By DORIS MILBERG

A film released in 2005 shows the barbaric side of the Japanese military during World War II. Benjamin Bratt (a former actor on the Law and Order television series) and Joseph Fiennes star in The Raid, which is based on fact. In the early years of the war, after the Americans have been defeated in the Philippines, stories get out about the harsh and inhuman treatment given the prisoners by their Japanese captors. The American command sends Bratt and his group of Rangers on a daring mission to free these captives. With the help of Filipino guerrillas, the Americans are successful.

The year 2006 brought to the screen a powerful film from the Netherlands. Black Book, a Paul Verhoeven vehicle, follows the struggles of a young Jewish woman (excellently portrayed by Carice van Houten) trying to survive in Nazi-occupied Holland towards the end of the war. She joins the Dutch underground, meets a German officer, gets a job in his office and obtains important information for her Resistance group. An ill-fated love affair ensues between the woman and the German. He dies and she goes to Israel. The world premiere of the film took place at the Venice Film Festival on September 1, 2006, sixty-seven years to the day after Hitler’s march into Poland—the day which began World War II.

Other World War II–related films released during the first decade of this new century include Enemy at the Gates, a German-British-American 2001 collaborative effort, which stars Ed Harris, Jude Law and Bob Hoskins. Stalingrad is the setting for this story of a Russian sharpshooter pitted against his German counterpart. The Grey Zone, a 2002 Tim Blake Nelson film, takes place in Auschwitz where a Jewish doctor is forced to help a Nazi doctor in order to save his own life. The Nazi medical man was the infamous Joseph Mengele, who, under the guise of “science,” performed monstrous experiments on camp inmates. Hart’s War is a Gregory Hoblit 2002 film starring Bruce Willis and Colin Farrell, wherein an American POW matches wits with the German commandant of the camp. Safe Conduct (French, 2000) documents the true story of two men who struggle to continue working in the French film industry under German supervision. The obvious question is, did they have the chance to emigrate to another country as did others who saw the writing on the wall and fled? Many of the latter came to the United States before Pearl Harbor and had illustrious careers in Hollywood.

Before we end our journey through the years with the event that began it all for America, four films released in 2008 need to be added to this last chapter. Very different in scope, two are factual; the others, though works of fiction, are based upon events that took place during and just after the war.

Several abortive attempts upon Adolf Hitler’s life had been made, beginning in the late 1930s. Always, sometimes by sheer luck, Der Führer managed to elude his fate. After the war began, many who were beginning to see the Nazis in their true light became involved in plots to destroy a regime that had dehumanized their beloved Fatherland. The most famous came on July 20, 1944, led by Count Klaus von Stauffenberg. Code-named Valkyrie, this last attempt on Hitler’s life is the basis of a Brian Singer film aptly titled Valkyrie.

Tom Cruise stars as the brilliant but doomed Stauffenberg, who places a bomb under Hitler’s conference table. Thinking that he has succeeded, he flies to Berlin only to find out that the Führer is still alive. The bomb had detonated, but had been pushed away from where the Nazi leader was seated. Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators are killed, he and some others executed by firing squad, others hung on meat hooks. Defiant in death, the real Stauffenberg was reviled by fanatics who followed Hitler unto death, and honored by realists who looked around them.

Heroism of a different kind is the theme of Edward Zwick’s Defiance (2008). Starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber, it tells the true and amazing story of the Bielski brothers, partisans who, through cunning, courage and resilience, were able to survive, living and moving from day to day in the forests of Belarussia, while rescuing hundreds of Jews and fighting the Germans whenever possible.

The real Bielski brigade was born when the parents (and also the wife and the daughter of one of the brothers) were slaughtered by the Nazis. Throughout the war, the brothers and some three hundred others employed non-stop guerrilla tactics against the enemy, ambushing enemy patrols, derailing troop trains and blowing up bridges and electric stations. Most of this is detailed in the film. Many of the people involved lived to see the end of the war; some are still with us. It is a triumph of the will that this band of disparate people formed a community based on the need to survive under insurmountable odds.

Enemies of the state were either shot or sent to concentration camps—this included Jews like the Bielski brothers, Gypsies and all others who didn’t conform to the dictates of “The Thousand Year Reich.”

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials held in 1946, the accused tried to justify their actions by saying that they were “just following orders.” This, in part, is the premise of The Reader. The 2008 Steven Daldry film stars Kate Winslet, David Cross and Ralph Fiennes. The centerpiece of the screenplay is Winslet’s performance as a former guard in a death camp, on trial for crimes against humanity.

She is seen by a law student, observing the trial, who, as a teenager, had a brief but passionate affair with her. She always wanted him to read to her. He now knows her secret: She is illiterate. She goes to prison and laboriously learns to read, aided by the tapes her former lover has sent her. Shamed by his reluctance to see her, she commits suicide, leaving money she has earned to a former inmate of the camp. Winslet received an Academy Award for her searing performance as this ignorant and amoral woman who was “only following orders.”

It is estimated that the Nazis established over fifteen hundred concentration camps in Germany and in its occupied countries during their deadly reign of terror. The setting of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a 2008 film by Mark Herman, is a concentration camp. Although the name is not mentioned, we know that it is the infamous Auschwitz. A young German child, the son of the commandant of the death camp, befriends a Jewish boy of his age, a prisoner on the other side of an electrified fence. The German boy wants a pair of striped pajamas which the other boy gets for him.

