason and in recent memory.
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