I thought he was in charge of the Werewolves, a Nazi outfit designed to fight on after the fall of the Reich and death of Hitler? Seems very at odds with this new story.

Hard to imagine a dude with that face blending in anywhere either…

I hate to sound unpatriotic, but I’d really love a Hollywood production that treated the Germans with a little more depth and complexity and made some characters serving Wehrmacht or other Nazi forces look sympathetic or perhaps even heroic. I’m sure even Germans are capable of saving cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Snyder#Origin_of_the_title

After seeing so many movies where the Yankees are the heroes, it’s hard to be surprised about who is going to win in the end. Hollywood usually is a sucker for the “underdog.” Well there have been hundreds of movies about World War II and the Holocaust, and so far the Yanks and the Allies are still as good as undefeated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_films

It’d sure be interesting for Hollywood to produce a story with a more nuanced characterization of the Germans and Nazis. The usual caricature of the Germans as inhuman monsters really does the crimes of that era an injustice. Animals and monsters can’t sin because they lack normal human feelings. Only humans with a full emotional range are at all capable of knowing moral good and evil. Hollywood’s usual depiction of Nazis has the usual depth and complexity as if they were portraying zombies. Can they do better? I doubt it and suspect well be served up much more a la Inglorious Basterds before they give us anything of real substance.

There is a story that Joachim Piper’s death was faked and he became an advisor to the Israeli army. During the war, he freed a 100 Jews so that they could travel to Israel. Be fore they left he had them sing some Yiddish songs to a Nazi official Piper despised. This made him a righteous Gentile. I wanted to do more research, but a combat engineer who fought against Piper ask me not to. He quoted that line from the Liberty Valance movie about printing the legend not the facts.

This is the final straw Sailer , retract this slanderous accusation or I

Seems pretty unlikely but maybe Skorzeny felt guilty and this is the way he could repent. Odder things have happened. There was a pretty good movie, the Odessa File with Jon Voight
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071935/
that may have been loosely based on the story of the German scientists working for Nasser.

Well, Otto Skorzeny was, in many ways, the father of modern special operations forces. If the man was into one thing, it was surprise.

Skorzeny = Sicario

If only he had written memoirs so we could tell if he “felt guilty and this is the way he could repent”!

Svigor will probably start crying when he reads this.

Fascinating story. According to Wikipedia (yeah I know) he wanted Mossad, in return, to wipe his name off the Wiesenthal list and take his name off the international warrant. Mossad/Wiesenthal refused, but he did the job anyway–probably to avoid a Mossad assassination of him. But I can’t help thinking Mossad also promised to make sure Wiesenthal’s efforts were sabotaged by Mossad, and that Mossad would tip Skorzeny off if the Nazi Hunters were close.

It also could turn out Skorzeny was some sort of double agent, infiltrating Neo-Nazi groups and militias due to his impeccable credentials and then informing on them to Mossad and other government officials. That would seem likely: he seemed to have a lot of contact with Nazi groups post -war, even allegedly leading some, and yet he got a slap on the wrist at his trial, and various governments and Mossad never went after him for his later Nazi collaboration, despite his obvious dangerous skills and his obvious drawing power for the groups.

Mr. Sailer! You cunning fox, you.

Throwing out Otto Skorzeny and Israel in the same post: you knew that was perfect clickbait for your loyal commentariat. I can hear the cocking bolts of forty, fifty Sten guns and MP-40’s.

Have at it, lads!

Among the many reasons to hope for a passing of Jewish cultural primacy is an end to this utter tripe. This is of a piece with monthly “news stories” discovering Hitler’s flatulence or testicles.

According to the article, he wouldn’t have had to blend in at all. He worked as Otto Skorzeny. His secret was who he worked for.

Maybe they can start with a movie about the forced expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homes in the east with 3 million dying from various causes including mass murder.

But that doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing Hollywood would be interested in does it?

Sounds unlikely. The Israelis could find button men and informers less likely to betray them than Skorzeny. The story seems to have been floating around for quite a while, though, since at least 2010, probably before.

The article claims Joe Raanan was at Skorzeny’s funeral in Madrid. It looks like there’s film footage of the event. Showing Raanan to be present at the service wouldn’t be dispositive–I imagine that the funeral was more heavily surveilled by law enforcement and intelligence agencies than a modern KKK meeting–but it would confirm at least part of his story.

Try getting a nuanced picture of Franco, or even Salazar first. Maybe even something nice about the Jacobites.

Israelis are the plucky sort of people who don’t blanche at making Faustian bargains.

Also I don’t think that the English are an underrated people, in any sense, in the modern world (as De Gaulle always hectored on about the triumphalism of the Anglo-Saxons) but I do sympathise with the Germans who are far and away have the most disproportionate metrics between achievements & recognition. I also think the Russians, post Cold War, & Persians, post Revolution, have had the same issues but now it seems that the balance is tipping; Germany controls the EU, Russian is rising again & Iran straddles the Middle East. History has way of making itself go full-circle!

I wish this book was updated for a 2016 edition – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_of_the_World

You will not get that from Hollywood any time soon, if ever. There is a German mini-series Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, i.e. “Our mothers, our fathers”) which is quite good. There are many clips on YouTube. Don’t know if you can get it in the U.S., you could try Netflix or Amazon.

Thanks; 1950s-1970s movies are really before my time. I try to watch old/classic movies from time to time, but there’s only so little time and so many movies…

“Unsere Muetter, Unsere Vaeter” was very well done. It is available on Netflix.

Rommel was the most overrated general of the Second World War.

Montgomery was held at gunpoint for several hours by American privates who had heard a rumor that Skorzeny had recruited a Montgomery double, much to Montgomery’s annoyance.

It is especially amusing that the Allied troops would think that Skorzeny’s Operation Greif would use a double for Field Marshal Montgomery since the British were simultaneously using a double for Monty in North Africa, to distract the Germans from the fact that he was actually in the French countryside immediately following D-Day.

There was a movie in my childhood called “I Was Monty’s Double” based on that deception.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._E._Clifton_James

Of course, the privates who detained the notably unamused Montgomery couldn’t have known of that covert initiative. Eisenhower, who was the brilliant but pompous and veddy British Montgomery’s boss was, on the other hand, hugely amused and said that Monty’s detention was the best contribution the American troops could have made.

Skorzeny did cause huge confusion and was a very capable Nazi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif

There have been exceptions since then. A Midnight Clear, for example. Enemy At The Gates arguably was harsher on the Soviets than the Germans. Also, Valkyrie.

“perfect clickbait for your loyal commentariat”.
I predict 250 comments on this thread.

Germans As Demonic may not have emerged as a consistent Hollywood theme until the early 1980s with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Sophie’s Choice.

Interesting, that.

The Hollywood and UK WWII movies I remember until that transition did depict Germans as the enemy and oftentimes as crude or rough, but rarely as evil. Genocide and race supremacy were rarely alluded to.

Looking back, this is striking, because those movies were made by people who lived through the war, and in many cases, actually fought in the war. It’s the boomer generation, starting with Steven Spielberg (though not Alan Pakula, who was a young teen during the war) that has consistently used the demon Nazi theme, most memorably in Quentin Tarantino’s fantasy “Inglourious Basterds.”

Hard to imagine a dude with that face blending in anywhere either…

The scar is a duelling scar (“schmisse”), which was a popular sport among university students in Germany and Austria until WWI and then vanished by WWII. Typically, the scar was acquired in student days and serve both as a badge of honor and a class marker.

So, even in the 1960s, Skorzeny would have been far from unique in having that scar, though it would have immediately identified him as Germanic to anyone acquainted with pre-war haute bourgeois European society.

As an aside, it is hard to see any of our latter day college students even being able to comprehend that mileu or mindset.

Christoph Waltz and Ralph Fiennes both jump started their acting careers by playing Nazis (though Fiennes later played a Jewish victim of the Nazis). Best part of Basterds, IMO, was when Waltz starts speaking in Italian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxEY3DRJUFs&feature=youtu.be

Funny thing about Valkyrie was that Claus von Stauffenberg was played by Tom Cruise, who’s like a foot shorter than real von Stauffenberg. Also Cruise’s mannerisms in Valkyrie were very similar to his mannerisms in Edge of Tomorrow… or maybe it’s just Cruise being himself.

The last Tarantino movie I watched was Pump Suction. No way am I going to ever watch any of the dreck he’s been making since. If I want to hate myself, which I don’t, I could do it without his crap movies.