Wearing the pajamas, the German child digs a trench in order to be able to play with his friend, is caught and is killed along with him. The film suggests that the family of the commandant did not know or did not want to know about the “ethnic cleansing” that was going on in the camp, just as in real life the townspeople of Auschwitz denied knowledge of what was taking place only a few miles away from them until General Eisenhower forced them to go to the camp to see what they had “known nothing” about.

We end our journey through the years with the event that began it all for America. Pearl Harbor (2001), a Michael Bay film, recounts the bombing of the naval base. With a cast of familiar faces including Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Jon Voight, Dan Aykroyd and Alec Baldwin, the film is a sweeping saga telling the story of individuals stationed at Pearl and ending with the recreation of the battle scenes that made “December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.”

By DORIS MILBERG

The new century is upon us and films about World War II are still being made. Even with the horrific event of September 11, 2001, and the never-ending war in which we are, at this writing, currently engaged, it is interesting to note that we Americans have an ongoing fascination for this earlier period of history, aided and abetted by obliging Hollywood and foreign film companies. If the pattern holds, students in the twenty-first century will be learning as much about those war years from a body of films as they would from their textbooks.

The events of the early 1940s are repeatedly brought back to us in movie theaters and on television. Through public television and The History Channel, events and personalities of the war years are brought back to us in living color as well as in black and white while we are comfortably seated in our living rooms.

Also, for World War II veterans and students of history, there is the National World War II Museum, envisioned by the late writer-historian Stephen Ambrose, located in New Orleans, which gives its visitors a panoramic view of the war via films and exhibits. This generation and those of the future will be able to have a feeling for those foot soldiers who fought their way through the steamy jungles and waters of the Pacific theater of war, the cold waters in the battle of the Atlantic and finally the triumphant march on the road to Berlin.

Some very interesting viewing has been part of this first decade of the twenty-first century, and not only at your neighborhood theater.

A fascinating TV-movie from Italy is Mussolini and I (2003). Produced by Film Alpha Productions, the film traces the complex relationship between Il Duce and his son-in law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and his equally complex relationships with his daughter, Countess Ciano and with Hitler, in war-torn Italy in the years before its surrender.

Powerful performances are given by Sir Anthony Hopkins as Ciano, Susan Sarandon as Edda Ciano and Bob Hopkins as Il Duce, torn between his love for his daughter and son-in law and his fear and admiration of Adolf Hitler.

Band of Brothers was a project co-produced by Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks for Home Box Office. The ten-part mini-series premiered in September of 2000 and is still being aired on other television channels. Based upon the book Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest by the aforementioned Stephen Ambrose, the series depicts the men of Easy Company, a group of paratroopers, from their training site to the invasion of Normandy, to their involvement in the Battle of the Bulge.

The events portrayed in the series are based upon interviews by Professor Ambrose with actual Easy Company veterans. Both Hanks and Spielberg placed a strong emphasis on accurately depicting the conditions under which these men lived and died. The series was nominated for nineteen Emmys, winning six, the most important of which was Outstanding Mini- Series. It also won a Golden Globe and an American Film Institute Award.

Band of Brothers is the story of the heroic men who fought in combat with guns and bullets. They were Ike’s boys—General Dwight Eisenhower, who headed the European theater of war. Ike: Countdown to D-Day, a 2004 TV-movie, stars Tom Selleck as the general who needed to make the momentous 1944 decision to invade the European continent. As previously noted, not until that “Longest Day” turned out to be one of triumph, did Ike destroy the communiqué he had written had the operation failed.

Ultra was the name used by the British for obtaining intelligence which came from the decoding of coded German radio communications in World War II. The few people with clearance for Ultra information were given the code name “bigots.” Those with this clearance could, without humor, ask the question, “Are you a bigot?”

Ultra intelligence was derived from the Germans sending out secret messages (“cipher traffic”) mainly generated on an electro-mechanical machine called Enigma. The Polish government had been given one of these machines by an anti–Nazi. It was reconstructed and given to the French and British governments in 1939.

Outside of London was a little-known compound known as Bletchley Park. It was there that hundreds of personnel, mainly cryptographers, worked day and night to decode the German Enigma traffic. Bletchley Park remained top secret throughout the war and even beyond.

The film Enigma (2001) is a collaborative effort of the United States, Great Britain and Germany. People in Bletchley Park discover that the German navy has changed the code used to communicate with their subs at sea. Those in charge enlist the help of a brilliant young man to aid in the breaking of the code. Featured in the cast are Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet as two of the people living and working at Bletchley. General Dwight Eisenhower, then Supreme Allied Commander, was quoted at war’s end as saying that Ultra had been decisive to the Allied victory.

Christian Bauer, in 2006, chronicled in a documentary the not well-known but true story of The Ritchie Boys. In the 1930s, seeing the future of Jews in Europe, many German Jews fled the land of their birth and made their way to the United States. With the advent of World War II, many such refugees volunteered for the armed services. Several were sent to the little-known Camp Ritchie in Maryland. Thus was born a unique intelligence unit made of German-speaking recruits. Their fighting was not with guns and bullets, but with their knowledge of the language and culture of the country from which they had emigrated. They were used to interrogate German POWs and much useful information was gained as a result.

