title: Currency

text: In cases where a country has control of its own currency, that control is exercised either by a central bank or by a Ministry of Finance. The institution that has control of monetary policy is referred to as the monetary authority. Monetary authorities have varying degrees of autonomy from the governments that create them. A monetary authority is created and supported by its sponsoring government, so independence can be reduced by the legislative or executive authority that creates it.


title: Currency

text: Several countries can use the same name for their own separate currencies (for example, a "dollar" in Australia, Canada, and the United States). By contrast, several countries can also use the same currency (for example, the euro or the CFA franc), or one country can declare the currency of another country to be legal tender. For example, Panama and El Salvador have declared US currency to be legal tender, and from 1791 to 1857, Spanish dollars were legal tender in the United States. At various times countries have either re-stamped foreign coins or used currency boards, issuing one note of currency for each note of a foreign government held, as Ecuador currently does.


title: Currency

text: Each currency typically has a main currency unit (the dollar, for example, or the euro) and a fractional unit, often defined as of the main unit: 100 cents = 1 dollar, 100 centimes = 1 franc, 100 pence = 1 pound, although units of or occasionally also occur. Some currencies do not have any smaller units at all, such as the Icelandic króna and the Japanese yen.


title: Currency

text: Mauritania and Madagascar are the only remaining countries that have theoretical fractional units not based on the decimal system; instead, the Mauritanian ouguiya is in theory divided into 5 khoums, while the Malagasy ariary is theoretically divided into 5 iraimbilanja. In these countries, words like "dollar" or "pound" "were simply names for given weights of gold". Due to inflation khoums and iraimbilanja have in practice fallen into disuse. (See non-decimal currencies for other historic currencies with non-decimal divisions.)


title: Currency

text: Subject to variation around the world, local currency can be converted to another currency or vice versa with or without central bank/government intervention. Such conversions take place in the foreign exchange market. Based on the above restrictions or free and readily conversion features, currencies are classified as:


title: Currency

text: According to the three aspects of trade in goods and services, capital flows and national policies, the supply-demand relationship of different currencies determines the exchange ratio between currencies.


title: Currency

text: Through cost transfer, goods and services circulating in the country (such as hotels, tourism, catering, advertising, household services) will indirectly affect the trade cost of goods and services and the price of export trade. Therefore, services and goods involved in international trade are not the only reason affecting the exchange rate. The large number of international tourists and overseas students has resulted in the flow of services and goods at home and abroad. It also represents that the competitiveness of global goods and services directly affects the change of international exchange rates.


title: Currency

text: National currencies will be traded on international markets for investment purposes. Investment opportunities in each country attract other countries into investment programs, so that these foreign currencies become the reserves of the central banks of each country. The exchange rate mechanism, in which currencies are quoted continuously between countries, is based on foreign exchange markets in which currencies are invested by individuals and traded or speculated by central banks and investment institutions. In addition, changes in interest rates, capital market fluctuations and changes in investment opportunities will affect the global capital inflows and outflows of countries around the world, and exchange rates will fluctuate accordingly.


title: Currency

text: The country's foreign trade, monetary and fiscal policies affect the exchange rate fluctuations. Foreign trade includes policies such as tariffs and import standards for commodity exports. The impact of monetary policy on the total amount and yield of money directly determines the changes in the international exchange rate. Fiscal policies, such as transfer payments, taxation ratios, and other factors, dominate the profitability of capital and economic development, and the ratio of national debt issuance to deficit determines the repayment capacity and credit rating of the country. Such policies determine the mechanism of linking domestic and foreign currencies and therefore have a significant impact on the generation of exchange rates.


title: Currency

text: Currency convertibility is closely linked to economic development and finance. There are strict conditions for countries to achieve currency convertibility, which is a good way for countries to improve their economies. The currencies of some countries or regions in the world are freely convertible, such as the US dollar, Australian dollar and Japanese yen. The requirements for currency convertibility can be roughly divided into four parts:


title: Currency

text: With a freely convertible currency, domestic firms will have to compete fiercely with their foreign counterparts. The development of competition among them will affect the implementation effect of currency convertibility. In addition, microeconomics is a prerequisite for macroeconomic conditions.


title: Currency

text: Since currency convertibility is the cross-border flow of goods and capital, it will have an impact on the macro economy. This requires that the national economy be in a normal and orderly state, that is, there is no serious inflation and economic overheating. In addition, the government should use macro policies to make mature adjustments to deal with the impact of currency exchange on the economy.


title: Currency

text: The maintainability of international balance of payments is the main performance of reasonable economic structure. Currency convertibility not only causes difficulties in the sustainability of international balance of payments but also affects the government's direct control over international economic transactions. To eliminate the foreign exchange shortage, the government needs adequate international reserves.


title: Currency

text: The level of exchange rate is an important factor in maintaining exchange rate stability, both before and after currency convertibility. The exchange rate of freely convertible currency is too high or too low, which can easily trigger speculation and undermine the stability of macroeconomic and financial markets. Therefore, to maintain the level of exchange rate, a proper exchange rate regime is crucial.


title: Currency

text: In economics, a local currency is a currency not backed by a national government and intended to trade only in a small area. Advocates such as Jane Jacobs argue that this enables an economically depressed region to pull itself up, by giving the people living there a medium of exchange that they can use to exchange services and locally produced goods (in a broader sense, this is the original purpose of all money). Opponents of this concept argue that local currency creates a barrier that can interfere with economies of scale and comparative advantage and that in some cases they can serve as a means of tax evasion.


title: Currency

text: Local currencies can also come into being when there is economic turmoil involving the national currency. An example of this is the Argentinian economic crisis of 2002 in which IOUs issued by local governments quickly took on some of the characteristics of local currencies.


title: Currency

text: One of the best examples of a local currency is the original LETS currency, founded on Vancouver Island in the early 1980s. In 1982, the Canadian Central Bank’s lending rates ran up to 14% which drove chartered bank lending rates as high as 19%. The resulting currency and credit scarcity left island residents with few options other than to create a local currency.


title: Currency

text: The following table are estimates of the 20 most frequently used currencies in world payments in October 2022 by SWIFT.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.


title: Holocaust victims

text: According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Holocaust was "the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators". In addition, 11 million members of other groups were murdered during the "era of the Holocaust".


title: Holocaust victims

text: While the term "Holocaust" generally refers to the systematic mass-murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe, the Nazis also murdered a large number of non-Jewish people who were also considered subhuman ("Untermenschen") or undesirable. Some victims belonged to several categories targeted for extermination, e.g. an assimilated Jew who was a member of a communist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as a Jehovah's Witness.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs (e.g. Russians, Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians and Serbs), Romanis (gypsies), homosexual men; the mentally or physically disabled, mentally ill; Soviet POWs, Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jehovah's Witnesses, Spanish Republicans, Freemasons, black people (especially the Afro-German "Mischlinge", called "Rhineland Bastards" by Hitler and the Nazi regime), and other minorities not considered Aryan ("Herrenvolk", or part of the "master race"); leftists, communists, trade unionists, capitalists, social democrats, socialists, anarchists, and other dissidents who disagreed with the Nazi regime.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a death toll of 17 million.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Despite widely varying treatment (some groups were actively targeted for genocide while others were not), some died in concentration camps such as Dachau and others from various forms of Nazi brutality. According to extensive documentation (written and photographic) left by the Nazis, eyewitness testimony by survivors, perpetrators and bystanders and records of the occupied countries, most perished in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The military campaign to displace persons like the Jews from Germany and other German-held territories during World War II, often with extreme brutality, is known as the Holocaust. It was carried out primarily by German forces and collaborators, German and non-German. Early in the war, millions of Jews were concentrated in urban ghettos. In 1941, Jews were massacred, and by December, Hitler had decided to exterminate all Jews living in Europe at that time. The European Jewish population was reduced from 9,740,000 to 3,642,000; the world's Jewish population was reduced by one-third, from roughly 16.6 million in 1939 to about 11 million in 1946. The extermination of Jews had been a priority to the Nazis, regardless of the consequences.


title: Holocaust victims

text: In January 1942, during the Wannsee Conference, several Nazi leaders discussed the details of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" ("Endlösung der Judenfrage") and German State Secretary Josef Bühler urged conference chairman Reinhard Heydrich to proceed with the Final Solution in the General Government. Jewish populations were systematically deported from the ghettos and the occupied territories to the seven camps designated as "Vernichtungslager" (extermination camps):


title: Holocaust victims

text: In 1978, Sebastian Haffner wrote that in December 1941, Hitler began to accept the failure of his primary goal—to dominate Europe, after his declaration of war against the United States, and his withdrawal—was compensated for by his secondary goal: the extermination of the Jews. As the Nazi war machine faltered during the war's final years, military resources such as fuel, transport, munitions, soldiers and industrial resources were still diverted from the fronts to the death camps.