[he was acquitted on the grounds that Operation Griffin was a “ruse of war.” I don’t exactly understand that defense]

You’re allowed to put on the other side’s uniforms for purposes of deception, just not to open fire on the other side while wearing their own uniforms.

In The Sea Chase, made in 1955, John Wayne (!) plays a German World War II merchant marine captain who is determined to avoid capture by the British Navy on the outbreak of World War II. He is sympathetically portrayed as a patriotic German, but anti-Nazi. There is a bad Nazi, as well, just to keep things PC. In the final scene, Wayne brings down the ensign of the Third Reich and hoists the Imperial Merchant Marine ensign that he has kept in his cabin. It’s quite well done.

Das Boot was a fairly sympathetic portrayal of U-boat personnel in the World War II Kriegsmarine. Rommel the Desert Fox featured James Mason as the famous Afrika Korps commander. The Cross of Iron was based on Willi Heinrich’s Das Geduldige Fleisch, but James Coburn was much too American to portray a German non-commissioned officer. One occasionally encounters sympathetic German characters in otherwise Germanophobic movies (e.g., a German enlisted man who returns a lost child in Europa, Europa or the German tank commander who blows open the bank vault door in Kelly’s Heroes).

If I were to make a WWII German-sympathetic movie, the German Merchant Marine would be a good subject. Its 1945 sea evacuations from the Baltic countries and East Prussia were epic, saving thousands of lives in appalling weather and under constant Russian attack. It was marred by the loss of the Wilhelm Gustloff with possibly 9,400, sunk by a Soviet submarine, but it was one of the most successful naval evacuations ever, far surpassing Dunquerque. But I’m not on the edge of my seat-I expect we’ll see twenty more Holocaust movies before we’ll see one that is a more balanced exposition of personalities during the Second World War.

The Sten gun was a British machine pistol. Perhaps you are referring to the MG-42, the main German World War II machine gun, or the StuG-45, the WWII Sturngeweher.

Otto Skorzeny was a person who I wished had been on our side. I think that it’s a fairly English (Scotts-Irish?) trait to be able to admire the fighting qualities of an opponent, even as one does one’s best to destroy him. I’ve read that Erwin Rommel, had he survived the war, would have been the guest of honor at reunions of the British 8th Army.

Maybe it was the Crow Indians who thought that a man’s prowess as a warrior was defined by the skill and valor of his opponents.

This may have been the reverse for the Pacific War, where, due to truly barbarous treatment of American prisoners, the Japanese were rarely portrayed in a nuanced way. Pacific War movies tend not to do well at the box office, or so I’ve heard. Hell in the Pacific, featuring WWII Marine veteran Lee Marvin and Flags of our Fathers, may have been exceptions and Bridge over the River Kwai is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese commander, although it sugar-coated the conditions at the camp. I think that it was in Road Past Mandalay that the author paid tribute to the superb fighting qualities of the Japanese soldier. I had a language student in Paris whose uncle fought the Japanese, the Chinese (in Korea), and the Vietnamese. He said that the Japanese were far and away the toughest–they never gave up and had to be killed.

I’m not sure what campaign or engagement I would choose to try and achieve a nuanced view of the Japanese in WWII.

Also, an American general was held at gunpoint for five hours for answering a baseball trivia question by saying that the Chicago Cubs were in the American League, when every red-blooded American knew it was the Chicago White Sox who were in the American League while the Chicago Cubs were in the National Leage.

Sometimes the questioner didn’t know the answer. General Bradley was held at gunpoint for awhile because he correctly said the capital of Illinois was Springfield, when the MP who asked him in the first place insisted it was Chicago.

Actually, the funniest Skorzeny moment wasn’t GRIFFIN; it was Operation PANZERFAUST (also called, believe it or not, Operation MICKEY MOUSE)–he and his commandos took Hungarian dictator Admiral Horthy’s son hostage to use as a bargaining chip to keep Hungary on the Axis side. Upon capturing him, Skorzeny suddenly remembered a scene from George Bernard Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra of all things–and decided to roll Horthy Jr. inside a carpet for ease of transport.

“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”: does anyone know who was bribed to switch the gloves in police storage?

I’ve read a version of this – that Skorzeny became an informer for the Mossad in exchange for personal immunity, not that he carried out any hits himself. In the world of intelligence/counter-intelligence as in that of law enforcement/criminals, stories like this seem unsurprising, even business as usual.

I’m not at all a film buff but in The Pianist a German soldier spares the main character without having any reason to do so besides his conscience. It’s basically the only part of that film I can recall.

I read Skorzeny’s memoirs as a young man which left me with the impression of a pretty straight-forward warrior whose instinct was for action rather than reflection. I gathered that he thought he was fighting for Germany qua Germany rather than any ideology IIRC.

Clearly the memoirs were self-serving but I would be slightly surprised if he had turned into a Mossad murderer, especially as they have never been short of such.

I do remember his concluding that the Russians were so careless in throwing away their own lives because they were essentially oriental rather than European.

Among the many reasons to hope for a passing of Jewish cultural primacy is an end to this utter tripe

It’s a story reported by an Israeli newspaper. Whatever the fate of “Jewish cultural primacy,” this type of story should at least be of interest to Israelis.

Looks like the story has made it onto Wikipedia already. Sounds like a colorful story but is it true? Any real verification of it? Why would the Israelis need Skorzeny to assassinate someone like Krug when they themselves have a long history of murdering people such as Folke Bernadotte?

great field officer imo

Old UK war films often made a distinction between more honorable aristocratic German officers and more prole-ish Nazi officers as the baddies

whereas US films it’s more the aristo ones who are the baddies.

i agree I was listening. To npr yesterday and it was a interview with a author of a book about the Spanish civil war. A battle of nationalists allied with the bad- fascists vs socialists allied with worse- communists.
The host was far more interested in supporting the worse than discussing the Book.i was only a single digit old kid then then but I think the humor of the old snl line that Franco is still dead was partly about poking the parents of red diaper babies. Meaning no one alive fought in the wars but the attitude they taught are still alive in folks like terrie gross.

Spahn and Sain and two days of rain, right Steve?

“Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets,……”

That doesn’t mean he was a Mossad agent; just a local contractor paid to do a particular job. What does a retired SS colonel do for a living in the Bundesrepublik? Perhaps he just needed the money. Assuming the story is even true, that is.

Martin Van Creveld, the foremost Israeli military historian, has written that the Mossad was essentially founded by Jews who had fled Germany before the war. They received their initial experience when the British used them, and their perfect German language skills, for intelligence work during the war. It would make sense that they might have reached out to their ex-countrymen floating around after the war. Who else would understand an exile from Germany better than they? Van Creveld also noted that the Israeli attitude towards German soldiers was admiring, stating that Moshe Dayan (and Israelis) considered Germans as the best soldiers of all. (On the other hand, if this story originated with Haaretz, it is suspect).

Even movies of that era with fictional stories (Guns of Navarone, etc.) portrayed the Germans more realisticly than did the cartoonish portrayals of them that became common with and after “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

“Band of Brothers”, which Spielberg produced, had a rather even-handed portrayal of Germans, and did not seem to demonize them. For that matter, “Schindler’s List” did not either.

“Try getting a nuanced picture of Franco,……”

Hollywood can’t even produce a nuanced picture of McCarthy.

With personal disfigurement being so much in vogue, perhaps dueling scars such as adorn Skorzeny’s face will have a comeback. In the 19th and early 20th century, fraternity members at German universities developed a style of fencing in which there was no thrusting, only cutting, and the head and face were the only targets exposed–the rest of the body, including the arms, was swathed in heavy padding. Scars to the face, called Renommierschmisse (bragging scars), were emblems of social status, signifying that one had belonged to an exclusive fraternity. They provided entrée to top positions in the military, law, medicine, academia, and government. As the scars were prized, the stitching of them was deliberately clumsy, and it is said that students sometimes had a horsehair sewn into the gash to ensure it healed poorly or poured wine on it to inflame it. Mark Twain, who attended a German duel, or Mensur, on his European trip, described seeing students whose facial scars seemed to “form a city map.”

Apparently these illegal duels went on until recently. Fencing scholar J. Christoph Amberger participated in seven while a student at Göttingen in 1987, and carries a photogenic scar on his cheek. He describes the experience in The Secret History of the Sword.

True or not, one of Steve’s most thought-provoking. Speaking of Schwarzenegger, I wrote an alternate history scenario some years back where he became Führer of the Greater European Reich following Léon Degrelle’s death in 1994.

