Announcing our new trailer…
Award-winning filmmaker announces trailer for WWII documentary
American woman becomes stranded in Nazi Germany after discovering her husband is a German spymaster
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - The director of the award-winning PBS short film, Love Without Parole, has released the trailer for his new, full-length documentary, COVERT DEVOTION: THE AURORA RITTER STORY.
The documentary chronicles the previously untold WWII-era story of American school teacher Aurora Ritter whose German husband secretly organized a large Nazi spy ring inside the U.S.
“She ended up stranded in Nazi Germany and fought heroically to protect her children from the horrors of war,” said director Greg Womble. “After Germany’s surrender, Aurora relocated to Tallahassee, Florida, where she taught eighth-grade English. I was one of her students in 1969.”
The film also examines her husband, Nikolaus Ritter, who entered the U.S. in 1924. In 1935, he took Aurora and their young family to Germany for a visit, but soon announced his intention to stay and serve his home country as an officer in the Abwehr, the Third Reich’s military intelligence service.
Aurora soon discovered his espionage activities against the United States and filed for divorce. A bitter child custody battle ended with the German court ordering her to remain in the country with her two preschool children, who were American-born.
“By 1938, Nikolaus Ritter had built a sizable enemy spy ring,” said Dr. Raymond Batvinis, a retired FBI agent and counterintelligence historian who appears in the film. “He facilitated the theft of the Norden Bombsight, which was America’s top military secret prior to the Manhattan Project.”
“Aurora was smart, ambitious and tenacious,” Womble said. “She and her children barely survived the devastating 1943 Allied bombing campaign on Hamburg, the infamous Operation Gomorrah.”
Members of Ritter’s U.S. spy network were arrested by the FBI in 1941, with the aid of the Bureau’s first double agent, William Sebold, in what many have called the first Allied victory of the war.
View the trailer for COVERT DEVOTION: THE AURORA RITTER STORY here (https://www.womcommedia.com). The film includes expert commentary from Dr. Jonathan Wiesen, professor of modern European history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Katharine Ritter Wallace, Aurora’s daughter.
More information about the film can be found at www.covertdevotion.com.
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