title: Holocaust victims

text: In Polandhome of Europe's largest Jewish community before the warthe Nazis murdered 3.3 million Jews, or 90 percent of its Jewish population. Although reports of the Holocaust had reached Western leaders, public awareness in the United States and other democracies of the mass murder of Jews in Poland was low at the time; the first references in "The New York Times", in 1942, were unconfirmed reports rather than front-page news.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Greece, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Lithuania, Bohemia, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Latvia lost over 70 percent of their Jewish populations; in Belgium, Romania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Estonia, the figure was about 50 percent. Over one-third of the Soviet Union's Jews were murdered; France lost about 25 percent of its Jewish population, Italy between 15% and 20%. Denmark evacuated nearly all of its Jews to nearby neutral Sweden; the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many Danish citizens, evacuated 7,220 of the country's 7,800 Jews by sea to Sweden, in vessels ranging from fishing boats to private yachts. The rescue allowed the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population to avoid capture by the Nazis. Jews outside Europe under Axis occupation were also affected by the Holocaust in Italian Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Japan, and China.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Although Jews are an ethnoreligious group, they were defined by the Nazis on purely racial grounds. The Nazi Party viewed the Jewish religion as irrelevant, persecuting Jews in accordance with antisemitic stereotypes of an alleged biologically determined heritage. Defining Jews as the chief enemy, Nazi racial ideology was also used to persecute other minorities.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Yad Vashem museum has created, in an ongoing collaboration with many partners, a database with the names and biographical details of close to 4.8 of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during the Holocaust, as well as those whose fate has yet to be determined. The names of more than one million victims remain unknown and are still being collected.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Slavs were one of the most widely persecuted groups during the war, with many Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Serbs and others killed by the Nazis.


title: Holocaust victims

text: According to British historian Ian Kershaw, the Nazis' genocide and brutality was their way of ensuring "Lebensraum" ("living space") for those who met Hitler's narrow racial requirements; this necessitated the elimination of Bolsheviks and Slavs:


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Nazi occupation of Poland was among the most brutal of the war, resulting in the murder of more than 1.8 million ethnic Poles and about 3 million Polish Jews. The six million Jewish, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles represented nearly 17 percent of the country's population. Poles were one of Hitler's first extermination targets, as he outlined in a 22 August 1939 speech to "Wehrmacht" commanders before the invasion. Intelligentsia, socially prominent, and influential people were primarily targeted, although ethnic Poles and other Slavic groups were also killed "en masse". Hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Poles were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps, and the intelligentsia were the first targets of the "Einsatzgruppen" death squads. The anti-Polish campaign culminated in the near-complete destruction of Warsaw, ordered by Hitler and Himmler in 1944. The original assumptions of Generalplan Ost were based on plans to exterminate around 85% (over 20 million) of ethnically Polish citizens of Poland, with the remaining 15% to be used as slaves.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainian and other gentiles were murdered as part of Nazi extermination policies in present-day Ukraine. More Ukrainians were killed fighting the "Wehrmacht" in the Red Army than American, British and French soldiers combined. Original Nazi plans called for the extermination of 65 percent of the nation's 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the survivors treated as slaves. Over two million Ukrainians were deported to Germany as slave labor. The ten-year plan would have exterminated, expelled, Germanized or enslaved most (or all) Ukrainians.


title: Holocaust victims

text: During Operation Barbarossa (the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union), millions of Red Army prisoners of war were summarily executed in the field by German armies (the "Waffen SS" in particular), died under inhumane conditions in German prisoner of war camps, on death marches, or had been shipped to concentration camps for execution. The Germans killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs by starvation, exposure, and execution over an eight-month period in 1941–42. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, by the winter of 1941 "starvation and disease resulted in mass death of unimaginable proportions". 140,000-500,000 Soviet citizens and POWs were murdered in the concentration camps.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Soviet civilian populations in the occupied areas were severely persecuted and endured the treacherous conditions of the Eastern Front, which spawned atrocities such as the siege of Leningrad, when 1.2 million civilians died. Thousands of peasant villages across Russia, Belarus and Ukraine were annihilated by German troops. During the occupation, the Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions lost about a quarter of their populations. An estimated one-quarter of Soviet civilian deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their allies (five million Russians, three million Ukrainians and 1.5 million Belarusians) were racially motivated. In 1995, the Russian Academy of Sciences reported that civilian deaths in the occupied USSR, including Jews, at the hands of the Germans totaled 13.7 million dead (20 percent of the population of 68 million). The figure includes 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals, 2.2 million deaths of persons deported to Germany as forced labour, and 4.1 million famine and disease deaths. An estimated three million people also died of starvation in unoccupied territory. The losses occurred within the 1946–1991 borders of the USSR, and include territories annexed in 1939–40. The deaths of 8.2 million Soviet civilians, including Jews, were documented by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Nazi genocide of the Romani people was ignored by scholars until the 1980s, and opinions continue to differ on its details. According to historians Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, the genocide of the Romani began later than that of the Jews and a smaller percentage was murdered. Hitler's genocidal campaign against Europe's Romani population involved the application of Nazi "racial hygiene" (selective breeding applied to humans). Despite discriminatory measures, some Romani (including some of Germany's Sinti and Lalleri) were spared deportation and death, with the remaining Romani groups suffering a fate similar to that of the Jews. Romani were deported to the Jewish ghettos, were shot by SS "Einsatzgruppen" in their villages, or deported and gassed in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Thousands of Spanish Republican refugees were living in France at the time of its occupation by Nazi Germany in 1940; 15,000 were detained in concentration camps, including 7,000 in Mauthausen-Gusen. Around 3,500 were murdered in the camp.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Nazis promoted xenophobia and racism against all "non-Aryan" races. African (black) residents of Germany and black prisoners of war, such as French colonial troops and African Americans, were also victims of Nazi racial policy. When the Nazis came to power, hundreds of African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation, lived in the Rhineland. In "Mein Kampf", Hitler described the children of marriages to African occupation troops as a contamination of the white race "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe" who were "bastardising the European continent at its core". According to Hitler, "Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardising the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate".


title: Holocaust victims

text: Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940, and was part of the Axis. No Japanese people were deliberately imprisoned or killed, since they were considered "honorary Aryans". The same applied to Turks and all other "Ural-Altaic" peoples.


title: Holocaust victims

text: According to their eugenics policy, the Nazis believed that the disabled were a burden to society because they needed care and were considered an affront to their notion of a society composed of a perfect race. About 375,000 people were sterilized against their will due to their disabilities.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Those with disabilities were among the first to be murdered by the Nazis; according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the T-4 Program (established in 1939) was the model for future Nazi exterminations and it set a precedent for the genocide of what they described as the Jewish race. The program attempted to maintain the "purity" of the Aryan race by systematically murdering children and adults with physical deformities or suffering from mental illness, using gas chambers for the first time. Although Hitler formally halted the program in late August 1941, the killings secretly continued until the end of the war and an estimated 275,000 people with congenital disabilities were murdered.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Homosexual men were also targets of the Holocaust, since male homosexuality was deemed incompatible with Nazism. The Nazis believed that gay men were weak, effeminate and unable to fight for the German nation; homosexuals were unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. According to the Nazis, "inferior races" produced more children than Aryans, so anything which diminished Germany's reproductive potential was considered a racial danger. Homosexuality was also thought to be contagious by the Nazis. By 1936, Heinrich Himmler was leading efforts to persecute gay men under existing and new anti-homosexual laws. More than one million gay Germans were targeted, of whom at least 100,000 were arrested and 50,000 were convicted and imprisoned. An unknown number were institutionalized in state-run mental hospitals. Hundreds of European gay men living under Nazi occupation were chemically castrated by court order. Although an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps, the number who were murdered is uncertain. According to Austrian survivor Heinz Heger, gay men "suffered a higher mortality rate than other relatively small victim groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and political prisoners". Gay men in Nazi concentration camps were identified by a pink triangle on their shirts, along with men convicted of sexually assaulting children and bestiality. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's website, "Nazi Germany did not seek to kill all homosexuals. Nevertheless, the Nazi state, through active persecution, attempted to terrorise German homosexuals into sexual and social conformity, leaving thousands dead and shattering the lives of many more."


title: Holocaust victims

text: Many homosexuals who were liberated from the concentration camps were persecuted in postwar Germany. Survivors were subject to prosecution under Paragraph 175 (which forbade "lewdness between men"), with time served in the concentration camps deducted from their sentences. This contrasted with the treatment of other Holocaust victims, who were compensated for the loss of family members and educational opportunities.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Another large group of victims was composed of German and foreign civilian activists from across the political spectrum who opposed the Nazi regime, captured resistance fighters (many of whom were executed during—or immediately after—their interrogation, particularly in occupied Poland and France) and, sometimes, their families. German political prisoners were a substantial proportion of the first inmates at Dachau (the prototypical Nazi concentration camp). The political People's Court was notorious for the number of its death sentences.


title: Holocaust victims

text: German communists were among the first to be imprisoned in concentration camps. Their ties to the USSR concerned Hitler, and the Nazi Party was intractably opposed to communism. Rumors of communist violence were spread by the Nazis to justify the Enabling Act of 1933, which gave Hitler his first dictatorial powers. Hermann Göring testified at Nuremberg that Nazi willingness to repress German Communists prompted Hindenburg and the old elite to cooperate with them. Hitler and the Nazis also despised German leftists because of their resistance to Nazi racism. Hitler referred to Marxism and "Bolshevism" as means for "the international Jew" to undermine "racial purity", stir up class tension and mobilize trade unions against the government and business. When the Nazis occupied a territory, communists, socialists and anarchists were usually among the first to be repressed; this included summary executions. An example is Hitler's Commissar Order, in which he demanded the summary execution of all Soviet troops who were political commissars who offered resistance or were captured in battle.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Thousands of people, primarily diplomats, of nationalities associated with the Allies (China and Mexico, for example) and Spanish Civil War refugees in occupied France were interned or executed. After Italy's 1943 surrender, many Italian nationals (including partisans and Italian soldiers disarmed by the Germans) were sent to concentration camps.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Historian Detlef Garbe, director of the Neuengamme Memorial in Hamburg, wrote about Jehovah's Witnesses: "No other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism [Nazism] with comparable unanimity and steadfastness". Between 2,500 and 5,000 Witnesses were murdered in the concentration camps; unwilling to fight for any cause, they refused to serve in the army.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Catholic Church was persecuted under the Third Reich, with the Nazi leadership hoping to gradually de-Christianize Germany. According to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, "By the latter part of the decade of the Thirties, church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion." Hitler vehemently despised Christianity, calling it the enemy of National Socialism. According to historian William Shirer, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists". He also wrote that Hitler "inveighed against political Catholicism in "Mein Kampf" and attacked both of the Christian Churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem...". As reported in the New York Times, Hitler's forces wished to de-Christianize Germany after "the final victory" and destroy Christianity. According to historian Alan Bullock, "Once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches, but until then he would be circumspect." Political Catholicism was a target of Hitler's 1934 Night of the Long Knives. German clergy, nuns and lay leaders were also targeted after the Nazi takeover, leading to thousands of arrests over the following years. Priests who were part of the Catholic resistance were killed. Hitler's invasion of Catholic Poland in 1939 began World War II, and the Nazis targeted clergy, monks and nuns in their campaign to destroy Polish culture.


