David Haspel | Mysite

David K. Haspel: Documentary Film Producer and Humanitarian

I didn’t know David Haspel well when I was at Newman, but I always liked his warm smile. David is a film producer who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife Victoria Mundt Haspel, who graduated from Newman the year following our class. David earned a BA in Journalism at the University of Oklahoma and an MBA at the Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business. He began his career in advertising in Dallas helping to launch Southwest Airlines, and he watched their first flight depart.

In 1989 he moved to Los Angeles, where he transitioned from advertising to film production. He was a partner in Westwood Pictures, president of Panorama International Production, Inc., managing partner of Insight Media Communications, and President/CEO of Haspel Communications, Inc. David continued his education in California by completing the Executive Program in Management at the UCLA John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management.

David and Vickie

David and Vickie have a blended family that includes five children and six grandchildren. Michael, Lori, lee, April, Wyatt, Lily, Nathan and Sydney Haspel all live in Dallas. Sarah Haspel lives in Los Angeles. Andy, Shelley, Jeff, and Sarah, Ella Grace, and Lark Moats live in Nashville.

He wrote in our 50th Class Reunion Book that his greatest professional accomplishment was writing and producing A Campaign to Remember with Ted Koppel. The film, released in 1989, was used to help raise $167 million dollars for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In 1996 he was a producer for the film Olympic Glory, about the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and in 2006 he produced the film Borrowing Time. His most recent film (2016) was Loving Henri, which explores the life of Henri Landwirth, Holocaust survivor and philanthropist.

From 1984 to 2010 David was on the board of Directors of the Raoul Wallenberg Committee of the US, which was created in 1981 “to perpetuate the humanitarian ideals and the nonviolent courage of Raoul Wallenberg.” Wallenberg was a Christian who in 1944 at the age of 31 served as the War Refugee Board's representative to Hungary. His actions saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis. Wallenberg was arrested by the Soviets in 1945 and has never been seen again.

Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish architect and humanitarian.

When I interviewed David in January 2018, my first question was what had led him to devote much of his career to Holocaust related subjects. I knew that his father served as a physician during World War II and was in the Battle of the Bulge, and so we began our conversation with his father’s experiences. David’s father, Robert Ber Haspel, MD, was born in 1915. He graduated from Newman School and then attended both college and medical school at Tulane University.

He was commissioned into the US Army directly upon his graduation from medical school. He entered the US Army Medical Corps and went straight to Ft. Polk and then to Ft. Jeune in North Carolina. As part of the First Division, he was sent to North Africa. He participated in the invasion of Italy in a non-combat assignment, and then his division moved into France. The First Division was then divided into two groups: one went to England to prepare for D-Day, and Dr. Haspel’s group remained in France. This group was divided in half again, with David’s father's group making their way to Belgium, where he served in the Battle of the Bulge.

Dr. Robert Ber Haspel in the US Army Medical Corps

Weather conditions in the Battle of the Bulge.

According to David, his father scarcely talked about his six years of service except to tell David that the “bombing of his position was so intense that the ground was shaking so much that he couldn’t walk on it. And he never wanted to experience cold weather again.” He made a point to tell David that he never fired a weapon in anger or combat during the entire war. The Battle of the Bulge was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. Taking place in the Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium during a bitterly cold winter, the battle lasted from December 16, 1944, through January 25, 1945. There were 75,000 casualties among the Allies and 120,000 casualties among the Germans. There was no way to evacuate the wounded, and the US Army ran out of morphine, plasma, and bandages. It’s almost incomprehensible to think of David’s father, having just been trained to be a healer at Tulane, observing so much suffering and death and working in conditions that did not allow him to adequately help his men heal and recover.

Dr. Haspel’s suffering and exposure to death did not end with the final battles. After the surrender of Germany, Dr. Haspel was assigned as an intelligence officer in the medical corps in occupied Germany. Dr. Haspel was among the physicians responsible for taking care of the captured Nazi war criminals before they were sent to Nuremberg. It was the task of the American physicians to improve the health of the Nazi prisoners and keep them alive until they could be tried for war crimes and possibly executed. David recalls that his father’s patients included Herman Goering and Julius Streicher, among others. According to David, his father stated that “it was extremely difficult to be near these horrible humans.”

