Escape from Germany

In late August 1939 there were 79 American missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints scattered across western Germany, and they all got the same order: leave the country as fast as possible. 'Escape from Germany' reconstructs that evacuation, a little-known episode from the eve of the Second World War. T. C. Christensen wrote, directed, produced and shot it from the book 'Mine Angels Round About', for which Terry Bohle Montague interviewed dozens of those missionaries in the 1980s.

It starts with a telegram from the church's president, Heber J. Grant, who takes it as given that Hitler is about to invade Poland. The American consulate doesn't take it seriously, but the mission president, Douglas Wood, does. With no way of warning everyone, he hands one of his men, Elder Norman Seibold, a job that looks impossible: cross Germany on his own, track down twenty or so colleagues stranded in towns and railway stations, and get them on a train to Holland or Denmark.

Seibold doesn't know where each of them is, and with each day there are fewer trains for civilians and more closed borders. Wood, meanwhile, shuts the office and tries to get his family and the rest of the group out through the north, by means that aren't exactly legal. Along the way they keep crossing paths with a Jewish family looking for a way out too.

Paul Wuthrich, who had already been Joseph Smith in 'Witnesses', plays Seibold and David McConnell plays Wood, with Sebastian Barr and Landon Henneman among the missionaries. It was shot in Utah and Budapest, with the Heber Valley heritage railway standing in for a European train of 1939 and missionaries serving in Hungary as extras. Christensen has said his films have to be made for under a million dollars, and this one was no exception.

It opened in the United States on 11 April 2024 in just 40 cinemas and got as far as 131, spread across Utah, Arizona, Idaho and Nevada. It took more than two million dollars, a strong figure for a Latter-day Saint film. The few reviews it had were split: some valued the tension and the fact that it's a war film children can watch, others disliked the sermonising, and one historian accused it of taking too many liberties with the facts.

• History
• Drama
• War
• Nazism