title: Holocaust victims

text: In 1940, the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp was established. Of 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau, the overwhelming majority (94.88 percent) were Catholic. According to Ian Kershaw, about 400 German priests were sent to the camp. Although the Holy See concluded a 1933 concordat with Germany to protect Catholicism in the Third Reich, the Nazis frequently violated the pact in their "Kirchenkampf" ("struggle with the churches"). They shut down the Catholic press, schools, political parties and youth groups in Germany amid murder and mass arrests. In March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued his "Mit brennender Sorge" encyclical accusing the Nazi government of violating the 1933 concordat and sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church".


title: Holocaust victims

text: The church was especially harshly treated in annexed regions, such as Austria. Viennese "Gauleiter" Odilo Globocnik confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations and sent many priests to Dachau. In the Czech lands, religious orders were suppressed, schools closed, religious instruction forbidden and priests sent to concentration camps. Catholic bishops, clergy, nuns and laypeople protested and attacked Nazi policies in occupied territories; in 1942, the Dutch bishops protested the mistreatment of Jews. When Archbishop Johannes de Jong refused to yield to Nazi threats, the Gestapo rounded up Catholic "Jews" and sent 92 to Auschwitz. One Catholic abducted in this manner was nun Edith Stein, who was murdered at Auschwitz along with Poland's Maximilian Kolbe. Other Catholic victims of the Holocaust have been beatified, including Poland's 108 Martyrs of World War II, the Martyrs of Nowogródek, Dutch theologian Titus Brandsma and Germany's Lübeck martyrs and Bernhard Lichtenberg.


title: Holocaust victims

text: According to Norman Davies, the Nazi terror was "much fiercer and more protracted in Poland than anywhere in Europe." Polish Catholic victims of the Third Reich numbered in the millions. Nazi ideology viewed ethnic Poles—the mainly Catholic ethnic majority of Poland—as subhuman. After their 1939 invasion of Poland, the Nazis instituted a policy of murdering (or suppressing) the ethnic-Polish elite (including Catholic religious leaders). The Nazi plan for Poland was the nation's destruction, which necessitated attacking the Polish Church, (particularly in areas annexed by Germany). About the brief period of military control from 1 September to 25 October 1939, Davies wrote: "According to one source, 714 mass executions were carried out, and 6,376 people, mainly Catholics, were shot. Others put the death toll in one town alone at 20,000. It was a taste of things to come."


title: Holocaust victims

text: In Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, severe persecution began. The Nazis systematically dismantled the church, arresting its leaders, exiling its clergy and closing its churches, monasteries and convents. Germanization of the annexed regions began in December 1939, with deportations of men, women and children. According to Richard J. Evans, in the Reichsgau Wartheland "numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some 1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their imprisonment." Among the clergy who were murdered at Dachau were many of the 108 Polish Martyrs of World War II.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Hans Frank said in 1940, "Poles may have only one master—a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed." Thomas J. Craughwell wrote that from 1939 to 1945, an estimated 3,000 members of the Polish clergy (18 percent) were murdered; of these, 1,992 were murdered in concentration camps. According to the "Encyclopædia Britannica", 1,811 Polish priests were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Among the persecuted resisters was Irena Sendlerowa, head of the children's section of Żegota, who placed more than 2,500 Jewish children in convents, orphanages, schools, hospitals, and homes. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, Sendlerowa was crippled by torture.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Nazis attempted to deal with Protestant dissent with their ideology by creating the Reich Church, a union of 28 existing Protestant groups espousing Positive Christianity (a doctrine compatible with Nazism). Non-Aryan ministers were suspended and church members called themselves German Christians, with "the swastika on their chest and the cross in their heart." The Protestant opposition to the Nazis established the Confessing Church, a rival umbrella organization of independent German regional churches which was persecuted.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The Nazis claimed that high-degree Masons were willing members of "the Jewish conspiracy" and Freemasonry was a cause of Germany's defeat in World War I. Reich Security Main Office ("Reichssicherheitshauptamt", or RSHA) records indicate the persecution of Freemasons during the Holocaust. RSHA Amt VII (written records), overseen by Franz Six, was responsible for "ideological" tasks: the creation of antisemitic and anti-Masonic propaganda. Although the exact number is unknown, an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 Freemasons were murdered as a result of Hitler's December 1941 "Nacht und Nebel" directive. Masonic concentration camp inmates, considered political prisoners, wore an inverted red triangle.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Small blue forget-me-nots were first used by the Zur Sonne Grand Lodge in 1926 as a Masonic emblem at its annual convention in Bremen. In 1938, a forget-me-not badge made by the factory which produced the Masonic badge was chosen for the annual Nazi "Winterhilfswerk", the charity drive of the National Socialist People's Welfare (the party's welfare branch). The coincidence enabled Freemasons to wear the forget-me-not badge as a secret sign of Masonic membership.


title: Holocaust victims

text: After the war, the forget-me-not was again used as a Masonic emblem at the first annual United Grand Lodges of Germany convention in 1948. The badge is worn on the lapels of Masons worldwide in remembrance of those who have suffered in the name of Freemasonry, particularly during the Nazi era.


title: Holocaust victims

text: The SS and police conducted mass actions against civilians with alleged links to resistance movements, their families, and villages or city districts. Notorious killings occurred in Lidice, Khatyn, Kragujevac, Sant'Anna and Oradour-sur-Glane, and a district of Warsaw was obliterated. In occupied Poland, Nazi Germany imposed the death penalty on those found sheltering (or aiding) Jews. "Social deviants"—prostitutes, vagrants, alcoholics, drug addicts, open dissidents, pacifists, draft resisters and common criminals—were also imprisoned in concentration camps. The common criminals frequently became Kapos, inmate guards of fellow prisoners.


title: Holocaust victims

text: Some Germans and Austrians who lived abroad for much of their lives were considered to have too much exposure to foreign ideas, and they were sent to concentration camps. These prisoners, known as "emigrants", each wore a blue triangle.


title: Holocaust victims

text: On rare occasions, POWs from Western Allied armies were sent to concentration camps, including 350 Americanssome chosen for being Jewish, but mostly for looking Jewish or for being troublemakers or otherwise 'undesirable'. Some captured in the Battle of the Bulge were forced into slave labor at the Berga concentration camp, a subcamp of Buchenwald; over 70 died. The "KLB Club" was a group of 168 Allied airmenmainly American, British, and Canadianconsidered "Terrorfliegers" ("terror fliers"), denied POW status, and held at Buchenwald for two months until a German officer arranged their transfer to a standard POW camp, a week before their scheduled execution.


title: Burt Ward

text: Burt Ward (born Bert John Gervis Jr. , July 6, 1945) is an American actor, animal welfare activist and businessman. He played Dick Grayson's Robin, the sidekick of Batman (played by Adam West), in the television series "Batman" (1966–1968), its theatrical feature film, the Saturday morning animated series "The New Adventures of Batman" (1977), the two-episode pilot "Legends of the Superheroes" (1979), the animated reunion films "" (2016) and "Batman vs. Two-Face" (2017), and the live-action television event "Crisis on Infinite Earths" (2019).


title: Burt Ward

text: Ward was born Bert John Gervis Jr., on July 6, 1945, in Los Angeles, California. His father, Bert Sr., was the owner of a traveling ice show called "Rhapsody On Ice". At age two, Ward was listed in the magazine "Strange as It Seems" as a professional ice skater. Growing up, he was an avid reader of comic books such as "Superman" and "Superboy", and enjoyed the action-adventure show "Adventures of Superman". He acquired the nickname "Sparky" in his youth, possibly from the sparks his skates kicked up during his routines or his energetic nature.


title: Burt Ward

text: He excelled in high school sport activities such as football, track, and wrestling; he was also a member of the chess club and is a practitioner of Taekwondo. After graduation, he enrolled in college while working part-time for his father's real-estate company.


title: Burt Ward

text: At the age of 19, Ward auditioned for the role of Robin. West and Ward were up against Lyle Waggoner and Peter Deyell for the roles of Batman and Robin, respectively. Selected for the role of Robin, Ward thought people would find Gervis (the "G" is soft, as in "gentleman") hard to pronounce and adopted his mother's maiden name, Ward. He also changed the spelling of Bert to "Burt" to add "punch".


title: Burt Ward

text: Unlike the series' lead, Adam West, Ward was required to perform some dangerous stunt work. He was told this was because his costume revealed more of his face, making it impractical for all of his stunt scenes to be performed by a stunt double. Later, he also discovered that he was being paid the minimum wage allowed by the Screen Actors Guild, and his stunt double was paid per stunt, so having Ward perform his own stunts was a cost-saving strategy. Ward says that he was sent to the emergency room dozens of times during his time as Robin.


