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MARKUSS -> RE: Any WWII movie from the German/Axis perspective? (10/11/2006 9:46:45 PM)
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Yes, also bits of Cross of Iron, which is Hollywood's version of Willi Heinrich's The Willing Flesh. Don't know if its the same Willi Heinrich who won the Ritterkreuz, but doubt it.
There are some wartime German-language films that perhaps take this further, including one about the air ace Marseille, which I have seen clips of. I do not know the name, but someone reading this post might.
The post-war German psyche prevents going overboard on 'heroism' or 'patriotism' given the regime that its soldiers were fighting for, and this extends to Germans or half-Germans of my generation, (in my case born of parents who one way or another served the Third Reich). There are many 'liberal' Germans who were outraged by Das Boot not dealing with questions of morality and being too sympathetic to the boat's crew. Then again, Hollywood refused to back the film financially because there was to be no 'massacre at sea' incident - shame no one told them what USS Wahoo did to the survivors of Buyo Maru and her Japanese crew / passengers and the Indian pows aboard her.
I agree that the film industry has been slow to acknowledge that herosim and patriotism were not traits exclusively displayed by the allies, but then many people in allied countries would find this a bit over the top. The further in the past the war recedes, the thicker the coating of rose-tinting becomes, so that all allied personnel are heroes, and only the enemy are villains. That was how it was in the early 50s when I was a child in an English school, with German as my first language, and we seem to have come full circle if English programmes are anything to go by. Complaints by me about allied pow's being shown being beaten up by sadistic German guards in a TV film about Colditz screened a year or so ago met with total indifference, yet is to my knowledge is a fabricated incident.
I prefer films like Downfall, the German film about Dresden and the sinking of the refugee ship Wilhelm Güstloff by the Soviet submarine S-13, which drowned most of the 10,600 people on board. Consequently I'll settle for an acknowledgement that not only allied troops and civilians were victims, especially as the killing did not stop when the war ended, as some of my mother's friends who like her were expelled from the former Sudetenland in 1947 can testify. I also pay tribute to some documentaries, like Canada's The Valour and the Horror, that frankly admit that allied personnel also committed war crimes, even if it was not on the routine scale found on the eastern front. Band of Brothers also shows this, as does Saving Ryan's Privates (sorry for the pun), which is a step in the right direction.
Regards
Charles
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