the populace. Years later, in an article he wrote for the Deutsche Filmkunst magazine on 30 October 1959, Sigfried Silbermann – director of the state film distributor Progress Film – attributed this response to the effect years of anti-Soviet propaganda had on the German people. French critic Georges Sadoul wrote in Les Lettres Françaises: "In the USSR, films are no longer a merchandise... They have become a means to spread ideology, and are produced by engineers of the human soul... Some aesthetics today advocate American film noirs, but in the future only specialists will be interested in these museums of horror, the remains of a dead epoch... While the majority of people will applaud The Fall of Berlin." In France, it sold 815,116 tickets. When the picture was imported to the UK by the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR in 1952, the British Board of Film Censors considered banning it, especially as it was attacking Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Private screenings of the film were held both for the Members of Parliament in Westminster and for the Prime Minister in his Chartwell residence. Churchill wrote to historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in May, asking about the veracity of the Berlin underground flooding by Hitler, and the latter replied it was "mythologizing" history. After the Foreign Office concluded the picture was "too one-sided to serve as an effective communist propaganda", it was released without cuts, with a long disclaimer that stressed "the advantages of living in the free British society" and that the Soviet screenwriters completely ignored the Western Allies' role in the war. The film became the most successful Soviet or foreign picture about World War II screened in the UK during the 1940s and 1950s. Tony Shaw noted The Fall of Berlin enjoyed mostly positive reviews during its six-week run in London and its subsequent showings in the country, though some also commented it was overblown propaganda; the critics of The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard both opined that the Soviets' obliteration of the UK-US contribution to victory was akin to the same treatment received by the Red Army in Western productions about the war. The film was one of the few foreign-language pictures to be presented in the BBC's program Current Release; former war correspondent Matthew Halton was invited to comment on it. The US magazine Variety described it as "The Russian answer to the many US