title: Burt Ward

text: At the height of the series' popularity, Ward recorded several musical tracks during sessions produced by Tom Wilson and arranged by Frank Zappa. The first two, "Boy Wonder, I Love You" (which Zappa wrote) and "Orange Colored Sky", were released as a single on November 14, 1966. Two other tracks from these sessions, "Teenage Bill of Rights" and "Autumn Love", remain unreleased.


title: Burt Ward

text: During the first months of shooting, Ward was paid $350 per week. The series only lasted three seasons, for a total of 120 episodes; according to Ward in an interview, this was because of the high cost of production. It was still high in the ratings, but ABC was losing money. Later, NBC offered to pick it up for a fourth season, but the offer was withdrawn after learning that the sets had been destroyed. Adam West and Burt Ward reprised their TV roles of Batman and Robin in the 20th Century Fox film "Batman: The Movie" released on July 30, 1966.


title: Burt Ward

text: In 1969, a year after "Batman"'s cancellation, West's mother died, bringing the two men closer together. They were reunited many times at conventions and TV reunion specials. In turn, Ward also made three guest appearances with West on separate cartoons: one was a 2002 episode of "The Simpsons", later in 2010 on an episode of "SpongeBob SquarePants", and in 2013 for one of the final episodes of "Futurama". West and Ward remained friends until West's death on June 9, 2017, at age 88.


title: Burt Ward

text: After the end of "Batman", Ward, like Adam West, found himself hard-pressed to find other acting jobs. He did act in more than 40 made-for-television films such as "Virgin High".


title: Burt Ward

text: In 1985, DC Comics named Ward as one of the honorees in the company's 50th-anniversary publication "Fifty Who Made DC Great" for his work on the Batman series.


title: Burt Ward

text: In June 1995, Ward wrote a tell-all autobiography called "Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights", which described his time playing Robin.


title: Burt Ward

text: Ward appeared in numerous reunions with co-star Adam West. The most memorable included reprising their roles as the Dynamic Duo on a short-lived animated series called "The New Adventures of Batman", as well as "The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour" and "Tarzan and the Super 7". In addition, they reappeared as the Dynamic Duo for "Legends of the Superheroes". West and Ward finally reunited in the 2003 television movie, "".


title: Burt Ward

text: During a "Pro Wrestling Unplugged" angle with wrestler Johnny Kashmere, Ward "knighted" Kashmere as the "New Batman". Ward has appeared on the show several times, walking out to the theme music from the 1960s "Batman".


title: Burt Ward

text: In 2012, Bluewater comics was planning to issue a four-issue comic miniseries in homage to Burt Ward playing Robin, called "Burt Ward, Boy Wonder", but it was apparently canceled. It starred Burt Ward and his crimefighting rescue dogs Gentle and Giant fighting crime. Part of the first issue was released on Free Comic Book Day 2012.


title: Burt Ward

text: Beginning in late 2017, Ward is seen promoting the "Batman" television series and other classic television series on the MeTV television network.


title: Burt Ward

text: In 2016 and 2017 respectively, West and Ward reunited a final time, to reprise the Dynamic Duo in the animated movies "" and "Batman vs. Two-Face", the latter being released after West's death.


title: Burt Ward

text: In 1994, Ward and his wife, Tracy Posner Ward, founded a charitable organization called Gentle Giants Rescue and Adoptions, Inc., which rescues giant-breed dogs such as Great Danes and some smaller-breed dogs. Their work with the organization has been featured in such outlets as "People" magazine, ASPCA Animal Watch, "Hard Copy", "Inside Edition", and "Entertainment Tonight". Ward was also seen in an episode of Animal Planet's "Adoption Tales".


title: Burt Ward

text: Ward's first wife was Bonney Lindsey, daughter of conductor Mort Lindsey. Ward and Lindsey married on July 19, 1965, and divorced in 1967. They had one daughter in 1966. Feom 1967 to 1969, he was married to actress Kathy Kersh, whom he met when she appeared as a guest villainess on the "Batman" television series. He was married to model Mariana Torchia from 1985 to 1989. Since 1990, Ward has been married to Tracy Posner. Their daughter was born on February 16, 1991.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Hertha, Berliner Sport-Club e. V., commonly known as Hertha BSC (), and sometimes referred to as Hertha Berlin, Hertha BSC Berlin, or simply Hertha, is a German professional football club based in the locality of Westend of the borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf of Berlin. Hertha BSC plays in the Bundesliga, the top tier of German football. Hertha BSC was founded in 1892, and was a founding member of the German Football Association in Leipzig in 1900.


title: Hertha BSC

text: The team won the German championship in 1930 and 1931. Since 1963, Hertha's stadium has been the Olympiastadion. The club is known as "Die Alte Dame" in German, which translates to "The Old Lady". In 2002, the sports activities of the professional, amateur, and under-19 teams were separated into "Hertha BSC GmbH & Co. KGaA".


title: Hertha BSC

text: The club was formed in 1892 as "BFC Hertha 92", taking its name from a steamship with a blue and white smokestack; one of the four young men who founded the club had taken a day trip on this ship with his father. The name Hertha is a variation on Nerthus, referring to a fertility goddess from Germanic mythology.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Hertha performed consistently well on the field, including a win in the first Berlin championship final in 1905. In May 1910, Hertha won a friendly match against Southend United, which was considered significant at the time, as England was where the game originated and English clubs dominated the sport. However, their on-field success was not matched financially and in 1920 the staunchly working-class Hertha merged with the well-heeled club Berliner Sport-Club to form "Hertha Berliner Sport-Club". The new team continued to enjoy considerable success in the Oberliga Berlin-Brandenburg, while also enduring a substantial measure of frustration. The team played its way to the German championship final in six consecutive seasons from 1926 to 1931, but was only able to win the title in 1930 and 1931 with BSC leaving to become an independent club again after the combined side's first championship. Notwithstanding, Hertha emerged as the Germany's second most successful team during the inter-war years.


title: Hertha BSC

text: German football was re-organized under the Third Reich in 1933 into 16 top-flight divisions, which saw Hertha playing in the Gauliga Berlin-Brandenburg. The club continued to enjoy success within their division, regularly finishing in the upper half of the table and capturing the divisional title in 1935, 1937 and 1944. It faded from prominence, however, unable to advance out of the early rounds of the national championship rounds. Politically, the club was overhauled under Hitler, with Hans Pfeifer, a Nazi party member, being installed as president.


title: Hertha BSC

text: After World War II, occupying Allied authorities banned most organizations in Germany, including sports and football clubs. Hertha was re-formed late in 1945 as "SG Gesundbrunnen" and resumed play in the Oberliga Berlin – Gruppe C. The 36 teams of the first season of the post-war Oberliga Berlin were reduced to just a dozen the next year, and the club found itself out of first division football and playing in the Amateurliga Berlin. By the end of 1949, it had re-claimed their identity as "Hertha BSC" and earned a return to the top-flight.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Tensions between the western Allies and the Soviets occupying various sectors of the city, and the developing Cold War, led to chaotic conditions for football in the capital. Hertha was banned from playing against East German teams in the 1949–50 season after taking on several players and a coach who had fled the Dresden club SG Friedrichstadt for West Berlin. A number of sides from the eastern half of the city were forced from the Oberliga Berlin to the newly established DDR-Liga beginning with the 1950–51 season.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Through the 1950s, an intense rivalry developed with Tennis Borussia Berlin. A proposal for a merger between the two clubs in 1958 was resoundingly rejected, with only three of the 266 members voting in favour.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Being a major Berlin side, Hertha had fans in the entirety of Berlin, but following the division of the city, supporters in East Berlin found it both difficult and dangerous to follow the team. In interviews with long-time supporter Helmut Klopfleisch, he described his difficulties as a supporter in East Berlin. Klopfleisch came from the district of Pankow and attending his first home match as a young boy in 1954 he became an instant supporter. He continued to attend home matches at the stadium, but with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, this became impossible. Despite this, he did not give up. By this time, Hertha played at the Stadion am Gesundbrunnen, nicknamed "Die Plumpe". The stadium was located close enough to the Berlin wall for the sounds from the stadium to be heard over the wall. Thus, Klopfleisch and other supporters gathered behind the wall to listen to the home matches. When the crowd at the stadium cheered, Klopfleisch and the others cheered as well. Klopfleisch later came under suspicion by Stasi, the East German secret police. He was arrested and interrogated at numerous occasions. He also had his passport confiscated and eventually lost his job as an electrician.


title: Hertha BSC

text: At the time of the formation of the Bundesliga in 1963, Hertha was Berlin's reigning champion and so became an inaugural member of the new professional national league. In spite of finishing clear of the relegation zone, the team was demoted after the 1964–65 season following attempts to bribe players to play in the city under what had become decidedly unpleasant circumstances after the erection of the Berlin Wall. This caused something of a crisis for the Bundesliga which wanted, for political reasons, to continue to have a team in its ranks representing the former capital. Through various machinations, this led to the promotion of SC Tasmania 1900 Berlin, which then delivered the worst-ever performance in Bundesliga history. Hertha managed a return to the premier German league in 1968–69 and developed a solid following, making it Berlin's favourite side.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Hertha, however, was again soon touched by scandal through its involvement with several other clubs in the Bundesliga matchfixing scandal of 1971. In the course of an investigation of Hertha's role, it was also revealed that the club was 6 million DM in debt. Financial disaster was averted through the sale of the team's former home ground.