Over in the Pacific, momentous events had occurred. Bloody battles had ensued with the cost of many lives. Okinawa, Midway, Tarawa, New Guinea, the Philippines, Guadalcanal—these were only some of the names Americans had heard for the first time. One of the bloodiest took place on the volcanic island of Iwo Jima. It was, as many believe, the pivotal battle of the Pacific war. Actor-director Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) retells the story of the ultimate capture of the island and the raising of the American flag over Mount Suribachi.

The snapshot of the flag-raising by six American soldiers is arguably the most famous wartime photo of World War II, though the fighting continued for a little over a month after the taking of the strategic hill with many more lives being lost on both sides. The event was photographed twice to maximize its impact.

The film follows the account by the son of one of the soldiers as to what happened after the photo was seen around the nation and the effect it had upon the three soldiers who survived the battle. The trio is flown back to the States and sent around the country to sell war bonds. This disquiets them. They do not think of themselves as heroes and in the case of one, an American Indian Ira Hayes, these feelings are certainly instrumental in his subsequent suicide. The film is an honest recreation of the times, of the adulation given to our returning veterans and, as seen in the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, the pondering of their futures once the adulation had faded away.

Months after the release of Flags of Our Fathers came Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2007). Letters looks at the events that took place on the island from the Japanese side of the conflict. Unlike the earlier films of World War II which painted the Japanese soldiers as fanatical barbarians, here they are portrayed as individuals who, like their American counterparts, have families back home. The focus of the film is on General Kuribayashi, sent to command the island in preparation for the invasion they know is coming. Eastwood learned about a book of letters written by the general, some written before Iwo and some from the island before his death. With his knowledge of the United States, having lived there while completing his education, Kuribayashi realized that the Japanese warlords had awakened a “sleeping giant.”

Both this film and Flags of Our Fathers are a credit to Eastwood, who has emerged as one of the finest filmmakers of recent times.

Director: Quentin Tarantino. Inglourious Basterds. Miramax, 2009. Distributed by the Weinstein Company (US) and Universal Pictures (International). Film. Rated R for strong graphic violence, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 153 minutes.

Reviewed by Bradley Nichols (University of Tennessee-Knoxville)
Published on H-German (October, 2009)
Commissioned by Benita Blessing

Inglorious Vengeance Fantasies

Few films offer the same controversial, radical reinterpretation of the historical-war film as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a masterfully entertaining, tragicomic satire on the nature of group hatred and violence. Set in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War, the film follows a group of Jewish American soldiers, “the basterds,” as they rampage throughout the countryside led by Lt. Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt), killing and mutilating German soldiers. Engaged in a secret plot to kill Hitler, the basterds cross paths with Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French-Jewish girl in hiding, who is seeking vengeance on the Nazis after the murder of her family by brutal SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). When Shosanna strikes up a reluctant acquaintance with Pvt. Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a famous German war hero, the latter convinces Josef Goebbels to screen the premiere of his new propaganda film depicting Zoller’s adventures in the Paris movie theater she operates. The stage is thus set for the separate machinations of Shosanna and the basterds to come to fruition in a spectacularly violent penultimate scene, in which they murder Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, and a score of other Nazi luminaries during the premiere of the film within the film.

On the surface, the film’s blatant historical revisionism serves a dramatic purpose. Historical accuracy would trap the narrative within the confines of a well-known chain of events. The worn plot-line of a covert U.S. mission to assassinate Hitler offers little by way of tension if we know the assassins fail. After all, we know Hitler shot himself beneath the chancellery in Berlin. Of course, many powerful and successful films that focus on popular historic events avoid this problem by placing a fictional sub-story within the larger narrative of the historical context (one need only consider Titanic [dir: James Cameron, 1997] or The Last of the Mohicans [dir: Michael Mann, 1992). That technique allows for audience identification with the characters and their time, as well as the suspense of ignorance as to their eventual fate, while also examining the historical factors at work and their broader moral implications. By posing the question of vengeance through a fantasy of Jews murdering Hitler, Tarantino explicitly avoids both constructs. Inglourious Basterds does not explore the Third Reich to draw moral lessons about the character of the period. By doing away with historical reality, the film uses Nazi-occupied Europe as the backdrop for an ahistorical film concerned with the more ageless and universal themes of communal hatred, violence, and revenge, issues explored through the framework of cinema as popular phenomenon.

The very choice to shoot the film at the Babelsberg studios in Potsdam, which saw the production of masterpieces like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as well as Nazi antisemitic propaganda films like The Eternal Jew (dir: Fritz Hippler, 1940), suggests both the themes and referential style Tarantino had in mind. In true postmodern fashion, the application of intertextuality–combining references and elements from a wide-ranging and disparate spectrum of genres–as well as the use of source music (from Ennio Morricone to David Bowie), each contribute to the film’s ahistorical diegetic world. Tarantino’s analysis, however, comes more from content than form. He establishes the main motif in the opening scene, where Colonel Landa postulates on the nature of group hatred within the vocabulary of Nazi racial ideology while interrogating a French farmer suspected of hiding Jews:

“If one were to determine what attributes the Jews share with a beast, it would be that of the rat…. If a rat were to scamper through your door right now, would you greet it with hostility…. Has a rat ever done anything to create this animosity you feel towards them…. I assume you don’t share the same animosity with squirrels that you do with rats…. Yet, they are both rodents, are they not … they even rather look alike…. However, interesting as the thought may be, it makes not one bit of difference to how you feel…. You don’t like them. You don’t really know why you don’t like them. All you know is, you find them repulsive.”

