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Hello and thank you for downloading the podcast of Witness History from the BBC World Service.

All this week we're looking back at landmark moments in the history of film. We're starting in 1940 and the release of the

Great Dictator Charlie Chaplin's satirical film about Adolf Hitler.

Louise Hidalgo reports.

October 1940.

Europe has been at war for just over a year, but America and Nazi Germany are still at peace.

And in America, one of its most famous adopted sons, the great comic actor Charlie Chaplin is releasing a

controversial film satirizing the Nazis and their leader Adolf Hitler. The film

is called the Great Dictator.

I don't think anybody understands how courageous it was of Chaplin to make that film at that time,

both physically and commercially.

The set designer, Lawrence Irving, was a friend of Charlie Chaplin.

Physically, because we realized all too well how active the Nazi Bund was in Hollywood.

The Nazi Bund was a group of Nazi sympathizers in America.

Irving and Chaplin had had first-hand experience of them. A friend of

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