Like, everyone gets that the conceit of Inglourious Basterds is that the (enlisted) Basterds are all monoethnic, weakly distinguished horrific monsters driven by ethnic hatred while the Nazis are noble, individual down-home types with distinct regional accents who share tales of the homes and loved ones they’re fighting to protect?

That the Nazis are multilingual humanists with a sense of chivalric honor, a taste for art, an appreciation of the nuances of foreign cultures, and a desire to end the war with a minimum of death while the Basterds are provincial, monolingual, sadistic thugs who have a superficial understanding of German culture, kill for joy, torture their own allies, and mutilate captives they’ve promised safe passage?

That the marketing campaign for the movie involved the principals doing interviews about how awesome it was to have a movie about Us wreaking mayhem against Them, while the principal of the Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film leaves the premiere because he hates how it valorizes the act of killing?

That after the whole movie we’re expected to cheer the Basterds as they go on a nihilistic homicidal rampage, setting fire to fragile artworks to destroy a temple of high culture, because after all what matters is that they’re Us, and anyway our popular media has long constructed Them as an insect collectivity to be incinerated en masse without compunction?

Right? But, I never saw anyone mention that, even though Tarantino made it COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS.

I was just going to ask if that was a Heidelberg dueling scar. A few years ago I was at a Raiders football game and there were Black male fans getting branded on the arm with Raider’s logos. One young man rode the shuttle with me after he was branded and he was green around the gills for sure. I thought he might pass out. Irony there, in that African-Americans are getting branded. Kind of like deliberately riding on the back of the bus. You can’t do it to me! I am doing it to myself!

I’ve never seen Basterds, but I heard that the German characters are actually much more sympathetic than the Jewish ones

Too Western, ear gauging and and face tattoos (from the Pacific or Africa) are the preferred methods.

One true Nazi hero about whom a great Hollywood action movie could be made is general Walther Wenck.

The youngest German general, he was in command of Germany’s last functioning armored units. Instead of breaking Hitler out of encircled Berlin, as ordered, or surrendering to the Americans, he lead the last German counterattack of the war to rescue a hospital full of wounded soldiers, nurses, female military personnel, and civilians trapped in a pocket outside Berlin by the rapacious Russians. He fought his way in, the wounded soldiers and civilians helped fight their way out, and he delivered them to the Americans for surrender.

Of course, such a thrilling and heroic true story could never be made into a Hollywood movie because Nazis.

Franco really saved our bacon. Imagine if he had cooperated with Hitler and let the Heer assault Gibraltar in lieu of Operation Sealowe. The Med would have become an Axis lake, the British North African forces would have been taken out of the war, Hitler would have secured unlimited petroleum reserves out of range of allied bombers, and preserved the Luftwaffe from the bruising it took over Britian. It’s very hard to see how the Nazis would have been able to be defeated if that happened. We owe Franco big time.

He reminds me of a patch I saw on an SOF dudes plate carrier “I don’t believe in anything, I’m just here for the violence. ”

I’m a big fan of Sam Peckinpah, fortunately for Sam his second unit guy was capable and sober so Cross of Iron came out OK and watchable.

Willi Heinrich wrote the novel. He had another translated into English, Crack of Doom, also pretty good.

They are hard to find, but the Gunner Asch series follows a German artillery grunt from the pre-war era to the days of the Federal Republic. They are sort of a German version of a Bill Mauldin cartoon, with trusty front-line guys having battles of will against martinets and REMFs while surviving on the Eastern front.

Personally, I’m a fan of Sven Hassel. If you haven’t got time to read Sven’s novels, look up Peter Rabbit Tank Killer.

http://blog.deadlycomputer.com/2010/01/20/2866/

At Skorzeny’s trial, at least one ex-Allied operative testified on Skorzeny’s behalf. He and other Allied soldiers had put on German uniforms. It was standard procedure on some Allied commando operations.

My 8th grade history teacher showed us a German WW2 film (complete with subtitles) about a unit of German soldiers made up of criminal convicts. It was quite sympathetic. He also arranged for a former WW2 German naval officer to come and speak to our class.

Bizarrely, this was in a Quaker school. The teacher managed to last 4 years there before they tired of his act. He lasted so long mainly because the school paid so poorly, they had trouble finding a replacement.

Now that is a 180 turnaround from the last version I saw of Skorzeny’s postwar history. A documentary on The Hitler Channel, or one of those other cable channels, did a show on Skorzeny claiming that after the war he helped to create the modern Muslim terrorist system. According to the show he worked with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini. Al-Husseini fought before the war to overthrow the British rule of Paestine and exterminate the Jews who were flooding into Palestine. Al-Husseini spent most of the war in Germany and allegedley spent his time organizing and recruiting an all Muslim SS division, and advocating the Holocaust with the intention of bringing the gas chambers to Palestine after Germany won the war. The Nazis for their part were delighted to work with someone who hated Jews even more than they did, and charmed by the fact that Al-Husseini had fair hair and blue eyes so he even looked like a proper Nazi.
According to this documentary after the war Skorzeny lived in Egypt where he trained the nascent PLO in the terrorist tactics he had developed for the Werewolves and he was an unrepentant Nazi to the end. Nothing in the documentary would suggest that Otto would ever work for the Jews, but who knows, maybe he was just a self-promoting opportunist willing to change sides for his own benefit.

Sympathetic German characters used to be moderately common, but more often in British films than American ones [back in the day when those could be considered distinct].

The Desert Fox offered a very sympathetic portrayal of Rommel [played by James Mason].

The Longest Day [American] offered a fairly sympathetic take on many German characters. So did A Bridge Too Far, a US/UK production made as late as 1977.

The Battle of Britain [late 1960s, mostly British] portrayed German Luftwaffe personnel as normal fighting men.

Even The Great Escape was reasonably fair, employing the classic and especially British trope of separating out “German” from “Nazi”, “SS”, or “Gestapo” [ Brits of that era probably made too much of this, but actually were prone to give German regular military personnel a free pass. The entire British memory of the war was organized around this trope until at least the 1970s].

The Battle of the River Plate. An excellent movie about the pursuit of the Graf Spee, and one of the best films for the early war, naval war, and the intelligence/propaganda war. Captain Langsdorff is unquestionably the tragic hero.

And countless lesser films from the 1950s-60s and even 70s. In many, as those above, the German characters to varying degrees get their own segments, perspectives, and characterization. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but rarely as Nazi stereotypes.

In the 1950s British film about the Bismarck [The Pursuit of the Bismarck/Hunt for the Bismarck or something like that- it has Kenneth More in it] Admiral Luetjens is portrayed as a stereotypical Nazi by naval standards, and probably too hysterically so, but I gather he had some sympathies in that area and the navy was a bit more Nazi than the army early on. Captain Lindemann, by contrast, is portrayed as a no-nonsense sailor and visibly perturbed by the Admiral when the latter once or twice goes into rant-mode. This, in contrast to some of the above, is NOT a very subtle take on the Germans, but they still get some screen time on their own and the two who get it are set up as contrasts. Also, even Luetjens is kind of sympathetic. Or so I thought anyway.

Even Patton, in which the Germans are foils, gives them some independent screen time in which Nazism is pretty downplayed and the generals’ personalities and motives are recognizable as human and professional.

Cross of Iron, which I always had a few problems with, is nevertheless all about the Germans and makes them entirely sympathetic. Even, by the end, and depending on your mileage, Maximilian Schell’s character. Of course, it’s really a Vietnam movie about Americans disguised as a WW2 movie about Germans, but if anything that earns it bonus points for making the Germans the stand-in for the Americans.

The less nuanced portrayal of the Germans as all screaming crazy Nazis is more a product of the last 30-40 years than of the generation or two after 1945, and the best war movies all came out in that earlier era. Almost any reference to the war since 1980 has been more and more cartoonish, and less about the war than the use of the Germans as stock villains in some other genre pictures.

Not that I’ll hear a word against Hugo Weaving’s performance as the Red Skull… Hail Hydra!

Must not have seen the Longest day, a Bridge too far, Battle of Britain.

Someone said that that this movie was a challenge for Cruise. For the first time he had to play someone more handsome and charismatic than him. At the end of the movie I was shocked. Tom Cruise failed to kill Hitler, how can that be?

It would have to take place in Burma. I always wanted to do a movie about Merrill’s Mauraders. Failing that John Master’s Road past Mandalay would do.

The Jacobites are romantic heroes already in Scottish culture and arguably wider British culture.