From this scene, the film fictionalizes the entire historical sequence of events by having the imaginary sub-stories consume the larger historical narrative. Inglorious Basterds consciously eschews identification with the characters, simultaneously utilizing and poking fun at popular culture depictions to subtly highlight the different nationalities’ underlying similarity: the glee with which they pursue ruthless and brutal violence as a means of vengeance. Hence, two British intelligence officers–one of whom is played by Mike Myers, in a sly reference to that actor’s iconic role as stereotypically British secret agent Austin Powers (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, dir. Jay Roach, 1997)–discuss assassination in the most trite of English phraseology in the presence of an overdrawn, cigar-smoking Winston Churchill. Similar lampoonish depictions characterize Hitler and Goebbels as vicious, childish, easily enraged buffoons à la Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1940). Or consider noirish German actress-spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), an obvious allusion to Mata Hari and Marlene Dietrich (both of whom are verbally referenced in the film). Then, of course, there is Colonel Landa, the archetypal, over-the-top Nazi villain. He is urbane and sadistic by turns, menacingly symbolizing the simultaneity of culture and barbarism with his manners and fluency in four languages and proud boastfulness concerning his moniker as “The Jew Hunter.” In fact, the use of multiple tongues within the film by a number of characters (much of the film is in subtitles) underscores the irony that these people can speak one another’s language, yet remain disposed towards murdering each other. The comical lack of multilingual ability by the Americans provides a revealing exception: Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raines is a prototypical American hillbilly from Tennessee, utterly unrefined and incapable of pronouncing foreign words let alone languages, and as single-mindedly dedicated to killing as many Nazis as possible as he is myopic about what actually constitutes a Nazi.

The basterds are, in fact, the film’s most shocking metaphor for the cultural universality of violent propensities: Upending the traditional arc of ferocity in the Second World War, it is the Jews in this film who scalp and murder Nazis indiscriminately and with the utmost savagery. The basterds are also Americans who are asked to confront and reify their own nation’s crime of slavery by an SS officer, who compares African American history with the capture and imprisonment of King Kong. In sum, the Jewish American basterds are eerily similar to the Nazis themselves. Their habit of carving swastikas into the foreheads of the rare German prisoners allowed to escape echoes the branding of Jewish inmates at Auschwitz. A related resemblance becomes evident in Raines’s rationalization for this atrocity: to mark the enemy for eternal identification as the enemy regardless of their exterior uniform and physicality. By presenting the possibility of Jewish revenge on Hitler and the Nazis–a hypothetical situation of retribution–Tarantino involves the audience itself in a subliminal process of vigilantism and catharsis. The film thus asks us to consider the possibility that we are capable of considering these forms of brutality acceptable in certain situations.

Even Shosanna and Zoller, the two most humane, non-caricatured characters, are no exception to the pattern of human bloodlust and ability to hate and kill other population groups in large numbers. Again, the thematic explication comes from cinematic references. When the two meet, Shosanna expresses her distaste for German cinema in terms of the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, yet when Zoller (a Chaplin fan) notes her fondness for the less Nazi-oriented director G. W. Pabst (who is referenced throughout the film), she responds with defensive French patriotism: “We respect directors in our country.” Shosanna expresses the emotions of romantic love and of having lost her family, yet conspires to incinerate the premiere’s German audience members, who themselves laugh maniacally at the gratuitous violence of the film within the film minutes before their own fiery doom at the hands of Jews. Zoller’s lethal military exploits, as portrayed onscreen for the enthralled audience, are juxtaposed with his remorse at having committed them. The farce only extends to the precipice of absolute ridiculousness. Indeed, even those protagonists who are stock pop culture caricatures of their respective nationalities still express all-too-human charm, idiosyncrasy, and pathos.

Due to its lack of authenticity, Inglourious Basterds is not of much practical use to historians teaching a straightforward survey course on the actual history of the Third Reich. Nonetheless, the film does offer a cinematic reflection of contemporary assumptions concerning the history of the Nazi era and the Holocaust, as well as a current look at the influence of cinema on the construction of national-historical stereotypes. More importantly, because Tarantino chose a controversial topic certain to offend sensitivities, Inglourious Basterds forces audiences to challenge their assumptions of what constitutes justified vengeance, and to what extent feelings of violation and urges towards retaliatory violence differ from one group of people to the next. Educators focusing on genocide and ethnic hatred could certainly utilize the film’s consistent thematic exploration of group violence in a discussion of similarities between different episodes of mass killing.

THOMAS KRETSCHMANN as Otto Ernst Remer in the suspense thriller VALKYRIE

Director: Bryan Singer. Valkyrie. Hollywood: United Artists, 2008. Film. Rated PG-13 for violence and brief strong language. Country: USA and Germany. Runtime: 121 min.