title: Hertha BSC

text: In spite of this, the team continued to enjoy a fair measure of success on the field through the 1970s with a second place Bundesliga finish behind Borussia Mönchengladbach in 1974–75, a semi-final appearance in the 1978–79 UEFA Cup, and two appearances in the final of the DFB-Pokal (1977 and 1979). The following season saw the fortunes of the team take a turn for the worse as it was relegated to the 2. Bundesliga, where it would spend 13 of the next 17 seasons.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Plans in 1982 for a merger with Tennis Borussia Berlin, SpVgg Blau-Weiß 1890 Berlin and SCC Berlin to form a side derisively referred to as "FC Utopia" never came to fruition. Hertha slipped as low as the third tier Amateur Oberliga Berlin, where it spent two seasons (1986–87 and 1987–88). Two turns in the Bundesliga (1982–83 and 1990–91) saw the team immediately relegated after poor performances. Hertha's amateur side enjoyed a greater measure of success, advancing all the way to the final of the DFB-Pokal in 1993, where its run ended in a close 0–1 defeat at the hands of Bundesliga side Bayer Leverkusen.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hertha became a popular side in East Berlin as well. Two days after the wall came down, 11,000 East Berliners attended Hertha's match against SG Wattenscheid. A fan friendship with Union Berlin developed, and a friendly match between the two attracted over 50,000 spectators.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Financial woes once more burdened the club in 1994, as it found itself 10 million DM in debt. The crisis was again resolved through the sale of real estate holdings in addition to the signing of a new sponsor and management team. By 1997, Hertha found its way back to the Bundesliga, where it generally managed to finish in the upper-third of the league table. When Hertha was promoted in 1997, it ended Berlin's six-year-long drought without a Bundesliga side, which had made the Bundesliga the only top league in Europe without representation from its country's biggest city and capital.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Most recently, bright spots for the side have been a continuous string of appearances in international play in the UEFA Cup and the UEFA Champions League beginning in the 1999 season, and the signing of key players such as Pál Dárdai in 1997 who became Herta's most capped player ever, Sebastian Deisler in 1999 and Brazilian international Marcelinho in 2001, who was named the Bundesliga's Player of the Year in 2005. Hertha has also invested heavily in its own youth football academy, which has produced several players with Bundesliga potential.


title: Hertha BSC

text: The team was almost relegated in the 2003–04 season, but rebounded and finished fourth the following season, but missed out on the Champions League after they were held to a draw on the final day by Hannover 96, which saw Werder Bremen overtake them for the spot on the final league matchday. (As a "thank-you" gesture, Werder sent the Hannover squad 96 bottles of champagne.) In 2005–06, the "Herthaner" finished in sixth position, then qualified for the UEFA Cup after defeating FC Moscow in the UEFA Intertoto Cup. However, Hertha was eliminated in the first round of the UEFA Cup by Odense BK. In 2006–07, Hertha finished tenth after sacking manager Falko Götz on 11 April. Hertha started the 2007–08 season with new manager Lucien Favre, who had won the Swiss championship in 2006 and 2007 with Zürich. Hertha finished tenth again, but started in the first qualification round of the UEFA Cup via the UEFA Respect Fair Play ranking, making it as far as the group stage of the tournament. After a successful campaign in 2008–09 season, finishing in fourth place and remaining in the title race up until the second to last matchday, the club had a very poor season in 2009–10 season, finishing last in the Bundesliga and suffering relegation.


title: Hertha BSC

text: After spending the 2010–11 season in the 2. Bundesliga, Hertha secured its return to the Bundesliga for 2011–12 by winning 1–0 at MSV Duisburg with three matchdays to play in the season. Hertha, however, finished 16th in the 2011–12 Bundesliga and lost in the relegation playoff to Fortuna Düsseldorf to fall back to the 2. Bundesliga.


title: Hertha BSC

text: In 2012–13, Hertha achieved promotion from the second division as champions for the second time in three seasons. On the opening day of the 2013–14 season, the club beat Eintracht Frankfurt 6–1 at the Olympiastadion to top the Bundesliga table at the end of matchday 1.


title: Hertha BSC

text: On 5 February 2015 Pál Dárdai, Hertha's longest serving and most capped player ever with 366 appearances took over as the manager of the main squad. At the halfway point of the 2015–16 Bundesliga season, Hertha lay in third place, its highest position at the winter break since 2008–09. Despite a late-season slump, Hertha still finished in seventh place for the season, its highest finish in the Bundesliga since 2008–09 during which Hertha finished fourth. The seventh-place finish meant the club secured Europa League football for the 2016–17 season by the means of a third round play-off. Hertha lost the third round play-off 3–2 on aggregate to Brøndby, winning the first leg 1–0 in Berlin but losing the second away tie 3–1, with Teemu Pukki scoring a hat-trick for the Danish side.


title: Hertha BSC

text: In the 2016–17 Bundesliga season, Hertha enjoyed its best ever start to a Bundesliga season in terms of points won during the opening eight matches, losing just one match – away against Bayern Munich – and forcing a draw away against Borussia Dortmund. At the 2016–17 Bundesliga winter break, Hertha stood at third place in the league, with nine wins, three draws and four losses. Hertha finished the season on 6th place and qualified for the 2017–18 Europa League. Their place in the group stage was secured on 27 May 2017, after Borussia Dortmund defeated Eintracht Frankfurt in the 2017 DFB–Pokal final.


title: Hertha BSC

text: On 27 November 2019, Jürgen Klinsmann became the new manager of Hertha BSC, replacing Ante Čović. Klinsmann left the club on 11 February 2020, after only 76 days in charge. Assistant manager Alexander Nouri took interim charge of the team, before the permanent appointment of Bruno Labbadia on 9 April 2020.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Since 1963, Hertha BSC has played its matches in Berlin's Olympiastadion, originally built for the 1936 Summer Olympics.


title: Hertha BSC

text: The stadium has a permanent capacity of 74,649 seats, making it the largest stadium in Germany in terms of seating capacity and the second largest stadium in Germany, behind the Signal Iduna Park in Dortmund, in terms of total capacity. For certain football matches, such as those against Bayern Munich, the capacity can be temporarily expanded. This is made by the addition of mobile grandstand over the Marathon Arch. The extended capacity reached 76,197 seats in 2014.


title: Hertha BSC

text: The stadium underwent major renovations twice, in 1974 and from 2000 to 2004. In both cases, the renovations were for the upcoming FIFA World Cup. In the 1974 upgrades, the stadium received a partial roof. It underwent a thorough modernization for the 2006 World Cup. In addition, the colour of the track was changed to blue to match Hertha's club colours. In addition to Hertha's home games, Olympiastadion serves as one of the home grounds for the Germany national football team, and it hosts concerts, track and field competitions, and the annual DFB-Pokal final. It was also the site for six matches of the 2006 World Cup, including the tournament final.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Hertha played its matches on a sports field on the "Exer" on Schönhauser Allee in Prenzlauer Berg until 1904. This was the first home ground of Hertha. The Exer was a former parade ground of the 1st (Emperor Alexander) Guards Grenadiers and the site is today occupied by the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark. Hertha then moved it matches to the Schebera-Sportplatz in the locality of Gesundbrunnen in 1904. The Stadion am Gesundbrunnen was built in the area in 1923. The stadium would be nicknamed "Die Plumpe" and had a capacity of 35,000, of which 3,600 seated. Hertha left the stadium when it joined the Bundesliga in 1963. Hertha returned to the site during the Regionalliga years from 1965 to 1968. The sale of the site in 1971 helped the club avoid bankruptcy.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Due to a lack of spectator interest, Hertha played its 2. Bundesliga and Amateurliga matches from 1986 to 1989 at the Poststadion. The opening fixtures of the 1992–93 season, as well as the Intertoto Cup and UEFA Cup qualifying matches, were played at the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark.


title: Hertha BSC

text: It was confirmed on 23 May 2016 that Hertha will continue to play its home matches at the Olympiastadion until 2025.


title: Hertha BSC

text: On 30 March 2017, Hertha announced its intentions to build a new 55,000 seater stadium, to be ready in 2025 when their contract to play at the Olympiastadion runs out. The club noted many factors for this decision, one being that the Berlin side are the only club in the Bundesliga without a dedicated football stadium. In the announcement, the club acknowledged that the Olympiastadion was suitable for major national and international matches, but was too large for the average attendance of a Hertha home game, with only 64% seats being sold; opposed to the Bundesliga average of 92%. On the announcement, the club stated that its preferred option was to construct its own stadium, with a survey identifying a suitable site in Berlin's Olympic Park close to the Olympiastadion. But, at the same time, Berlin's state government indicated a willingness to consider rebuilding the Olympiastadion itself into a football-only venue. However, following the success of the 2018 European Athletics Championships held at the stadium, combined with the potential cost of the conversion, the state government subsequently elected not to proceed, leading Hertha to return to the Olympic Park proposal. However, if that plan was rejected, they also have secondary plans for the stadium to be built in Brandenburg Park, Ludwigsfelde.


title: Hertha BSC

text: Missing out on a trend of promoting women's football, Hertha became one of a decreasing number of major German football clubs left outside the top of women's football. Several steps had been taken to develop women's football, but most of them ended up inconclusive. The change came in 2009, when the club announced that it was to launch a cooperation in women's football with 1. FC Lübars, a football club from the Berlin borough Reinickendorf and with decades of history in women's football.


title: Hertha BSC

text: From one side, the partnership meant that Hertha was to provide Lübars with various forms of support, including financial support, expertise in licensing and sponsor acquisition, equipment and training instruction – investing approximately 1 million Euros in the project. From the other side, the partnership meant that Lübars was to compete in the colours of Hertha, thus earning the nickname ""Die Hertha-Frauen"" ("The Hertha-women"). In the long run, the club plans for the team of 1. FC Lübars to be integrated with Hertha BSC. 1. FC Lübars now competes in the 2. Bundesliga of women's football.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Beowulf is a 2007 3D CGI fantasy action film directed and co-produced by Robert Zemeckis, written by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and based on the Old English epic poem of the same name. Starring the voices of Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, Brendan Gleeson, John Malkovich, Crispin Glover, Alison Lohman and Angelina Jolie, the film features human characters animated using live-action motion-capture CGI animation, which was previously used in "The Polar Express" (2004) and "Monster House" (2006).