Though this is fading as more Englishmen know no history and more Scots are troubled by evidence their ancestors were not all multiculturalist social democrats. The Jacobite web-presence is combating this by implying Jacobitism was all about federalism, democracy and minority rights, or even Scots nationalism, for which there is just a bit of fuel in the ’45’s PR campaign to justify this postmodern spin. Just ignore the effort to go all the way to London and take the throne of the UK, or the centuries of Stewart/Stuart commitment to divine right absolute monarchy and unification of the British Isles.

Still, there was enough love left for this obscurantist bit of history to make Jacobitism the glorious lost cause in Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson, IIRC. I don’t think there’s enough money left in the British film industry to do much more, and Americans don’t care unless it can be linked to modern Irish nationalism or the American Revolution. [The American Revolution as backed by a secret Jacobite conspiracy to take one last shot at the Hanoverians has been the theme of at least one fantasy novel, despite the absurdity of this premise- the American Revolution was the ultimate expression of Whiggism and parliamentarism].

It was, however, heavily criticised in Poland. I have not watched the series, mind you, I will not repeat only what I have read: supposedly it contains very unflattering and false image of AK (Armia Krajowa, Home Army, i.e. Polish underground state)

I was always wandering how to pronounce his name. Polish wiki states it was “skozheny”, and that Germans except Hitler were pronouncing it wrong. If it was “skozheny” then it’s a very Slavic name, which would be very, very ironic – a German ubermensch with roots from us, the subhuman Slavs…

The MP-40 was kind of the German WW2 equivalent of the Sten gun. Machine stamped, mass produced.

That mirrors the British attitude in the first decades after the war. Any relative I ever met who had lived through the war as an adult and fought, or had relatives who did or had been lost, or who just absorbed the attitudes of their time, pretty much hated the Japanese and respected [even admired] the Germans. They did not sugar coat the holocaust, and it was in all the books and periodicals [the British were big on magazine serials about the war], but the German forces were admired and their treatment of Allied POWs was acknowledged to have largely been consistent with the Hague and Geneva Conventions, with exceptions [everybody had heard about the Great Escape when it was in a book, long before the 1962 film]. Those exceptions were often attributed to conditions and/or to the all-important [for the British mindset] German/Nazi distinction.

The Japanese may have been admired for their fighting qualities by the veterans, but were also depicted in British culture as the barbarians who abused POWs as a matter of course, and regardless of the Japanese war situation.

My grandparents in Scotland took these views for granted and so did most of their siblings.

It’s worth noting that the Japanese are given perfectly reasonable, sympathetic portrayals by American filmmakers in both Tora, Tora, Tora and Midway. Made in the 1970s.

As to a nuanced portrayal of the Japanese, I haven’t seen the Eastwood movies and don’t remember which one was from the Japanese perspective. Do you think they were good?

A movie about the Solomons campaign would be able to portray Japanese courage and skill on both land and sea, and American as well. One about Malaya and Burma would certainly showcase Japanese military brilliance and soldierly endurance, though these would be obscure topics now.

Anything that stayed away from the China theatre or from POW handling would offer scope for a fair presentation. For pure avoidance of that sort of thing, I’d see any film about a Japanese warship, officers and sailors in the war, or something about carrier air. Even kamikaze operations for that matter. Suicide bombing done against heavily defended military targets, while in uniform and in an identifiable military vehicle. I expect terrifying to face, but not dishonorable.

The IJN was one of history’s most magnificent precision instruments of warfare ever to be deployed with pitifully inadequate logistical and industrial backup in service to a hopelessly ill-conceived strategy. I’d see any big budget movie that memorialized them.

Good point. Closely tracks the assumptions of Brits [until recently] and Americans about the world.

Both are right and wrong. Plenty of aristos embraced Nazism to some degree, for various reasons including assuming that as they had the best blood they would naturally earn membership in the Nazis’ aspirational “new nobility”. Or just because nobles served the state, period. The former was not unlike the vain notions in the heads of some British aristocrats or American blue-bloods about how well Nazism would suit them.

But there was a serious gulf between the traditional aristo worldview and that of the Nazis, and the Nazis knew that pretty well themselves. They harbored serious concerns about unproven aristos and knew well they were a movement from the bottom up with hard cores of petit bourgeois and working class support and a culture born among street thugs.

Modern Brits have probably come largely around to the American way of looking at this, to the detriment of a nuanced understanding.

“Try getting a nuanced picture of Franco, or even Salazar first. Maybe even something nice about the Jacobites.”

For Franco, see Peter Day’s book Franco’s Friends. While it is not an entirely flattering book, it is not the usual hatchet job, and gives a good account of Franco’s early career as a soldier. What is most interesting about it is its detailed account of how Franco’s rise to power was brought about by British intervention, and the particular role of Maj. Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard, a British intelligence officer described by one of his contemporaries thus:

“He looked, and occasionally behaved, like the German Crown Prince and had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office which he happened to visit. When I asked him once if he had ever killed anybody he replied: Never accidentally.”

The now-dormant blog “Unqualified Reservations” written under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug contains some interesting discussion on Portugal and its empire under Salazar.

For the Jacobites, Marsha Keith Schuchard’s lengthy book, Restoring the Temple of Vision (expensively published at Leyden by Brill) provides an account of the intellectual currents at the time of the reigns of Charles II and James II and debunks the usual Whig portrayal of the latter monarch as a would-be Catholic tyrant.

Peiper made the mistake of buying a vacation home a little too close to the site of the Malmedy Massacre. I suspect that he was “recruited” by some American veteran from the Battle of the Bulge.

If I’m not mistaken, some American TV channel made a mini-series about this 25-30 years ago. Sorry, I forgot the title though.

I’d see any film about a Japanese warship

The Japanese movie Yamato about the battleship Yamato was, in my opinion, good. I’ve seen it in Japanese with English subtitles.

[had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office which he happened to visit]

Perhaps on the same principle as the Louis de Funès character in “Fantômas”! “If you can’t cope with that, how are you going to catch Fantômas?”

Fascinating story. Whether true or not remains to be seen. I do recall G. Gordon Liddy on his radio show relating a story about how, after WW II, the French Foreign Legion recruited members of the Waffen SS to fight what was then known as the Vietminh. Supposedly they were quite successful–as Liddy said “No one could kill like the Waffen SS”– but when the public heard about it there was an outcry. Result? No more Waffen SS. Then came Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and we know the rest of the story.

Back in the Vietnam era, the Green Berets at Ft. Bragg, or some of them, thought of Skorzeny as sort of a mascot/role model.

I gathered that he thought he was fighting for Germany qua Germany rather than any ideology IIRC.

As a young man, it appears he was a Nazi by conviction. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

In 1931 Skorzeny joined the Austrian Nazi Party and soon became a member of the Nazi SA. A charismatic figure, Skorzeny played a minor role in the Anschluss on 12 March 1938, when he saved the Austrian President Wilhelm Miklas from being shot by Austrian Nazis.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Skorzeny#Pre-war_years%5D

Hell, it’s getting harder and harder to find nuanced depictions of Confederate leaders any more.

In what respect was Erwin Rommel overrated? The only possibly valid criticism that I can think of Rommel’s reputation is his alleged secret anti-Naziism. He was a favorite of Hitler and had no real objections to National Socialism, but I don’t think he was Prussian Juncker origin. He became convinced that the war was unwinnable after North Africa and evidently communicated with other officers that he would be willing to make overtures to the Allies to end the war on negotiated terms after a replacement of Hitler–for which the Nazi government forced his suicide. That’s not exactly anti-Nazi, but more simple realism. I know of no significant war crimes committed by forces under his command.

As a tactical commander, he consistently achieved victories against opponents disposing of far greater resources. I can’t think of a significant error that he committed during the North Africa campaign. One might criticize him for a “defend the landing beaches at all cost” strategy as commander of the West Wall (von Rundstedt felt that strategy was doomed because of Allied naval gunfire superiority and favored withdrawal into France and fighting mobile armored battles at which the Germans generally did better, but this strategy would probably not have succeeded in light of overwhelming Allied air superiority), but at that point Germany had bad choices and worse choices.

Rommel did have the good fortune to fight mostly British, American and Canadian forces, rather than Russian, so his reputation got wider play than, e.g., Erich Manstein, Herman Hoth or Walter Model).

I would guess AA was referencing how early Israeli troops used both the Sten and the MP-40 until they were replaced by the Uzi. But I might be wrong about her intentions.

I tell my high school students that in the Spanish Civil War the bad guys won, while the worse guys lost!

The Pianist was based on a true story and that German was not a Hollywood character but a real person:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilm_Hosenfeld

Of course, after the war he was justly rewarded – he was held prisoner by the Soviets and died in 1952, probably while under torture.