Goering and Streicher were among the most notorious of the Nazis on trial. Goering was addicted to paracodeine when he was captured. With careful attention, he was weaned away from the drugs so that his hands no longer shook, and he lost 80 of his 280 pounds. On October 15, 1946, the night before his planned execution at Nuremberg, he committed suicide with a cyanide capsule. Streicher was known for extreme anti-Semitism, greed, corruption, and sadism. He was the publisher of the virulent newspaper Der Sturmer. He was held accountable for inciting genocide and was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Dr. Haspel recalled one day when his commanding officer summoned him to his tent and advised him that a group of interrogators would be coming through to interview some of the prisoners. He was ordered “not to speak to them unless spoken to.” Decades later Dr. Haspel realized that this was the initial stage of Operation Paperclip, where the US was searching for the Nazi rocket scientists in order to expunge their previous records of any misdeeds so that they could enter the US.

According to David, his father rarely talked about his service in World War II or as a physician to the “Nazi elite.” He hated war and for many years hated Germans, but according to David, later in life “managed to find a form of forgiveness to non-Nazis.” Until he was an adult, David thought that the word “Auschwitz” was pronounced in a whisper because in his home it could not be said out loud. Aside from the silence in his home about wartime atrocities and his father’s abiding deep hatred for Germans, David had little actual information about the Holocaust when he was growing up.

Although he had read The Diary of Anne Frank when he was at Newman, his first profound direct knowledge of the Holocaust came when he and classmate Richard Cahn went to Amsterdam during the summer of 1967 after graduation. That summer he and Richie had been up all night sampling some interesting clubs when at 9:30 am they were walking along and came upon the Anne Frank House. They went through the museum, with David finding the house smaller than he had imagined, and came to a room about the size of a living room and viewed “horrible pictures” of Bergen-Belsen. David was seeing images of the bulldozer and pits for the first time. “It devastated me.” He explained that he although he had experienced some social anti-Semitism growing up in New Orleans he had never felt threatened. He learned that day that there were “people who would like to do me in” just because of who he was. David stated, “It never left me, going through that little museum.”

After leaving advertising, David founded a Dallas-based film production company and then moved to California in 1989. While he was working with Robert Redford on an environmental film project, the executive director of the Sundance Film Festival sent him a copy of Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, by Robert Abzug of the University of Texas. The book tells the story of the soldiers who liberated the camps and how it affected their lives. David, very moved by the book, offered to produce a documentary film based on the book .

Meanwhile the US Holocaust Council in Washington, DC, recruited David to do public service campaigns. He told me that he wrote five spots, “two of which were really good.” The three major networks and CNN aired the two best, and they generated several millions of dollars in earned media for The Council.

Television producer and former press secretary to First Lady Betty Ford, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, oversaw the PSA (Public Service Announcement) campaign and asked him about creating a short film to raise money to build the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. President Jimmy Carter had sanctioned the idea in 1978, and the US Government had donated the land, but the project was languishing.

David set about interviewing the key players at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to develop a vision and thinking about how to find a narrator. When he started thought about his ideal narrator, Ted Koppel came to mind. He had always been a “Ted Koppel junkie” and he knew that Koppel’s father had been a German Jewish industrialist in Berlin who had moved the family to England when Hitler came to power. So without any previous contact with Koppel and without knowing him, David started writing the script for Ted Koppel, using his intuitive experience of Koppel’s voice and phrasing.

After six months he completed a script, and he called Muriel Flescher at Ted Koppel’s office and asked if he could send it over. Yes, he could send it over, but please don’t call again, he was told. He got on a plane that afternoon to return to Dallas, and when he returned to his office the phone was ringing. It was Muriel Flescher calling to tell him “that Ted would do it.” He then asked if the fee he had estimated for Ted was sufficient, and Muriel said that Ted would not take a fee. The film, 17 ½ minutes long, was finished in 1989. The first donor to see the film reached for his checkbook and wrote a check for $1,000,000. The film helped to raise $167,000,000 for the building of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in April 1993 with Ted Koppel serving as the master of ceremonies for the momentous event. To see the film, click the button below.