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Produced by Zemeckis' ImageMovers and Shangri-La Entertainment, the film premiered at Westwood, Los Angeles on November 5, 2007 and was released theatrically in the United States on November 16, 2007, by Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros. Pictures handling international distribution. The film received moderately positive reviews from critics, who complimented the CGI visual-effects, CGI performance-capture and voice acting whilst criticizing aspects of the interpretation of the poem. The film underperformed at the box office, having earned only $196.4 million on a $150 million budget (not including marketing costs).


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: In 507, the legendary Geatish warrior Beowulf travels to Denmark with his band of soldiers including his best friend Wiglaf to help King Hrothgar, who needs a hero to slay Grendel, a hideously malformed troll-like creature with appalling strength and cunning who attacked and killed many of Hrothgar's warriors during a celebration in the mead hall Heorot. Upon arriving, Beowulf becomes attracted to Hrothgar's wife Queen Wealtheow.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: The men celebrate in Heorot to lure Grendel out while Beowulf strips naked and relaxes so that when the beast attacks, they can have a fair and equal fight. During the fight, Beowulf discovers that Grendel has hypersensitive hearing and ruptures the creature's eardrum. Grendel shrinks in size and manages to escape only after Beowulf severs his arm, mortally wounding him. In thanks for freeing his kingdom from the monster, Hrothgar gives Beowulf his golden drinking horn, which commemorates Hrothgar's victory over the mighty dragon Fafnir.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: In his cave, Grendel's mother swears revenge over his corpse. She travels to Heorot and slaughters Beowulf's men in the night. Hrothgar tells both Beowulf and Wiglaf that Grendel's mother is the last of the Water Demons. Hrothgar's adviser, Unferth, offers Beowulf his sword Hrunting to slay Grendel's mother. Beowulf and Wiglaf then travel to the demon's cave, where Beowulf enters alone and encounters the demon, who takes the form of a beautiful, gold-covered naked woman. He tries to kill her with Hrunting but fails due to her magic. Instead, she seduces him with promises to make him king in exchange for the drinking horn and a son to replace Grendel, which Beowulf agrees to when they both kiss.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Afterwards, Beowulf returns to Heorot with Grendel's head and announces he has killed his mother the demon. He recounts embellished stories of a fight, claiming he left the sword impaled in the body of Grendel's mother and lost the golden drinking horn in the battle. Hrothgar speaks to Beowulf privately, and asks if he truly killed Grendel's mother. Despite Beowulf's boasting and calling Grendel's mother a 'hag', Hrothgar is not fooled and indirectly reveals he had been seduced by the demon, and Grendel was the result of their tryst. Hrothgar says all that matters is that Grendel is dead and the curse of Grendel's mother is no longer his to bear. Beowulf then realizes that the curse has now been passed on to him after his affair with the demon. Hrothgar declares Beowulf to be king upon his death and he then commits suicide by jumping from the castle parapet onto the beach below. Grendel's mother appears as a gold light in the surf, and drags Hrothgar's corpse into the sea as the crowd kneels to the newly-crowned King Beowulf, fulfilling their bargain.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Fifty years later, the elderly Beowulf is the estranged husband of Wealtheow, who has converted to Christianity. Beowulf has a mistress, Ursula, but his tryst with Grendel's mother has left him sterile to both his wife and mistress. On the anniversary of Beowulf's victory against Grendel, Unferth returns the golden drinking horn, which his slave had found on the moors. That night, a nearby village is destroyed by a dragon, which then transforms into a golden figure, who orders Unferth to give a message to King Beowulf, the dragon's father: the sins of the father have returned to him (referencing the Faustian bargain curse cycle, which Wealtheow knows about). Afterwards, Beowulf privately confesses to Wealtheow about his affair with Grendel's mother and they reconcile.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Beowulf and Wiglaf go to the cave once again, and Beowulf enters alone. When Grendel's mother appears, Beowulf throws her the golden horn, but she refuses it and the dragon attacks Beowulf's castle, threatening Wealtheow and Ursula. Despite his age, Beowulf goes to great lengths to stop the dragon. Beowulf is mortally wounded in the struggle, but manages to kill the dragon by ripping its heart out, and he and the creature tumble to the rocky beach below the castle. The dragon transforms into its golden humanoid form, before being washed out to sea. Before he dies, Beowulf tries to tell Wiglaf the truth about his affair with Grendel's mother and acknowledge his son, but Wiglaf insists on keeping his legacy intact.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: As the new king, Wiglaf gives Beowulf a Norse funeral. Wiglaf finds the golden horn in the sand and sees Grendel's mother give Beowulf a final kiss as his burning ship sinks into the sea. Grendel's mother slowly rises to the water's surface and seductively beckons Wiglaf towards her. He wades into the sea, while holding the golden drinking horn, before pausing halfway in the surf. They both stare at each other, with Grendel's mother seductively waiting and Wiglaf clearly tempted.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Author Neil Gaiman and screenwriter Roger Avary wrote a screen adaptation of "Beowulf" in May 1997 (they had met while working on a film adaptation of Gaiman's "The Sandman" in 1996 before Warner Bros. canceled it). The script had been optioned by ImageMovers in the same year and set up at DreamWorks with Avary slated to direct and Robert Zemeckis producing. Avary stated he wanted to make a small-scale, gritty film with a budget of US$15–20 million, similar to "Jabberwocky" or "Excalibur". The project eventually went into turnaround after the option expired, to which the rights returned to Avary, who went on to direct an adaptation of "The Rules of Attraction". In January 2005, producer Steve Bing, at the behest of Zemeckis who was wanting to direct the film himself, revived the production by convincing Avary that Zemeckis' vision, supported by the strength of digitally enhanced live-action, was worth relinquishing the directorial reins. Zemeckis did not like the poem, but enjoyed reading the screenplay. Because of the expanded budget, Zemeckis told the screenwriters to rewrite their script, because "there is nothing that you could write that would cost me more than a million dollars per minute to film. Go wild!" In particular, the entire fight with the dragon was rewritten from a talky confrontation to a battle spanning the cliffs and the sea.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Zemeckis drew inspiration for the visual-effects of "Beowulf" from experience with "The Polar Express", which uses motion-capture technology to create three-dimensional CGI images of characters. Appointing Jerome Chen, whom Zemeckis worked with on "The Polar Express", the two decided to chart realism as their foremost goal.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Animation supervisor Kenn MacDonald explained that Zemeckis used motion capture because "Even though it feels like live-action, there were a lot of shots where Bob cut loose. Amazing shots. Impossible with live-action actors. This method of filmmaking gives him freedom and complete control. He doesn't have to worry about lighting. The actors don't have to hit marks. They don't have to know where the camera is. It's pure performance." A 25 × 35-foot stage was built, and it used 244 Vicon MX40 cameras. Actors on set wore seventy eight body markers. The cameras recorded real-time footage of the performances, shots which Zemeckis reviewed. The director then used a virtual-camera to choose camera angles from the footage which was edited together. Two teams of animators worked on the film, with one group working on replicating the facial performances, the other working on body movement. The animators said they worked very closely on replicating the human characters, but the character of Grendel had to be almost reworked, because he is a monster, not human.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Over 450 graphic designers were chosen for the project, the largest team ever assembled for a Sony Pictures Imageworks-produced movie as of 2007. Designers at Imageworks generated new animation tools for facial, body and cloth design especially for the movie, and elements of keyframe animation were incorporated into the film in order to capture the facial expressions of the actors and actresses. The mead hall battle scene near the beginning of the film, among others, required numerous props that served as additional markers; these markers allowed for a more accurate manifestation of a battlefield setting as the battle progressed. However, the data being collected by the markers slowed down the studios' computer equipment and five months were spent developing a new save/load system that would increase the efficiency of the studios' resources. To aid in the process of rendering the massive quantities of information, the development team used cached data. In the cases that using cached data was not possible, the scenes were rendered using foreground occlusion, which involves the blurring of different overlays of a single scene in an attempt to generate a single scene film.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Other elements of the film were borrowed from that of others created by Imageworks: "Spider-Man 3" lent the lighting techniques it used and the fluid engine present in the Sandman, while the waves of the ocean and the cave of Grendel's mother were modeled after the wave fluid engine used in "Surf's Up". The 2007 film "Ghost Rider" lent "Beowulf" the fluid engine that was used to model the movements of protagonist Johnny Blaze. Jerome Chen worked to process large crowd scenes as early as possible, as additional time would be needed to process these scenes in particular. As a result, the film's development team designed a priority scale and incorporated it into their processors so graphic artists would be able to work with the scenes when they arrived.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: So much data was produced in the course of the creation of the film, the studio was forced to upgrade all of its processors to multicore versions, which run quicker and more efficiently. The creation of additional rendering nodes throughout Culver City, California was necessitated by the movie's production. Mark Vulcano, who had previously worked on "VeggieTales" and "Monster House", served as Senior Character Animator for the film.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: In designing the dragon, production designer Doug Chiang wanted to create something unique in film. The designers looked at bats and flying squirrels for inspiration, and also designed its tail to allow underwater propulsion. As the beast is Beowulf's son with Grendel's mother, elements such as Winstone's eyes and cheekbone structure were incorporated into its look. The three primary monsters in the film share a golden color scheme, because they are all related. Grendel has patches of gold skin, but because of his torment, he has shed much of his scales and exposed his internal workings. He still had to resemble Crispin Glover though: the animators decided to adapt Glover's own parted hairstyle to Grendel, albeit with bald patches.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Zemeckis insisted that the character Beowulf resemble depictions of Jesus, believing that a correlation could be made between Christ's face and a universally accepted appeal. Zemeckis used Alan Ritchson for the physical model, facial image and movement for the title character of "Beowulf". Avary had the idea to make Beowulf fight Grendel naked as a reference to Richard Corben's comic book "Den", while also taking inspiration from legendary berserkers, who purportedly fought in battles while naked.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: The music for "Beowulf" was composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri. A soundtrack was released November 20, 2007. Silvestri was largely responsible for the production of the soundtrack album, although actresses Robin Wright Penn and Idina Menzel performed several songs in the soundtrack's score.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: One objective of Robert Zemeckis, Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary was to expand on the original poem as it has been recorded. "Beowulf" is generally considered to be a pagan tale written down by Christian monks, which for Zemeckis and Avary represented the possibility that the original story had been tampered with in order to better fit Christian sensibilities. They found this to be a reasonable explanation for critical elements to the story that are absent from the poem, such as the identity of Grendel's father, why he abstains from attacking Hrothgar, and the lack of proof that Grendel's mother had been slain.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: In order to restore those points, they offered their own interpretation for motivations behind Grendel's behavior and for what happened in the cave of Grendel's mother, justifying it by arguing that Beowulf acts as an unreliable narrator in the portion of the poem in which he describes his battle with Grendel's mother. Avary said their goal was "to remain truer to the letter of the epic but to read between the lines and find greater truths that had been explored before," while Gaiman commented, "the glory of "Beowulf" is that you are allowed to retell it" due to the presence of many other adaptations that offered their own take on it.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: These choices also helped them to better connect the third act to the second of their screenplay, which is divided in the poem by a 50-year gap.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: This is not the first time that the theme of a relationship between Beowulf and Grendel's mother was explored by Gaiman. In his 1998 collection of short stories, "Smoke and Mirrors", the poem "Bay Wolf" is a retelling of Beowulf in a modern-day setting. In this story, Beowulf as the narrator is ambiguous about what happened between Grendel's mother and himself.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Drawing extensively on the theories of Freud, Kristeva, Lacan and Jung, as well as Žižek, many scholars have discussed the themes of the film. In particular, the portrayal of Grendel and his kin appeals to multiple forms of sexual unease, among them the castration anxiety, the monstrous feminine and the challenging of traditional gender roles. According to Nickolas Haydock, the film reflects the "American obsession with sex as the root of all evils," to the extent to compare Beowulf's and Hrothgar's portrayals to Bill Clinton and the history of sexual misconduct that caused his political decline. Nadine Farghaly also argues the story makes the point that unbridled desire only causes ruin.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Grendel's mother is represented in the film as a castrating, monstrous female who threatens masculinity. While Beowulf embodies phallic power through his physical strength, recurrent nudity and usage of a sword, all those prove useless against her, as she symbolically emasculates him by subsuming his phallus into the feminine power. This is metaphorized by Beowulf being seduced in her womb-like cave, where his sword strike magically fails at harming her body. After copulating with Grendel's mother, both Hrothgar and Beowulf find themselves unable to maintain fulfilling sexual relationships with Wealtheow or other women, becoming aged, bitter and even feminized in their impotency. In turn, Grendel's mother remains immortal and young, and through her offspring she proves capable to wield herself the robbed phallus. Grendel and the dragon act as extensions of her will, "mindless embodiments of feminine aggressiveness" who represent their fathers' emasculation and loss of patriarchal power.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Later Beowulf claims to have vanquished the mother, having supposedly rendered her dead with his sword in her cave, but the falsity of this only translates as a wishful, pretended triumph of the male over the female. His defeat to her, as well as his bargain for prestige and glory, transmits that male power "not only comes from the feminine, but remains eternally subject to it." However, authors have noted that he ultimately breaks the Oedipian triangle caused by his destructive son, as he manages to kill the dragon and seemingly thwart the cycle at the cost of his life. This has been interpreted as a last exaltation of masculinity, electing to die in self-sacrifice rather than living in his impotent, feminized state. He refers to himself as already "dead long time ago" in a previous scene. The film still underline the irresistibility of female power, as even Wiglaf, who had been shown to be abstinent from lust in contrast to his partners, is hinted to be similarly seduced by Grendel's mother.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: The film contrasts those points to the original poem, using the "postmodern techniques of metatextuality and deconstruction". Whereas in the poem the heroic values of ancient warrior culture is reaffirmed, in the film it is shown to be in decline, even explicitly failing along with Beowulf. In the film, the character laments the old, heroic pagan religion is being replaced by Christianity, "leaving humankind with nothing but weeping martyrs, fear, and shame." In the poem Beowulf slays Grendel's mother and defeats her challenge on gender roles, but her film version is victorious over him, also using seduction instead of strength, which updates the ways in which the story views female power. The gold covering her skin and the Faustian bargain she offers embody similar modern views on the relationship between wealth and sex, particularly societal compulsions to enjoy them at the fullest, "not prohibited but demanded, which becomes a postmodern variation of Freud's death wish".