Still, there was enough love left for this obscurantist bit of history to make Jacobitism the glorious lost cause in Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson, IIRC. I don’t think there’s enough money left in the British film industry to do much more, and Americans don’t care unless it can be linked to modern Irish nationalism or the American Revolution.

Two obvious counter-examples: Braveheart and The King’s Speech.

…a-a-and, I just realized no one had mentioned the two million yet. I must’ve been replying to a discussion I had with myself, in my head. Mental slips – that’s what happens when you don’t have a life…

Maybe they can start with a movie about the forced expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homes in the east with 3 million dying from various causes including mass murder.

More recent scholarship argues for a lower figure:

The West German figure of 2 million deaths in the flight and expulsions was widely accepted by historians in the West prior to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.[177][178][179][180][181][186][194][195][196][197] The recent disclosure of the German Federal Archives study and the Search Service figures have caused some scholars in Germany and Poland to question the validity of the figure of 2 million deaths; they estimate the actual total at 500–600,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%9350)#West_German_estimates_of_the_death_toll

What international warrant though? The only war crime Skorzeny was ever charged with is the uniform ruse, for which he was acquitted. He did leave the jail where he was being held pending his de-nazification trial but he was de-nazified in absentia anyway shortly after and at that point no longer had anything hanging over his head and traveled freely even buying a farmhouse in Ireland. Story sounds like complete bullshyt. And not for nothing, many have argued that being a charming, charismatic bullshyt artist was Skorzeny’s primary talent anyway. His signature missions in Italy and Hungary were far less impressive than the legend that grew up around them.

All this movie talk and nobody has mentioned the widespread perception that the James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld was inspired by Otto Skorzeny:

The Literary Character of Ernst Blofeld was Based on Otto Skorzeny

Some discussion there of the early Ian Fleming novels, and of the film portrayal by Donald Pleasance, made up with an enormous duelling scar in You Only Live Twice.

I read that rightwing austrian students still practice duelling.

Interesting take on that movie which I always to took be a form of Jewish revenge porn.

Judging from the # of replies to your comments, there’s a real demand for movies depicting Nazis as heroic among Sailer blog readers, if nowhere else.

What about Hogan’s Heroes? The Nazis were not depicted as evil , merely clownish.

Ultimately, all of the Germans were fighting for Hitler, perhaps the most evil man of the 20th century (or at least in the top 3 along with Stalin and Mao) so that made them evil no matter how good they were individually. Anyone who was truly good could not have fought in favor of what Hitler advocated. Nor could they have fought as “German patriots” on behalf of “Germany”. There were too many damn swastikas all over the place to ignore that what they were fighting for was NAZI Germany with all that that entailed. Not to mention that every member of the Wehrmacht swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler.

A great division commander (and below), an above average corps commander, and a very bad commander of the army in Africa. (He was given command of all forces, including the Italians.)

Bingo. Skorzeny the man seemed unlikely to have pangs of guilt, but being called a War Criminal
made him essentially the Charles Manson of soldiers, not the daring commando who rescued Mussolini but some mass murderer shooting women, kids, the elderly as well as unarmed and submissive men in a ditch. Not exactly valorous.

Being called a War Criminal made Skorzeny seem a coward, not brave, whose only accomplishment was shooting unarmed civilians. Not a record for a man of daring and action.

No wonder he wanted to work for the Israelis. And if the article is half-way accurate, it is illuminating the measures the Israelis took to deep six the Egyptian Rocket effort. I recall the Day of the Jackal, where the Jackal is introduced to the reader returning from Egypt where he killed several German scientists on the rocket program. So the general outlines were well known if Frederick Forsyth knew it.

And this is why Sherman feared war, as did Lee — both knew it unleashed a certain type of man who thrived only in war; Sherman and Grant particularly were both of that kind though not Skorzeny level. If you are looking for a parallel — Forrest would be a good one. Founder of the Klan who disbanded it promptly when it threatened his northern business investments.

Regardless of whether the # of deaths was millions or merely hundreds of thousands, there is no doubt that millions were displaced from territories where their ancestors had lived for centuries. No doubt among those who were displaced were some who disliked Hitler or who were entirely non-political. But overall it was clear that the vast majority of Germans loved Hitler when he was at the peak of his success – everybody loves a winner ( Putin has an 83% approval rating among Russians). Hosea said that those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. After the way the Germans treated the Slavs, it was no longer going to be possible to restore the pre-war status quo.

“The Sten gun was a British machine pistol. Perhaps you are referring to the MG-42, the main German World War II machine gun, or the StuG-45, the WWII Sturngeweher.”

My dear Diversity Heretic, I know what a Sten gun is (and how it got its name: the initials of its inventors Shepard and Turner appended with the first two letters of the Enfield arsenal at which it was first produced).

The MP-40, which many among the Western Allies wrongly called the Schmeisser, was the German 9mm submachine gun counterpart to the British Sten (and to the U.S. .45-cal. Thompson, Reising and “grease gun” submachine guns, and to the Red Army’s 7.62mm PPSh-41): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP_40

First book I read on Otto Skorzeny, shown here in its first Bantam Books edition cover: http://www.abebooks.com/Commando-Extraordinary-Foley-Charles-Bantam/4466785219/bd

British Army veteran author Desmond Morris wrote The Desert Fox whose cinema adaptation starred James Mason in the title role. The book and film are utterly apologetic, flattering portraits of Rommel that are completely and deliberately ignorant of the actual Rommel. During and immediately after the war it served the British to portray Rommel as an exceptionally capable and decent foe, as this helped the British to magnify the efforts and achievements of the British Army in the Western Desert campaigns (the British called them the Western Desert campaigns because they were fought west of the British power center in Egypt/Suez); the British Army in the Western Desert performed sketchily, at best, and did not gain the upper hand until the Royal Navy had interdicted Rommel’s Mediterranean supply line and the UK and U.S. had bolstered the British Eighth Army with an increasing flow of war materiel. Rommel was actually a consummate brown-nose flatterer of Hitler, not least because Rommel was a Swabian, seen in the Wehrmacht as a social-climbing provincial upstart, who was jealous of the easier promotion and favors lavished on Prussian old boys’ club members of the Wehrmacht. In popular material one of the best assessments of Rommel’s character, up to the conclusion of the Nazi invasion of France, appears in Len Deighton’s book Blitzkrieg.

Rommel was a sound, temperamentally aggressive, somewhat above average field general, not an exceptionally brilliant one. Most people are unaware that his German Afrika Korps units were vastly outnumbered by the Italian Army troops under his command and most of which, considering their supply from the Italian mainland was indifferent at best, gave a good account of themselves under German theater leadership. The war in the Western Desert went back & forth for almost three years, chiefly because it was a series of campaigns dependent upon supply whose provision alternately and variously favored the Axis and the British forces. In this seesaw campaigning Rommel enjoyed the slight advantage imparted by his aggressiveness which prompted him to attack many a time at which he was nigh bereft of armor and logistic support; in this the sluggishness and ineptitude of the British Army also played a significant part (which helps to explain the postwar British accolades to Rommel’s acumen: the more formidable one’s foe, the more glorious one’s achievements against him). Ultimately, Rommel lost in North Africa because the Royal Navy succeeded in keeping the British Army’s supply lines open while, with the RAF, increasingly interdicting the Axis Mediterranean supply line.

Both fiction and non-fiction books and films about WWII range widely in their treatment of the various combatants, yet in these offerings there are trends which tend to follow the shifting, prevailing postwar zeitgeist.

The Homerian precursor of special operations forces is, of course, the Trojan Horse. Before Industrial Revolution technology made them possible and today ubiquitous, special operations did not flourish, chiefly because special operations depend, at first on rapid mobility and later also on portable instantaneous communications. In pre-Industrial Revolution eras mobility was limited to infantry marches and cavalry scouting, and communication depended on runners, mounted messengers, and line-of-sight signalling. Motor vehicles, self-propelled warships and small craft, submarines, aircraft, and wireless made special operations possible and practicable.

Of course a lot of the movies in which Germans are portrayed as cartoon villains are in effect live action cartoons themselves – e.g Raiders of the Lost Ark. EVERYONE in the movie is a cartoon character.

I think the popular notion of Germans as screaming fanatics owes a lot to the fact that almost all surviving footage of Hitler shows him in insane ranting mode. If you listen to the Hitler -Mannerheim tape (Google it) which is perhaps the only surviving recording of Hitler speaking in a normal conversational voice, he doesn’t sound insane at all (because he isn’t). That is what is REALLY scary. The devil doesn’t necessarily wear a funny uniform and gesticulate wildly – he can wear a business suit and speak in calm rational voice, so you don’t even know that he is the devil.

