- Born
- Died
- Charles Guggenheim was born into a wealthy Cincinnati family (his father was a furniture manufacturer). While studying agriculture in college in 1943, Guggenheim was drafted into the army. Upon discharge from the service he decided against an agricultural career and moved to New York to pursue a career in broadcasting. He founded Charles Guggenheim and Associates, a film production company. He developed an interest in politics, and soon moved the company from New York to Washington, DC, where he became a media adviser to many Democratic political figures. After Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, Guggenheim put together a tribute to him culled from the thousands of feet of film he had shot of Kennedy over the years. The resulting film, Robert Kennedy Remembered (1968), won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. Although Guggenheim occasionally ventured into feature film production, he stayed mostly with documentaries, where he received his first Academy Award for 1964's Nine from Little Rock (1965), about the desegregation effort in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. He won two more Oscars for documentary filmmaking, in 1989 and 1994. His last documentary, Berga: Soldiers of Another War (2003), was about a group of 350 American soldiers captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge who, because they were either Jewish or the Nazis thought they "looked Jewish", were sent to concentration camps instead of POW camps (Guggenheim had been assigned to the unit that was captured, but a severe illness resulted in his being left behind when it was sent to the front lines so he was not with them when the men were captured). He finished the film just a few months before his death in October of 2002.
- IMDb mini biography by: frankfob2@yahoo.com
- SpouseMarion Guggenheim(1957 - October 9, 2002) (his death, 3 children)
- Children
- At the time of his death, he held the record for most Academy Award nominations for documentaries (10 + 1 credited to his company, Charles Guggenheim and Associates), including 8 (a record) for documentary short subjects; and most Oscars for documentary short subjects (3 + 1 credited to his company, Charles Guggenheim and Associates). (His Oscar for Robert Kennedy Remembered (1968) in the live action short subject category.)
- Father-in-law of Elisabeth Shue.
- Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.
- There was a war crimes trial because an American prisoner had been shot trying to escape. He had obviously been recaptured and shot, and that violated the Geneva Convention.
- There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.
- I think he was explicit that it was a slave labor situation, but I was not alarmed at that point, because there were so many tragedies involved in that war. That was the first time I had any indication that something was sort of strange.
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