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: However, the main difference from the poem is portraying Beowulf as a flawed hero destroyed by his own negative qualities, like lust for power and unchecked male desire, which raises questions about the morality underlying heroism. Despite the superficial characterization of the Water Demons as Others, the film blurs the line between heroes and monsters, as Grendel can talk, and the dragon's human form resembles Beowulf himself, representing his repressed wishes. In turn, Beowulf and Hrothgar are rendered impotent just like Grendel, who lacks genitalia altogether, and then Beowulf ends up losing an arm like Grendel does. At the end, although the men from the film pretend to be champions against demonkind, they are ultimately revealed to be only its very originators.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: At Comic-Con International in July 2006, Gaiman said "Beowulf" would be released on November 22, 2007. The following October, "Beowulf" was announced to be projected in 3D in over 1,000 theaters for its release date in November 2007. The studios planned to use 3D projection technology that had been used by "Monster House" (another motion-captured animated film that Zemeckis was involved on, but only as an executive producer), "Chicken Little" and the 3D re-release of "The Nightmare Before Christmas", but on a larger scale than previous films. "Beowulf" would additionally be released in 35mm alongside the 3D projections.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Originally, Columbia Pictures (which also distributed "Monster House") was set to distribute the film, but Steve Bing did not finalize a deal and instead arranged with Paramount Pictures for North American distribution and Warner Bros. for international distribution. "Beowulf" was also set to premiere at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, but was not ready in time. Instead, the film's world premiere was held in Westwood, Los Angeles on November 5, 2007.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Critics and even some of the actors expressed shock at the British Board of Film Classification rating of the film—12A—which allowed children under twelve in Britain to see the film if accompanied by their parents. Angelina Jolie called it "remarkable it has the rating it has", and said she wouldn't be taking her own children to see it. In the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America gave the film a PG-13 rating for "intense sequences of violence including disturbing images, some sexual material and nudity".


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: To promote the film, a novelization of the film, written by Caitlín R. Kiernan, was published in September 2007. This was followed by a four-issue comic book adaptation by IDW Publishing released every week in October 2007.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: A video game based on the film entitled "" was released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and PSP formats. The game was announced by Ubisoft on May 22, 2007, during its Ubidays event in Paris. It was released on November 13, 2007, in the United States. The characters are voiced by the original actors who starred in the film. On November 1, 2007, "Beowulf: The Game" was released for mobile phones. The side-scrolling action video game was developed by Gameloft.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Several cast members, including director Robert Zemeckis, gave interviews for the film podcast Scene Unseen in August 2007. This is noteworthy especially because it marks the only interview given by Zemeckis for the film.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: "Beowulf" was released for Region 1 on DVD February 26, 2008. A director's cut was also released as both a single-disc DVD and two-disc HD-DVD alongside the theatrical cut. The theatrical cut includes "A Hero's Journey: The Making of Beowulf" while the single disc director's cut features four more short features. The HD DVD contains eleven short features and six deleted scenes.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: The director's cut was released on Blu-ray Disc in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2008, and in the United States on July 29, 2008. The Blu-ray edition includes a "picture-in-picture" option that allows one to view the film's actors performing their scenes on the soundstage, before animation was applied (a notable exception to this is Angelina Jolie, whose scenes are depicted using storyboards and rough animation rather than the unaltered footage from the set).