Reviewed by Edward N. Snyder (University of Minnesota)
Published on H-German (October, 2009)
Commissioned by Benita Blessing

A Hollywood Take on the German Resistance

When I first heard that Tom Cruise would play Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in the film Valkyrie, my initial reaction was to recoil in horror at the thought of Cruise tarnishing the legacy of the great hero of German resistance during World War II. Furthermore, I could only imagine the damage an American popular film director (Bryan Singer) would do to the memory of this important aspect of the war. I expected to hear Stauffenberg, Ludwig Beck, and the other leaders of the July 1944 plot proclaim a belief in freedom and democracy in the face of Nazi tyranny. I feared that the complex debates the resistors had about their vision for postwar Germany would go unmentioned. I thus entered the theater with a number of reasons why I wanted to dislike this film.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by Valkyrie and its depiction of the 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Cruise’s energetic portrayal of Stauffenberg was entirely satisfactory and, at times, even enjoyable. More important, director Bryan Singer did a respectable job of highlighting the conflicts and debates that arose within the circle of resistors prior to the assassination attempt. Although Singer did not articulate fully the issues of contention among the resistors, he nevertheless made clear that the 1944 plot leaders did not intend to replace the Third Reich with a U.S.-style republic. Ultimately, historians should consider Valkyrie a success, because it introduces the audience not only to the July 1944, conspiracy, but also to several of the larger questions and debates surrounding the nature of German resistance to the Third Reich.

Valkyrie opens with Stauffenberg on the battlefields of Tunisia just before an Allied air raid attacks the German division and severely wounds Stauffenberg in the process. In the meantime, Henning von Treschkow attempts to assassinate Hitler by sending a bomb disguised as a bottle of alcohol on a plane carrying Hitler back from the eastern front. The bomb fails to detonate, however, and Treschkow hurriedly travels to Berlin to retrieve the package. On screen, the two events happen concurrently. In fact, Treschkow’s assassination attempt occurred on March 13, 1943, almost one month before Stauffenberg suffered his injuries. The film also uses Treschkow’s plan to stand in for other assassination plots; several previous attempts to eliminate Hitler had been made. However, due to numerous mechanical problems, coincidence, and the Führer’s unusually good luck, all of these attempts failed.

When Treschkow went to retrieve the bomb, he learned that the Gestapo had arrested Hans Oster, a member of the conspiracy. Treschkow then instructed General Friedrich Olbricht to find a replacement for Oster. Olbricht selected Stauffenberg and invited the colonel to a meeting with the other conspiracy leaders. Before the meeting, Stauffenberg explained to Olbricht why he was willing to engage in resistance: “I am a soldier. I serve my country, but this is not my country…. I know now there is only one way to serve Germany, and in doing so I’ll be a traitor. I accept that.” This brief exchange with Olbricht is key to understanding the anxieties of many resistors in deciding to engage in resistance activity. Stauffenberg saw himself as remaining true to his principles of protecting the German nation, while acknowledging that the majority of Germans would view any attempt to destroy Nazism as treason. In the film as in the historical record, it is a testament to Stauffenberg’s personal courage that he did not back out of the plot even after recognizing the dangers that the assassination attempt would pose to both himself and his family.

His co-conspirators, however, were not quite as thoughtful. During the meeting, Stauffenberg asked them what their plan was for post-Hitler Germany. He knew they could not simply assassinate Hitler and expect to end the war and destroy the Nazi regime. Yet some of the conspirators believed such a quick solution possible. In response to Stauffenberg’s question, one of the resistors arrogantly replied: “You are in the presence of men who would have been in Hitler’s inner circle. Instead, we refused, Colonel. The people know we put our principles above personal gain. We have the respect of the people and the army.” These few sentences conveyed the challenges those engaged in resistance activities faced.

Nonetheless, the scene is not without its flaws. For those unfamiliar with the history of the German resistance, the conspirators’ reaction to Stauffenberg’s question could give the impression that the German public supported the plotters and any attempt to throw off the yoke of Nazism. No such grand coalition existed. The Nazi regime ruthlessly hunted those who engaged in resistance activities, but the greater population also stigmatized them as traitors for years after the war. Peter Hoffmann, a consultant for the film and an eminent scholar on the German resistance, argued this point in his book Stauffenbergs Freund, which describes the problems that the resistor Joachim Kuhn faced following his release from a Soviet prison several years after the war.[1]

Furthermore, by asking what would happen after Hitler, Stauffenberg opened the door to discussing one of the larger and more interesting questions surrounding the German resistance to Nazism: what ultimately pushed the various circles comprising the resistance to act, and what did they envision for a post-Hitler Germany? Although the film hints at the real motivations behind Operation Valkyrie, it never deals with the question directly. When Stauffenberg first enters the meeting, the leaders of the conspiracy are complaining that unless they act quickly, the Allies will soon overrun Germany and “all of Europe will pay a price.” Certainly, many members of the resistance were not necessarily supporters of Nazism; they were nevertheless willing to tolerate the ideology insofar as it advanced Germany’s standing within Europe, a point made by Hans Mommsen in his work on the German resistance.[2] The impetus to remove Hitler only grew stronger once the conspirators realized that Nazism was leading Germany (as well as Europe) on a path to catastrophic destruction. Along with co-conspirator Carl Goerdeler’s assertion that the conspiracy comprised principled men who consciously chose to oppose Nazism, the film thus presents a misleadingly unified picture of the resistance. In reality, the conspirators’ relationship with the regime was much more complex. For instance, the resistors did make a conscious decision to oppose Nazism actively, yet many of them had initially been sympathetic to the regime and its aims–something the film fails to mention. They decided to resist only after they realized how destructive and nihilistic the regime was.