One gets a very good sense of Rommel’s combat instincts in his early book, “Infanterie Greift An.” He won the coveted Pour le Merite in World War I due to his extreme personal daring on the attack.

Rommel tended to do very well on the attack (or counterattack) if the opponent had the least bit of nerves. He tended to do poorly when he ran into determined and capable opponent who would bait him. According to F.W. von Mellenthin (who was a staff officer under Rommel in Africa and subsequently wrote “Panzer Battles”) writes at length about Rommel’s casual refusal to acknowledge or take into account dire supply situations and running men and machines into the ground to maintain the momentum of attacks… which worked very well if the enemy panicked. But if they didn’t and carefully gave ground without breaking, Rommel would run into trouble just as his men and machines approached the collapse point (in one particular situation, as the momentum of his attacks petered out and the British refused to retreat, he had something like a dozen or so operational tanks left in the whole of Panzerarmee Afrika).

Back in the Vietnam era, the Green Berets at Ft. Bragg, or some of them, thought of Skorzeny as sort of a mascot/role model.

Some still do in SOCOM.

Think about how Rommel might have performed had he been on the American side with massive air support and supplies. He was almost always handicapped by Germany’s inability to fully support his effort in North Africa.

His task was to keep Africa from falling, and to tie down as many British divisions as possible, all with minimal casualties.

While no doubt he did tie down a number of well-equipped and trained British divisions, he suffered huge casualties and stretched out his positions so badly that when the American invasion of the Maghreb came, he couldn’t quickly help there.

As a commander of the whole Axis army in Africa, it was his job to take into account the supply situation (which he totally failed to do) as well as the overall strategic situation (the fact that his army might be needed in the Maghreb as well).

He thought he had the chance to win the world war in North Africa (totally delusional), and this caused him to disregard both the orders given to him and ordinary common sense.

He was almost always handicapped by Germany’s inability to fully support his effort in North Africa.

A great commander adjusts his goals to his means and does not foolishly try to adjust his means to his goals. In Rommel’s case, he oftentimes just ignored the fact that most of fuel from Europe was consumed on the way to the battle front on that poorly maintained west-east highway from a port much too behind his lines… which did not matter if Rommel could induce panic on his brittle opponent by appearing quickly unexpectedly. When the British 8the Army finally had a commander with some backbone, the fate of Rommel’s men in North Africa was sealed.

The hackneyed saying that amateurs study strategy while professionals study logistics does have some truth.

Instead of dashing to the front for personal glory, if Rommel had actually worked politically to secure elimination of British air-naval bases in the Med and concentrated on restoring the capacity of ports he captured, he’d have been in a far better shape.

Rommel attacked knowing he could not be supplied. He was reckless, gambling he could capture British supplies and he was considered so by the German General Staff. Once he met a opponent who did not panic under pressure, called his bluff, was willing to grind him down, he lost his army completely.

for aficionados–an austrian documentary on skorzeny from 2010 (german language)

at 5:40 some pretty bizarre footage of students fencing, at 6:00 there’s a photo of bloodied skorzeny and friends after a ‘mensur’ (skorzeny seems happy as a plum, though). the woman that talks in-between is his daughter. she tells of him having been a ruffian and a meenie, particularly towards women (le sigh…)

Judging from the # of replies to your comments, there’s a real demand for movies depicting Nazis as heroic among Sailer blog readers, if nowhere else.

There wasn’t a lot of interest in films about Thermopylae, but 300 was a massive hit. People want compelling movies. And there are certainly compelling stories of German forces fighting long odds during the war. If one were not afraid of the political and even legal repercussions, one could make some very compelling films about German forces in the war.

What about Hogan’s Heroes? The Nazis were not depicted as evil , merely clownish.

Depicting Nazis as clowns distorts history and makes a mockery about what our troops faced. It took the combined might of the USSR, UK, USA and others over 4 years to defeat the Nazis. Incompetent clowns wouldn’t have been so hard to defeat.

Nor could they have fought as “German patriots” on behalf of “Germany”.

Yes they could have fought as patriots. Allied bombers where targeting civilian areas and inflicting massive harm on them. I can easily see a patriotic German manning an anti-aircraft gun or being a Luftwaffe pilot to try to protect his fellow citizens.

Additionally once the Morgenthau Plan was leaked I could easily see patriotic Germans fighting to ensure Germany did not have to endure its provisions. Even if you weren’t a Nazi, you still wouldn’t want Germany to be subjected to the Morgenthau Plan.

Even strategically his pursuit of Cairo was foolish. The British didn’t depend on Suez (in fact, the Med was mostly closed to British shipping anyway), and even if he could have captured Cairo, he would have had to retreat to West Libya (and eventually to Tunis) after the November 1942 invasion of Algiers anyway. From a strategic point of view, he should have taken into consideration both the vulnerability of Algiers (even without an American invasion, the French forces there could have simply joined de Gaulle) and the total uselessness of capturing Egypt.

His campaign looked impressive, but eventually it proved a huge waste of manpower and resources. As I wrote, he was a great divisional (and below that level) commander, an above average corps commander, and way in over his head as the commander of the Axis army in Africa.

In evaluating Erwin Rommel it would be well to remember that his adversaries were reading all of his communications in real time, yet he still surprised them and won substantial victories against considerable odds.

“Judgement at Nuremberg”, released in 1961 (I saw it then), started the Holocaust Wahnsinn. Unlike the junk produced today, it was at least well written and well acted.

“We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — …”

Mossad officers & Israelis? Seriously?
I cannot think of a more unreliable source for just about anything.

Pure pulp fiction from top to bottom. If it smells, looks, & reads ridiculous then it is ridiculous.

“By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”
– Mossad

To what extent was the problem you describe attributable to Erwin Rommel as commander of the Afrika Korps, and to what extent was it the fault of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht for even sending three German divisions to North Africa in the first place? As I see it, the Germans had two good choices: (1) concede the Mediterranean theater, leaving the Italians to cope as best they could, while the Germans concentrated on the USSR; or (2) make it, and not the USSR, the major theater, with the objective of cutting British communications entirely in the Mediterranean (e.g., capturing Malta) and forcing British ships to and from India to take the long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, while putting a maximum effort into U-boat interdiction efforts. They chose option 3: send just enough forces to keep the Italians from collapsing. That wasn’t Rommel’s fault. In a position of strategic inferiority, a commander can either elect a tenacious, grudging defense (e.g., Kesselring’s Italian strategy), or a calculated-risk offensive. Robert E. Lee chose the latter strategy in the American Civil War, as did Rommel in North Africa. It offered a chance (admittedly a very long chance, in either case) of decisive victory. The other strategy simply aims at a delayed defeat. Rommel’s reputation is on solid ground.

The Morgenthau Plan wasn’t finalized until Sept of ’44 and I don’t know that its contents were ever leaked before the war was over, so that is a pretty farfetched example and would not account for the other 11 years of Nazi rule that preceded Sept. 44. Even in Sept. of ’44, the only access most Germans had to media was Nazi propaganda so it would have been hard to distinguish any genuine news about the Morgenthau plan from the rest of the hysterical and false propaganda they were being fed.

Hugo Drax from Moonraker is the Skorzeny connection. I’m referring to the Flemming novel, not the movie (which was fun to watch). The character’s backstory puts him in one of Skozeny’s commando units in the Battle of the Bulge.

Every morning, I walk by a picture of my wife’s grandfather in full Wehrmacht regalia hanging on the wall. No, I don’t give a salute.

Anyway – the documented truth is that the man who still silently stands watch over my crumbling old ranch in an old photograph, well cared for but faded, was a blue collar kid from a dinky ass Heimat who went and did his patriotic chore. The only people he killed were, actually, Russians. War. Well, War never changes, Cucky, and the men, especially young ones, will fight for their family, neighborhood, town, state, race, and nation. The flag, well, it doesn’t really matter. Men will follow a leader, because he is leader. This has been true since Horatio stood and the bridge and, like all verities, will be true long after the internet shuts down and the world that was is gone.

And the fact that Hollywood, run by Eskimos with their 8 bazjillion words for f*cking host cultures over, now seems fit to to produce Frankfurt school propaganda that misrepresents facts as the actual guys who fought the war on the Allied side actually remembered them should give you some god damn pause to think that maybe, just maybe, it’s not, like the photo on the wall, black and white.