American-British broadcaster Ted Koppel.

US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

View the film

During the making of the film, David met many Holocaust survivors and probably spent hundreds of hours interviewing them. He wondered over and over how they were able to manage. Some were very accomplished, and he kept thinking about how they could have possibly recovered after the trauma they had been through. Meanwhile, David stated, “I was an emotional wreck.” For his next project, he went back to Inside the Vicious Heart and began interviewing camp liberators. While working on the project, however, the film The Liberators was distributed, and so he and the director shelved the idea of making their film.

David felt emotionally drained, and he continued to wonder how Holocaust survivors had been able to put their lives back together. The result of his years of searching was the film Loving Henri, shown at the Orlando Film Festival in 2016 and at the Nashville Jewish Film Festival in 2017 . You can click to the right to see the trailer.

Loving Henri Trailer

Henri Landwirth.

The film portrays the story of Henri Landwirth, a Holocaust survivor who founded the organization “Give Kids the World.” For over 30 years Give Kids the World has been providing children with life-threatening illness and their families week-long cost-free vacations in Kissimmee, Florida. David explained to me that it was his goal to go beyond brief portrayals of Holocaust survivors and to examine what allowed one individual survivor to live and engage with the world in a loving and giving manner. The documentary is unusual in that it was 14 years in the making, and David and director Robert Allan Black had no way to predict how Henri would develop over the course of those 14 years. Through the medium of film, the work addresses one of the most challenging questions in the field of psychology, the subject of how individuals recover from unspeakable trauma.

David with director Robert Allan Black at the Orlando Film Festival in 2016.

The film tells Henri Landwirth's story. Henri grew up in Krakow, Poland, and he spent his entire adolescence, ages 13 to 18, in five different concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Mauthausen. The chances of survival went down 25% with each move to a different camp; Henri narrowly escaped death on numerous occasions. He was separated from his parents, who were killed, but his twin sister Margot survived and Henri found her after the war. The last time Henri saw his mother was in the Plaszow concentration camp (the setting for Schindler's List).

David was kind enough to send me the link to Loving Henri. I watched the film twice and then read Henri's biography and autobiography. Then I obsessed over every detail and tried to make sure that I understood the names and the order of the concentration camps where Henri was imprisoned. I tried very unsuccessfully via email to engage David in obsessing with me. Then I decided it might be better to just let the readers watch the movie for themselves.

So I'll just mention a few moments in the film that made a big impression. It is clear in the film that Henri has enormous empathy for children who are suffering. He is not afraid of other people's tears or pain. During the fourteen years of the making of the film, Henri meets and marries his fourth wife, Linda. To the viewer's surprise, he and Linda divorce. One of Henri's children states that Henri had asked all of his four wives to style their hair the way his mother styled hers in 1930s Poland. This offhand remark suggests that Henri could not recover from the acute loss of his mother and father at age thirteen and that his level of emotional pain may have prevented him from sustaining an individual attachment to a life partner. As the director Robert Allan Black stated, "We cannot lay down the burden of the past but we can rise above our pain and find ways to make the world a better place." Henri made the world a better place, and he says that he feels his mother would be proud of him.

The film captures the complexity of Henri; there are no simple formulations or answers. David fulfilled his goal of bringing to the world an in-depth study of a Holocaust survivor who became very successful, excelling in business and philanthropy, but never laying down the burden of his past. One can say that Henri Landwirth lived his life with what Victor Frankl called “survivor responsibility,” as opposed to survivor guilt. Frankl wrote: “I rather think that what the majority of survivors of concentration camps experience may better be called ‘survivor responsibility.’ Because what we feel is a deep sense of being responsible, of having carefully to listen to what the prompter called conscience is whispering into our ears regarding the question of how to make the best of each single opportunity that life may offer us.”

Click for the Starlight Film

Like Henri, David has also been dedicated to helping children with serious illness through the Starlight Children’s Foundation. In 1992 he produced a short documentary called Let Them Run Free to introduce the Starbright Foundation to the world. (This collaboration is how David met Robert Allan Black, who directed the project.) The film highlighted the social isolation of severely ill children and introduced technology to help with communication and connection. To see the film, click the button to the lower left.