Perhaps the greater failure of Valkyrie’s portrayal of Stauffenberg’s initial encounter with the resistance is the response of the circle’s leaders to the colonel’s question of what will happen after Hitler. Sadly, Goerdeler’s reply is not only misleading, but it also misses the opportunity to explore the fascinating debates within the conspiracy about how the resistance envisioned postwar Germany. Certainly, Singer accurately illustrates the arrogance and naivety of some elements of the resistance, but he also gives the impression that it failed to give any serious thought to a postwar government. The resistance leaders had no real plan for post-Hitler Germany in part because their own political views differed significantly. They detested the liberal Weimar Republic and believed that the growth of mass political movements had prepared the ground for Nazism. They thus were not ready to turn any power over to the people. Ultimately, they wanted Germans to forego political parties and embrace a corporatist system in which the conspirators would play a leading role in the postwar government.

The film focuses on broader concepts of Operation Valkyrie, while also including enough details of the kind that audiences enjoy. For instance, the plotters decided that Stauffenberg would assassinate Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair bunker using pencil detonators. After setting the explosives, he would then call Olbricht in Berlin, who would in turn arrest leading Nazi officials and take control of the central government. These actions would be justified with the claim that the SS was really behind the assassination as part of a larger coup attempt. The conspirators therefore needed to take control of the government in order to prevent the coup. In order to legitimize their actions, they rewrote the orders for Operation Valkyrie accordingly and, after forging Friedrich Fromm’s signature, Stauffenberg asked Hitler to sign off on the revised plans.

Initially, Stauffenberg traveled to the Wolf’s Lair on July 15, 1944 to carry out the assassination, but aborted the mission after Heinrich Himmler failed to attend a planning session at the bunker. Stauffenberg returned to the bunker a second time on July 20, 1944 and set the explosives, even though the meeting had been moved from the cement bunker outside to a wooden hut due to the heat. The change in venue ultimately reduced the impact of the explosion, allowing Hitler to survive. Stauffenberg, however, left the retreat before he determined whether or not he had killed Hitler. Without confirmation that Hitler had died in the blast, Olbricht hesitated to carry out Valkyrie back in Berlin. The hesitation proved fatal, because it allowed the regime to regroup and reassert its authority in the capital. Regime officials quickly arrested the leaders of the coup and executed them almost immediately.

Shortly after the film premiered in theaters, I began teaching a lifetime learning class at the University of Minnesota. I asked my students who had seen the film what they thought of how it depicted the German resistance. Their responses eased my fears considerably. They overwhelmingly said that, although the film did not discuss the postwar plans of the resistance, it nevertheless gave a clear impression that the leaders certainly had plans for a postwar Germany. Many said they left the film wanting to learn more about the German resistance, and were highly motivated to read more on the subject. Only one student said later (jokingly, I hope) that the next time someone decides to produce a film on the resistance, he or she should rewrite the ending to allow for the possibility of a sequel.

Several students were particularly interested in the conspirators’ attitudes towards the Holocaust and German war crimes, which the film does not address. Early on, Stauffenberg makes a comment indicating his disgust with the Nazis’ Jewish policy, but none of the other conspirators raise similar concerns. In some respects this absence of discussion is appropriate, as the conspiracy leaders never expressed overt concern for the Jews and other persecuted groups. However, they disagreed with Nazi racial policies in the East because they feared it would undermine Germany’s position as a future leader in the region. The filmmakers could have touched upon this question as a way to explain better the conspirators’ post-Hitler vision.

Despite its flaws, Valkyrie is a film that historians should not dismiss. As a review in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger stated: “Was im Vorfeld so viele Bedenkenträger auf den Plan rief, nämlich dass der deutsche Widerstandsmythos durch die Weichzeichner Hollywoods gefiltert werden könnte, entpuppt sich nicht nur als falsch und präjudizierend–im Gegenteil, die amerikanische Herkunft dieses Films ist sein größter Vorteil.”[3] As a Hollywood film, Valkyrie has the potential to reach a much larger audience than most historians. The film leaves much unsaid; however, any film must work within the medium’s limits while still telling a coherent and entertaining story. Valkyrie has created significant public interest in the German resistance, and historians should use this opportunity to teach their students and the broader public about the aspects of the resistance that the film does not address. Despite its Hollywood pedigree–or perhaps because of it–this is a positive tool for historians of modern Germany.

Notes

[1]. Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund: Die tragische Geschichte des Widerstandskämpfers Joachim Kuhn (München: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2007).

[2]. See Hans Mommsen, Germans Against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under the Third Reich (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2009)

[3]. Frank Olbert, “Der versehrte Held,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (Cologne, Germany), December 19, 2008.