Judging from the # of replies to your comments, there’s a real demand for movies depicting Nazis as heroic among Sailer blog readers, if nowhere else.

I predict that Nazis will come to be regarded as heroic by much of our population when the US becomes well over half non-European, because they will be seen as resistance fighters standing up against Anglo/Zionist hegemony, and their ideology will be seen as something worth emulating.

Call it a crazy theory, but non-whites are a lot less bothered by Hitler than Europeans and Jews. Chinese, for example, are not really bothered by Nazis. What really gets them going is the Opium War and the like, and that wasn’t started by Germans…

What a lot of American elites and PC types don’t understand is that much of the rest of the world sees US as we see the Nazis, so anyone who fought us earns some respect and even sympathy in an “enemy of an enemy” sort of way.

The rap on Rommel was that he was “the greatest battalion commander in the German army.” He’d show up at the pointy bit, direct the battalion in contact, and win the victory. In North Africa the problem was that he didn’t pay enough attention to his supply lines, including reducing Malta, which led to his eventual defeat.

According to wiki knowledge of the plan was known. Here is an excerpt.

General George Marshall complained to Morgenthau that German resistance had strengthened.[40] Hoping to get Morgenthau to relent on his plan for Germany, President Roosevelt’s son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger who worked in the War Department explained to Morgenthau how the American troops who had had to fight for five weeks against fierce German resistance to capture the city of Aachen had complained to him that the Morgenthau Plan was “worth thirty divisions to the Germans.” Morgenthau refused to relent.[41]

Franco was smart. He knew that the odds favored a Nazi defeat, so he stayed out of it.

The King’s Speech, while a gripping yarn and beautifully filmed, was a total travesty of the history. The foul-mouthed Aussie speech therapist was in real life a very religious churchwarden, whose surviving relatives told the BBC he would never have used such language at all, let alone to the King.

He’s also shown in the film as mocking the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, an impressive figure who incidentally wrote a fiction book on the Jacobite rebellion, The Young Clanroy.

The scriptwriter, David Seidler, also stuttered as a youth :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Seidler

“Numerous forms of speech therapy failed him, until, at 16, he had a breakthrough. “I resolved that if I was going to stutter for the rest of my life, people were going to be stuck listening to me. I had been depressed, but now I was angry — I decided I deserved to be heard.” That is when, in rage he spoke the ‘F’ word, or “naughty word” as he recalled decades later.”

So basically he replaced Lionel Logue with David Seidler.

Speaking of the Japanese navy in WWII, this is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Destroyer-Captain-Guadalcanal-Battles/dp/1591143845

“I have no idea if this new story is true, by the way.”

Well, you want it to be true. Seems like a real stretch, though. The Israelis would always have to worry about Skorzeny double-ratting on them. Why bother with such risk when they could do special ops very well themselves?

One thing is undoubtedly true: Skorzeny lived openly in Ireland for a couple years in the 1950s. Much of the Irish press and glitterati actually feted him as a derring-do hero. Eventually some Irish politicos grumbled that he would start a neo-Nazi movement, and he decamped to Franco’s Spain. The BBC ran a weirdly funny story about Skorzeny’s stint as an Irish farmer…

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-30571335

“We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.”

Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, 1942

Churchill elsewhere … “Rommel, Rommel, Rommel ! What else matters but beating him?”

Many Austrians (Skorzeny was an Austrian) have Slavic-sounding names, which is normal considering how mixed Austria-Hungary was. And if they have Slavic names, it’s safe to assume they had some Slavic blood too.

Ditto for Prussia: you would expect that, being next to Poland, there must have been some intermixing of the populations. It happens in all border regions. Maybe that’s why they were the most fierce Germans, due to Slavic influences. Either Nazis didn’t see the irony in this, or they purposely pretended not to see it.

Additionally once the Morgenthau Plan was leaked I could easily see patriotic Germans fighting to ensure Germany did not have to endure its provisions. Even if you weren’t a Nazi, you still wouldn’t want Germany to be subjected to the Morgenthau Plan.

First, it was obvious to anybody that a German victory would be good for Germany. I know there’s a lot of hand-wringing about how dark and terrible it would’ve been for Germans to be under the swastika banner, but truly, the Gestapo would’ve been not much worse than the present PC regime (they rarely executed or even arrested Germans who avoided explicit anti-regime activity, and even less so during times of peace), so it was obvious for German patriots in 1939 or 1940 that they should help the regime if they wish good for Germany.

After 1941 it didn’t change, but after that Hitler turned truly genocidal, and one can argue that from a moral point of view self-interest (or ethnic self-interest) should’ve been overridden by moral considerations. However, in 1941 Hitler’s war against Stalin also started, so anyone working on the defeat of Hitler was also explicitly working to help Stalin. (Arguably that was the case even in 1940, because Stalin would’ve used the opportunity to grab for himself what he could.) Now even our friend the commentator Jack D acknowledged that Stalin might have been as evil as Hitler or even more so. Especially with the limited information people had at the time, and the human propensity to believe worse things about an outgroup (like the Soviets) then an ingroup (the Germans themselves). So after 1941 for a German patriot it would have been arguably a duty to help Hitler against Stalin. And certainly many non-Nazi patriots did think so.

I truly find it bizarre how German patriots of the time are now retrospectively expected to work for the ruin of their own nation based on the (even in retrospect highly questionable) notion that Hitler’s victory would have led to more mass murder than Stalin’s victory.

(Stalin’s victory led to Mao’s victory and hence later even Pol Pot’s victory – Mao wouldn’t have killed 60 million Chinese, nor Pol Pot, nor the Vietnamese commies etc. would have killed their millions. Would Hitler have killed more than 60 million after his victory, in addition to the ones he killed anyway? Maybe, but it’s pure speculation.)

It makes sense. But to be fair to Cruise, I can’t think of a contemporary movie actor in his mid-30s who is both good-looking enough and tall enough to portray von Stauffenberg realistically. The tall ones aren’t as pretty, and the pretty ones aren’t as tall.

I have to disagree about “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter”…I thought it was crap. The very beginning is already totally nonsensical…a group of friends, including a Jew, merrily celebrating in 1941 (!) as if Jews by that time hadn’t already been a persecuted and demonized minority, increasingly cut off from mainstream German society (most German Jews who had the means and understood what was happening had already left Germany by that time anyway). There were also lots of contrived and unbelievable coincidences in the plot. And worst of all: By their negative portrayal of antisemitic Polish resistance fighters (apparently worse in their hatred of Jews than the Germans who feel really bad when they commit atrocities!) the filmmakers proved totally insensitive to Polish concerns (the Polish ambassador actually protested about that movie, quite rightly so in my opinion).
It would probably be impossible to really capture in a movie what life was like in wartime Germany, but “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” was a very poor attempt (and the title is pretty dated by now…).

He recklessly went on his adventure to Egypt, which led to the destruction of his army, the inability of the Axis to promptly react to the American invasion of Algiers, and eventually the collapse of Fascist Italy. Arguably it all would’ve happened anyway, but his actions hastened all this.

There’s a fairly good recent biography of Franco by Stanley Payne (“Franco. A personal and political biography”). Has a slight pro-Franco bias, but really balanced on the whole (neither demonizing nor whitewashing Franco). Can remmomend it unreserverdly.

That’s true, Polish criticism was justified. It also was just bad and unbelievable in general.

As I said before, this was late in ’44 – anyone who was going to fight for the Nazis had already been fighting for years by then.

I’m not sure that the idea of Germany without war-making capability should really have been that horrifying to a German – its war making capability seemed to lead to trouble rather than victory and the new non-militaristic Germany (ultimately the aim of the plan) has done quite well for itself. The Morgenthau’s idea of not allowing the Germans to have any sharp metal objects was impractical (in part because of the Cold War) so instead the US kept Germany under military occupation for 50 years and allowed it to start chipping away at our auto industry. If nothing else, blowing up all the steel mills would have been a lot cheaper for us.

What the Russian had in mind for the Germans (and what they actually did) was a hell of a lot worse than the Morgenthau Plan but this did not stop them from winning in the east so I’m not sure the stuff about 30 divisions was really true. Morale will only get you so far without materiel.

Italy was the most important German ally. Italy’s collapse tied down at least a million German soldiers in Southern Europe. Italy’s collapse was inevitable after the loss of Africa. So it made a lot of sense to keep three good divisions in Libya to keep Italy in the war.

Capturing Egypt, on the other hand, was impossible in the first place, but even if it was possible, it would have been useless. Rommel’s bosses correctly saw that it was a goal both impossible to reach and useless if reached.