After serving as a key member of the Board of Directors for many years, he is presently the Chairman Emeritus. The Starlight Children's Foundation (Starlight and Starbright merged in 2002) has helped improve the quality of life for over 60 million children by providing entertainment, education, and innovative technology. Regarding David's role in the Starlight Children's Foundation, a fellow Newman classmate commented, "David not only contributed generously, he provided vision and creativity to this charity that helped so many children. When I once spoke to the CEO of the charity, she was effusive in her praise of David's contribution. This was not just charity by David, it was active philanthropy."

David also told me in our interview that he is dyslexic, something I had not known when we were in school at Newman. Although never formally diagnosed, he recognized the disorder when his son was diagnosed. Dyslexia often co-exists with excellent visual-spatial skills, meaning the ability to see the big picture and to see how its parts fit together. People with dyslexia also have strengths in visual-spatial memory and in picture recognition memory. They tend to think in images rather than words, and they may think in stories.

Whereas dyslexia is considered a learning disorder, outstanding visual-spatial skills and memory are gifts, and it would not be surprising that David would excel in a visual-spatial field such as film production. One of David's New Orleans ancestors likely had the same gifts in visual-spatial creativity. His great-uncle, Joseph Haspel, Sr, envisioned a solution to the problem that New Orleans businessmen in the early 1900s encountered wearing flannel suits or linen suits in the hot, humid climate. In 1909 he chose to utilize seersucker fabric, originally worn by factory laborers to keep cool, to create a fashionable men's suit. He crafted the first seersucker suit, which became very popular, and it was a Haspel seersucker suit that Gregory Peck wore in To Kill a Mockingbird.

David's parents' wedding in 1948

After his service in World War II, David’s father met his future spouse at a wedding in Kansas City. In 1948 he married Shirley Krasne and they made New Orleans their home. Shirley Krasne Haspel (1924-2020) graduated from the Connecticut College for Women, was a gifted artist, and along with her husband was a major contributor to charities and other organizations in New Orleans. The Haspels received awards for their philanthropy and were both considered pillars of the community.

After her three sons were grown, she returned to school at Tulane University to earn a Master’s in Social Work in 1974. Her choice of profession reflected her warm caring for others, her advocacy for social justice, and her wish to understand people in all their depth. After her recent death in late 2020 she was described as a great listener and a storyteller, qualities that would have influenced David to approach all of his work with intense curiosity and in-depth understanding.

David told me that he has spent much of his professional career examining the Holocaust. In producing the short film with Ted Koppel, he helped to raise the funds for the US Holocaust Museum, a major step toward memorializing the Holocaust and ensuring that it will not be forgotten. The film, Loving Henri, accomplished his goal of developing an in-depth portrait of a very successful Holocaust survivor, told realistically and without sentimentality. David can be called a “Holocaust carrier” in that he has deep feelings about memories and experiences that are not his own and he engages with film to bring those experiences to the wider public. Through his lifetime work he honors his father’s wartime service and his mother’s passion for social justice and connection with people. Like his mother, he is a great storyteller. That he could write for Ted Koppel's voice using his memory and intuition suggests that David has some unusual auditory gifts in addition to his visual-spatial creativity.

His work with Holocaust survivors, David wrote recently, made him realize "how critical a pluralistic democracy is to the safety and well-being of the Jewish community and our nation at large." David is continuing his quest to bring awareness and understanding of the Holocaust to the world. Presently working with Peter Samuelson's PhilmCo Productions, the group has optioned and is developing a feature film based on Richard Condon's 1964 novel, An Infinity of Mirrors. On the back cover, Condon described why he was compelled to write this book, ". . . I spent three years researching and writing this book (IOM). The more evidence I found--which was augmented for me by four researchers working in five countries--the more I became convinced that it was not merely Hitler's genius for murder and destruction that made him the equal in evil to any figure in history; what marked him particularly was his unquenchable lust for the corruption of everyone who did not actively oppose him."

An Infinity of Mirrors will be the first of a triptych of films. The other two projects, which will examine events about World War II and its aftermath, are in advanced negotiation with a very exciting international director.