Valkyrie’s Revisionism

Posted By John Rosenthal On January 8, 2009 @ 12:17 am In Books, Culture, Film, History, Media | 68 Comments

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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/valkyrie-and-the-myth-of-the-good-german/

URLs in this post:
[1] Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 14, 2000: http://www.kirchen.ch/pressespiegel/nzz/200009141132.pdf
[2] most irrefutable: http://www.randomhouse.de/content/edition/excerpts/16674.pdf
[3] here: http://www.blaetter.de/artikel.php?pr=2706
[4] the initial orders: http://www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1518&language=german
[5] The text of the declaration: http://www.gdw-berlin.de/b13/pdf/13_3_Faksimile_d.pdf
[6] millions of dollars in financial support from the German government: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117968064.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

Valkyrie: They Dared To Stop It

by Assemblyman Chuck DeVore Film is power. As with ideas and the words that convey them, film can inform, inspire, and move people to act – for better or for worse. Some films need to be made. Others are better left unmade for the harm they cause. Of course most films fall into neither category, being rather a general waste of time – amusement – as such, true to the Latin root meaning “to stare stupidly.”

Of the films that need to be made, some are made with more ease than others. Schindler’s List, for instance, needed to be made and, while the subject matter was difficult, the story’s focus on the heroic character of Oskar Schindler made director Steven Spielberg’s task agreeable enough. With a powerful and likable cast, Schindler won Spielberg seven Oscars.

Valkyrie is the other sort of film that needed to be made – the one that isn’t so clean and agreeable, depicting real people with real flaws working up enough courage to confront evil in spite of their shortcomings. It is instructive that the film’s tagline is, “Many saw evil. They dared to stop it” rather than the morally satisfying, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Valkyrie follows men, not necessarily good men, who take life as it is dealt to them right up on the screen, drawing in the audience, and inviting those watching to question whether they would have summoned the courage to do the right thing from deep inside the monstrous regime that was Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Valkyrie is a good film – perhaps one of the best in its class. Most Americans with an even passing knowledge of World War II history know that Hitler was not assassinated in 1944. Yet Valkyrie manages to capture the audience, compelling them root for the July plotters led by Tom Cruise’s Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a war-wounded German officer and minor noble who decides Hitler must be killed and joins the German resistance.

Valkyrie is visually disquieting. The film opens in the chaos of combat in Tunisia with Cruise speaking German as he writes in his diary. Minutes later, he is grievously wounded by an Allied fighter aircraft.

The film ends in wartime Berlin, not yet bombed into rubble, where stark, swastika-festooned buildings evoke an antiseptic malevolence.

As we follow Cruise’s Colonel von Stauffenberg – in combat – recovering from his injuries and touchingly awarding Wound Badges to his fellow patients – seeing his wife and children – then linking up with the resistance in Berlin, we see a man drawn into a frightened conspiracy where the evil ferocity of the Reich makes even combat veterans quail.

In one memorable scene, Stauffenberg meets Hitler in Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps just after the Allies landed at Normandy. Stauffenberg’s hope is to persuade Hitler to sign an update to Operation Valkyrie, the real-life plan to restore order in Berlin and other areas should unrest of some sort rock the Nazi government. Stauffenberg modified the plan to make it easier to carry out a coup after Hitler’s assassination. As Stauffenberg walks into Hitler’s mountaintop Berghof, we see a meeting in progress with Hitler (David Bamber), Goring (Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg), Himmler (Matthias Freihof) and Speer (Manfred-Anton Algrang). Hitler’s hand is on a black-faced German Shepherd. The dog radiates wolfen danger and we expect it to leap on Stauffenberg in defense of Hitler. Hitler discusses the progress of the war and is assured by Goring, convincingly fat with large rings on his sausage fingers, that the Allied landings will soon be dealt with.

Bamber’s Hitler is well-executed. In his first scene, he shows a hint of the qualities that vaulted him to Fuhrer of the Third Reich, but at the same time he is menacingly evil and increasingly in denial about the progress of the world war he ignited.

With the Western Allies firmly landed in Northern France, the fate of the Nazi regime is sealed. But moving the plotters from intellectual agreement to action proves a Herculean task. One of the original plotters, Major General Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh) is shipped off to the Russian front, leaving a less confident General Friedrich Olbright (Bill Nighy) to work with Cruise’s von Stauffenberg. It is here we see the plotters as real people: fears, faults and all.

It is with this core cast of generals, former generals, and politicians that we see the desperation and fear of the last 11 months of Hitler’s Germany – desperation that all is lost and paralyzing fear that precipitous action would result in an assured and painful death (as comedian Eddie Izzard, who ably played the part of General Erich Fellgiebel, said, “When the SS catch you, they will pull you apart like warm bread.”)

The relationship between the vacillating General Olbright and Colonel Von Stauffenberg is especially developed at this point in the film, with Nighy (Davy Jones in the POTC franchise) playing a stressed and conflicted officer to a tee, his trademark twitches subdued and put to good theatrical use. Cruise’s von Stauffenberg, on the other hand, war wounded, religious (he was a devout Catholic), and driven, is concerned with stopping Hitler, fully realizing that his actions will place his wife and children in extreme jeopardy. This friction between a man of action and a man filled with self-doubt, united in the same cause, is believable and adds considerably to the movie’s tension.

John Ottman, music editor and composer, does an admirable job in adding to the film’s tension with his score. Ottman’s work deserves critical recognition.

The film’s critics make much of two points in attacking Valkyrie and Cruise.

