Arthur Holch, Renowned Documentarian, Passes
Holch was known for tackling challenging subjects in his films.
Arthur E. Holch, Jr., an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work took on such challenging subjects as race relations, Nazism and Communism, died September 28, 2010, in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was 86.
According to news reports, the cause was heart failure.
Holch’s best-known documentaries include the 1961 ABC production Walk in My Shoes, which aired as part of the Bell & Howell Close-Up! series. Through interviews with African-Americans from a range of social classes, the program chronicled what daily life was like for black people in the United States at the time. Holch earned a Primetime Emmy Award for the project.
Thirty years later, in 1992, Holch won a News & Documentary Emmy for Heil Hitler! Confessions of a Hitler Youth, a half-hour documentary he produced and directed for HBO. The film told the story of Alfons Heck, who as a child in Germany belonged to the Hitler Youth. Heck, who later settled in the U.S, later rejected Nazi ideology and wrote and lectured widely about his boyhood experience.
Arthur Everett Holch, Jr., was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on March 13, 1924, and grew up in Denver, Colorado. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver, followed by a master’s from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Holch began his career as a reporter for The Rocky Mountain News before moving to New York, where he worked first for CBS radio and afterward for NBC television. He later established his own company, Round Hill Productions.
His other documentaries include two films about life in Communist countries that he wrote, produced and directed: The Beautiful Blue and Red Danube (1967) and Cuba: The Castro Generation (1977). Both were broadcast on ABC.
He is survived by his wife, three sons, four daughters and seven grandchildren.