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: "Beowulf" ranked #1 in the United States and Canada box office during its opening weekend date of November 18, grossing $27.5 million in 3,153 theaters.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: At the end of its theatrical run, the film had grossed an estimated domestic total of $82,280,579 and a foreign box office total of $114,113,166 for a worldwide gross of $196,393,745.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "Beowulf" has received an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average score of . The website's consensus reads, "Featuring groundbreaking animation, stunning visuals, and a talented cast, "Beowulf" has in spades what more faithful book adaptations forget to bring: pure cinematic entertainment." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 59 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Giving "Beowulf" three out of four stars, Roger Ebert commented that the film is a satire of the original poem. "Time" magazine critic Richard Corliss described the film as one with "power and depth" and suggested that the "effects scenes look realer ["sic"], more integrated into the visual fabric, because they meet the traced-over live-action elements halfway. It all suggests that this kind of a moviemaking is more than a stunt. By imagining the distant past so vividly, Zemeckis and his team prove that character capture has a future." Corliss later named it the tenth-best film of 2007. "Rolling Stone" critic Peter Travers praised the motion capture used in the film and argued that "The eighth-century "Beowulf", goosed into twenty-first century life by a screenplay from sci-fi guru Neil Gaiman and "Pulp Fiction"s Roger Avary, will have you jumping out of your skin and begging for more... I've never seen a 3-D movie pop with this kind of clarity and oomph. It's outrageously entertaining."


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Tom Ambrose of "Empire" gave the film four out of five stars. He wrote that "Beowulf" is "the finest example to date of the capabilities of this new technique [...] Previously, 3D movies were blurry, migraine-inducing affairs. "Beowulf" is a huge step forward [...] Although his Cockney accent initially seems incongruous [...] Winstone's turn ultimately reveals a burgeoning humanity and poignant humility." Ambrose also argues that "the creepy dead eyes thing has been fixed." Justin Chang of "Variety" thought that the screenwriters "have taken some intriguing liberties with the heroic narrative [... the] result is, at least, a much livelier piece of storytelling than the charmless "Polar Express"." He also stated that "Zemeckis prioritizes spectacle over human engagement, in his reliance on a medium that allows for enormous range and fluidity in its visual effects yet reduces his characters to 3-D automatons. While the technology has improved since 2004's "Polar Express" (particularly in the characters' more lifelike eyes), the actors still don't seem entirely there."


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Kenneth Turan of NPR criticized the film, writing: "It's been 50 years since Hollywood first started flirting with 3-D movies, and the special glasses required for viewing have gotten a whole lot more substantial. The stories being filmed are just as flimsy. Of course "Beowulf" does have a more impressive literary pedigree than, say, "Bwana Devil". But you'd never know that by looking at the movie. Beowulf's story of a hero who slays monsters has become a fanboy fantasy that panders with demonic energy to the young male demographic." Manohla Dargis of "The New York Times" compared the poem with the film, stating that "If you don't remember this evil babe from the poem, it's because she's almost entirely the invention of the screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman and the director Robert Zemeckis, who together have plumped her up in words, deeds and curves. These creative interventions aren't especially surprising given the source material and the nature of big-studio adaptations. There's plenty of action in "Beowulf", but even its more vigorous bloodletting pales next to its rich language, exotic setting and mythic grandeur."


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: Scholars and authors criticized the changes done upon the poem's story. Southern Methodist University's Director of Medieval Studies Bonnie Wheeler is "convinced that the new Robert Zemeckis movie treatment sacrifices the power of the original for a plot line that propels Beowulf into seduction by Angelina Jolie—the mother of the monster he has just slain. What man doesn't get involved with Angelina Jolie?' Wheeler asks. 'It's a great cop-out on a great poem.' ... 'For me, the sad thing is the movie returns to...a view of the horror of woman, the monstrous female who will kill off the male,' Wheeler says. 'It seems to me you could do so much better now. And the story of "Beowulf" is so much more powerful.'" Other commentators pointed to the theories elucidated in John Grigsby's work "Beowulf and Grendel", where Grendel's mother was linked with the ancient Germanic fertility goddess Nerthus.


title: Beowulf (2007 film)

text: However, there were also positive academic reviews. Philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma argued that "Zemeckis's more tender-minded film version suggests that the people who cast out Grendel are the real monsters. The monster, according to this charity paradigm, is just misunderstood rather than evil (similar to the version presented in John Gardner's novel "Grendel"). The blame for Grendel's violence is shifted to the humans, who sinned against him earlier and brought the vengeance upon themselves. The only real monsters, in this tradition, are pride and prejudice. In the film, Grendel is even visually altered after his injury to look like an innocent, albeit scaly, little child. In the original "Beowulf", the monsters are outcasts because they're bad (just as Cain, their progenitor, was outcast because he killed his brother), but in the film "Beowulf" the monsters are bad because they're outcasts [...] Contrary to the original "Beowulf", the new film wants us to understand and humanize our "monsters"."


title: Trading Places

text: Trading Places is a 1983 American comedy film directed by John Landis, with a screenplay by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod. Starring Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Ralph Bellamy, Don Ameche, Denholm Elliott, and Jamie Lee Curtis, the film tells the story of an upper-class commodities broker (Aykroyd) and a poor street hustler (Murphy) whose lives cross when they are unwittingly made the subject of an elaborate bet to test how each man will perform when their life circumstances are swapped.


title: Trading Places

text: Harris conceived the outline for "Trading Places" in the early 1980s after encountering two wealthy brothers who were engaged in an ongoing rivalry with each other. He and his writing partner Weingrod developed the idea as a project to star Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. When they were unable to participate, Landis cast Aykroyd—with whom he had worked previously—and a young but increasingly popular Murphy in his second feature-film role. Landis also cast Curtis, against the intent of the studio, Paramount Pictures; she was famous mainly for her roles in horror films, which were looked down upon at the time. Principal photography took place from December1982 to March1983, entirely on location in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York City. Elmer Bernstein scored the film, using Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera buffa "The Marriage of Figaro" as an underlying theme.


title: Trading Places

text: "Trading Places" was considered a box-office success on its release, earning over $90.4 million to become the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1983 in the United States and Canada, and $120.6million worldwide. It also received generally positive reviews, with critics praising both the central cast and the film's revival of the screwball comedy genre prevalent in the 1930s and 1940s while criticizing "Trading Places" for lacking the same moral message of the genre while promoting the accumulation of wealth. It received multiple award nominations including an Academy Award for Bernstein's score and won two BAFTA awards for Elliott and Curtis. The film also launched or revitalized the careers of its main cast, who each appeared in several other films throughout the 1980s. In particular, Murphy became one of the highest-paid and most sought after comedians in Hollywood.


title: Trading Places

text: In the years since its release, the film has been reassessed both positively and negatively. It has been praised as one of the greatest comedy films and Christmas films ever made, but retrospective assessments have criticized its use of racial jokes and language. In 2010, the film was referenced in Congressional testimony concerning the reform of the commodities trading market designed to prevent the insider trading demonstrated in "Trading Places". In 1988, Bellamy and Ameche reprised their characters for Murphy's comedy film "Coming to America".


title: Trading Places

text: Brothers Randolph and Mortimer Duke own a commodities brokerage firm, Duke & Duke Commodity Brokers, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Holding opposing views on the issue of nature versus nurture, they make a wager and agree to conduct an experiment—switching the lives of two people on opposite sides of the social hierarchy and observing the results. Witnessing an encounter between their managing director—the well-mannered and educated Louis Winthorpe III, engaged to the Dukes' grandniece Penelope—and poor black street hustler Billy Ray Valentine; Valentine is arrested at Winthorpe's insistence after the latter assumes he is being robbed. The Dukes decide to use them for their experiment.


title: Trading Places

text: Winthorpe is framed as a thief, drug dealer and philanderer by Clarence Beeks, a man on the Dukes' payroll. He is fired from Duke & Duke, his bank accounts are frozen, he is denied entry to his Duke-owned home, and is vilified by Penelope and his friends. He befriends Ophelia, a prostitute who helps him in exchange for a financial reward once he is exonerated to secure her own retirement. The Dukes post bail for Valentine, install him in Winthorpe's former job, and grant him use of Winthorpe's home. Valentine becomes well versed in the business, using his street smarts to achieve success, and begins to act in a well-mannered way.


title: Trading Places

text: During the firm's Christmas party, Winthorpe plants drugs in Valentine's desk, attempting to frame him, and brandishes a gun to escape. Later, the Dukes discuss their experiment and settle their wager for $1. They plot to return Valentine to the streets, but have no intention of taking back Winthorpe. Valentine overhears the conversation and seeks out Winthorpe, who has attempted suicide by overdosing. Valentine, Ophelia, and Winthorpe's butler, Coleman, nurse him back to health and inform him of the experiment. Watching a television news broadcast, they learn that Beeks is transporting a secret United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) report on orange crop forecasts. Winthorpe and Valentine remember large payments made to Beeks by the Dukes. They realize they will obtain the report early to corner the market on frozen concentrated orange juice.


title: Trading Places

text: On New Year's Eve, the four board Beeks' train in disguise, intending to switch the original report with a forgery that predicts low orange crop yields. Beeks uncovers their scheme, and attempts to kill them, but is knocked unconscious by a gorilla being transported on the train. The four disguise Beeks with a gorilla costume and cage him with the real gorilla. The group deliver the forged report to the Dukes in Beeks' place. After sharing a kiss with Ophelia, Winthorpe travels to New York City with Valentine, carrying with them Coleman's and Ophelia's life savings to carry out their plan.


title: Trading Places

text: On the commodities trading floor, the Dukes commit their holdings to buying frozen concentrated orange juice futures contracts, legally committing themselves to buying the commodity at a later date. Other traders follow their lead, driving the price up; Valentine and Winthorpe short-sell juice futures contracts at the inflated price. Following the broadcast of the actual crop report and its prediction of a normal harvest, the price of juice futures plummets. Valentine and Winthorpe buy at the lower price from everyone except the Dukes, fulfilling the contracts they had short-sold earlier, turning an immense profit.