First, the critics say that Cruise’s von Stauffenberg is too confident, too sure of himself. They fault Cruise in his acting for not showing more self-doubt. I simply note that these critics have never served as commissioned military officers, much less, ever served in uniform. I marvel at the real-life von Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg got himself appointed to a key position in Berlin. He sized up his target, meeting Hitler more than once. Stauffenberg then flew from Berlin to Prussia on the morning of July 20, 1944 with his briefcase bomb. He got into the heavily guarded command post and excused himself to arm the bomb. He armed the bomb with one mangled hand on which he had a thumb and two fingers, coordinating his progress through his one eye. He was interrupted by a guard telling him to hurry as the briefing with Hitler was about to begin. He placed the briefcase bomb under the briefing table and was called out of the room by a “phone call.” He waited in a nearby shelter to observe the blast, then walked away with his aide-de-camp. Stauffenberg then bluffed his way out of a command post crawling with heavily armed men just after a mysterious explosion. He flew back to Berlin, arriving at 3:30 p.m. Stauffenberg got to his command post, the Bendlerstrasse, an hour later and tried to rally a military coup. By 7:00 p.m., Hitler had recovered enough to made a radio broadcast, proving he was alive. Stauffenberg was then wounded in a firefight and was executed by firing squad just after midnight, shouting before being shot, “Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!” (”Long live our holy Germany!”) The SS was so incensed by Stauffenberg that they dug up his body the next day, stripped it of medals and cremated it. These are not the actions of a timid man, hobbled by fear. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a few officers who could have pulled off what Stauffenberg did – I can assure the critics that such people do exist.

Secondly, the critics rail over Cruise’s lack of a German accent – or that Cruise’s “flat American accent” is out of place amongst British actors. I didn’t find the accents, or lack thereof, at all bothersome – while the prevailing American film convention is to have German characters speak in a German accent, a German would hear his language spoken in a range of accents, from the lilting accent of the Alps to the hard accent of the Northern German plains as well as Prussian, which is altogether different. I have always been annoyed at a German accent affectation for war movies – unless the actors actually are German. If you want accuracy, have the actors speak German and use subtitles (as was done in the opening seconds of Valkyrie).

These critics are missing the larger meaning in the film – all of it is taken from history. When Kenneth Branagh’s General von Tresckow says, “God promised Abraham that he would not destroy Sodom if he could find ten righteous men… I have a feeling that for Germany it may come down to one,” it does not sound odd or out of place in the film. It is a statement of deep value. The real von Tresckow said, “The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be made. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.” No wonder that after von Tresckow committed suicide, making it look like a partisan attack to save others, the SS dug up his body and had it cremated.

Perhaps movie critics have become so jaded – and who wouldn’t become jaded after being bombarded by all the garbage Hollywood produces – that they have largely become unable to judge the films they are charged with reviewing. Or, perhaps the critics pay too much attention to the non-stop coverage of the Hollywood elite whom they think they know and often loathe as a result. I can’t admit to knowing much at all about actors or their personal lives. If, however, an actor makes a pronouncement about public policy, I do pay attention – long enough to scoff – unless, of course, the actor was someone like Jon Voight or Gary Sinise. This might explain the critics’ rush to dump on Cruise and Valkyrie. Cruise appears to be Hollywood’s equivalent to the kid who got picked on on the playground. He is an easy target. But without Cruise and the money from his United Artists studio, Valkyrie never would have been made in today’s largely shallow and inane Hollywood pool.

Sadly, I have even seen “Cruise contempt” in the California legislature where, in August 2006, by a vote of 72 to 7, the Assembly approved AB 2360, a bill written to prevent what Tom Cruise did: buy an ultrasound machine so that he and the mother of his baby could see images of their unborn daughter. Cruise later donated the costly machine to an inner-city clinic and Gov. Schwarzenegger later wisely vetoed the bill.

All of which brings us back to films that should be made and those which are a waste of time and resources. At the beginning of the piece I mentioned Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as a film worthy of effort. One might say the opposite about his 1998 effort, Saving Private Ryan. While the film won five Oscars, Saving Private Ryan was entirely devoid of any meaning beyond that of soldiers fighting for each other. Yet, even the Nazi SS soldier could make that claim, as could the Imperial Japanese soldier in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. As we know – at least those of us outside of Hollywood – the American soldier fights for a larger cause, the cause of liberty in defense of the Constitution of the United States. Ask any American in military uniform why they serve and most of them will respond with a patriotic rationale that would make the average Hollywood executive producer blush.

Since war is terrible, Hollywood ought to explore what it is that makes men fight. Men go to war to expand their evil intent or to defend against evil, then defeat it.

Tom Cruise instinctively grasped this when he led his fellow film crew in a moment of silence on the spot where von Stauffenberg was executed. Lionel Chetwynd understood this when he wrote and directed the Hanoi Hilton in 1987 to bring closure and dignity to those who resisted their Communist Vietnamese captors in the face of propaganda visits from Hollywood big shots like Jane Fonda. I’ll never forget the special screening of the Hanoi Hilton I saw in the White House in 1987. The screening, arranged by former TV and screen actor, then Cong. Bob Dornan, and attended by numerous administration officials and veterans, was a needed vindication of the sacrifice made in freedom’s name by Vietnam veterans. The same cannot be said about the better funded and technically higher quality Saving Private Ryan, a movie with no soul, no higher purpose, other than the tribal urge to fight for your buddy.

Valkyrie has soul and dignity – and it’s about time some soul was restored for the benefit of the Germans who served in uniform who weren’t Nazis, and who did what they could to resist Hitler’s evil when doing so would cost them everything.