So Rommel’s bosses are to be commended for giving him the both possible and useful job of tying down some British forces and keeping Italy in the war. He is not to be commended for disregarding the sensible orders he was given.

Franco knew that he owed his position to MI6 (see my comment earlier in this thread). The British persuaded him to keep out of the war. Franco was a monarchist at heart and intended (as he ultimately did) to restore the monarchy. Alfonso XIII was married to Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, the youngest granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and first cousin to George V.

Franco admired his queen and on one occasion when she reviewed his troops after a battle in Spanish Morocco, he presented her with a large basket of roses adorned with the severed heads of three Moorish rebels, recalling a legendary episode of the Reconquista. What the queen thought of this romantic gesture is not recorded.

Between the debt he owed British intelligence, and the connection between the Spanish and British royal families, Franco had reasons to cultivate the good will of the British.

Characterizing Franco as a “fascist” is not quite accurate. He less resembled Mussolini, an atheist whose fascism was derived from socialism and syndicalism, than the Austrian Engelbert Dollfuss, who was a traditionalist Catholic authoritarian.

The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark aren’t demonic, they’re comic book villains. And I seem to recall that Spielberg didn’t even really know about the Holocaust until well into middle adulthood (yes, I know it sounds weird, but it’s apparently true), so it probably didn’t influence his film-making in Raiders.

the new non-militaristic Germany (ultimately the aim of the plan) has done quite well for itself

Except it’s in the process of dying. Mind you, not because of desindustrialization, but because of reeducation.

My dear flyingtiger, have you given this one a look-see? – : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056234/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1

Would Hitler have killed more than 60 million after his victory, in addition to the ones he killed anyway?

I think it is far from speculation:

On March 15, 1940 Himmler stated: “All Polish specialists will be exploited in our military-industrial complex. Later, all Poles will disappear from this world. It is imperative that the great German nation considers the elimination of all Polish people as its chief task.”

(a) we know that Hitler had no compunction about committing genocide, (b)the Slavs were designated as untermenschen and (c) Lebensraum wouldn’t be Lebensraum if someone else was living there.

In case anyone gets overly sentimental about Nazi Germany, a few figures:

Soviet POWs who died at the hands of the Nazis: Approx 3 million plus, with around 2 million of the deaths occurring in the Winter of ’41-’42 alone.

Jews: 5 million plus

European civilians killed in Nazi “reprisal” operations: Approx 700,000 (with Belarus alone accounting for around 300,000)

Soviet citizens starved to death during the siege of Leningrad: 670,000 plus

And, if the Nazis had actually managed to win in the East, the death toll would have been higher still:

The Hunger Plan: The planned diversion of “surplus” Ukrainian food supplies to the Reich. It was estimated that that would have entailed the mass starvation of around 30 million people.

Generalplan Ost: The mass ethnic cleansing of the Slavic East. If fully implemented, this would have meant a death toll in the neighborhood of 50 million.

Rommel did have the good fortune to fight mostly British, American and Canadian forces, rather than Russian, so his reputation got wider play than, e.g., Erich Manstein, Herman Hoth or Walter Model).

Or Michael Wittmann?

However, he did at least get immortalized in this book:

Anything that stayed away from the China theatre or from POW handling would offer scope for a fair presentation.

The Japanese did not confine their predilection for atrocity to the Chinese Theatre and POWs:

Manila, Philippines (massacre of civilians by Japanese: Nov. 1944-Feb. 1945): 100 000
Gilbert, History of the Twentieth Century: 100,000 Filipinos k.
William Manchester, American Caesar (1978): “nearly 100,000 Filipinos were murdered by the Japanese”
PBS: “100,000 of its citizens died.”
World War II Database: 100,000

East Timor
James Dunn, in Century of Genocide, Samuel Totten, ed., (1997): 70,000 died under Japanese occupation

The Sook Ching (simplified Chinese: 肃清; traditional Chinese: 肅清; pinyin: Sùqīng, meaning “purge through cleansing”) was a systematic extermination of perceived hostile elements among the Chinese in Singapore by the Japanese military during the Japanese occupation of Singapore and Malaya, after the British colony surrendered on 15 February 1942 following the Battle of Singapore. The Sook Ching operation was overseen by the Kempeitai secret police and later extended to include the Chinese in Malaya as well. The massacre took place from 18 February to 4 March 1942 at various places in the region.

Thanks for providing the larger context; I can see why you wouldn’t like the mini-series on that basis. I admit I don’t know about that chapter of history enough to catch the inaccuracies you mentioned. What I liked about the series was the portrayal of German soldiers as humans with their fears and doubts and weaknesses, not as some comic book cutouts. Or do you think that aspect wasn’t realistic either?

Was this film Strafbatallion 999? This was a West German feature film circa 1960.

Best movie to be made for that would probably be the Kriegsmarine’s Baltic evacuation operation, which as a ‘miracle’ easily blows Dunkirk out of the water. Several times as many people evacuated over a longer distance against a much stronger opposition with far fewer naval resources than the British had.

Plenty of heroism along with terrible tragedy. Just about all of the most lethal ship sinkings in history occurred when overloaded liners got torpedoed in the icy Baltic by Soviet submarines.

Liddy would tell this tale every time he had a Vietnam veteran on his show. The guest would hardly get any words in.

The Nazis were just getting warmed up by gassing the Jews. Their Generalplan Ost envisioned killing or deporting roughly 75% of the population in Eastern Europe and enslaving most of the rest.

That’s only speculation. Himmler said many things (for example regarding the Jews in spring 1941 in his correspondence with Heydrich they both explicitly rejected the extermination of a whole people, only to change their minds sometimes later in 1941), but it’s not at all obvious that in the absence of an explicit order from Hitler he’d have done anything. It’s not at all obvious Himmler would’ve been retained by Hitler’s successor (Göring or anybody else), when Himmler’s relationship wasn’t all that cordial with Göring (or any other Nazi notability).

Stalin for example explicitly stated that

a) the only correct way of dekulakization in the USSR was the way he did it (i.e. mass deporting and murdering them)
b) the only correct way of building socialism is the Soviet way
c) the occupied small European countries (like Hungary) should build socialism the Soviet way

It stands to reason that Stalin should’ve forced Hungary to dekulakization, i.e. mass murdering maybe 2-3% of the population. But it didn’t happen. Life was difficult for the Hungarian peasantry under the regime of Rákosi, especially for those designated “kulaks”, but there was no dekulakization comparable to what happened in the USSR. (In China, however, what Mao did probably resulted in even more deaths…)

So you cannot reason what would’ve happened. Maybe Hitler would’ve killed 150 million people. Maybe not. It’s just speculation.

That’s speculation. As I wrote to Jack D, based on what he said, Stalin should’ve murdered 5% of the population of the other Eastern Bloc countries. But it didn’t happen. (It did happen in China, but actually against the advice of Stalin. I read somewhere that Stalin advised the Chinese against collectivization and forced industrialization because he feared they would get too strong. He didn’t want them to do the good thing! But Mao wanted to catch on the USSR, so he jumped into it anyway…)

Sven Hassel’s books are totally inaccurate in many ways, unfortunately.

Mass murdering regimes have the habit of slowing down the mass murder part after the death of the founding dictator. Not always, but usually. The USSR didn’t do that after the death of Lenin, but after the death of Stalin they stopped the mass murder almost completely. In China the same thing happened after the death of Mao. Vietnam got less murderous after 1986. Pol Pot’s regime got destroyed.

I read years ago that to much of the world (Middle East, Asia, Latin America) Hitler is only seen as the man who lost WW II, rather than the most evil man who ever lived.

The writer’s point was Americans don’t know this.

Morale will only get you so far without materiel.

But that morale got a lot more Americans killed even after the tide of the conflict had long past turned. That wiki quote about German morale stiffening due to the Morgenthau Plan wasn’t attributed to some corporal complaining about the increasing resistance. It was attributed to General George Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the Army, Eisenhower’s superior!

As to taking away Germany’s industrial capacity, this what former President Hoover had to say, “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.”

When you have an enemy on the ropes you want them to quit without the mad fight to the death. It saves lives on both sides. You want them to see the light that they are outnumbered and outgunned and there is no logical reason to continue. Throwing out crap like the Morgenthau Plan just mucks it up. Sure the Germans were going to lose, but how many soldiers on both sides and civilians died in those final months unnecessarily?

You have earned the coveted DH armaments erudition award: wear it proudly, you likely won’t see many!

Your discussion of Rommel is quite good: not really a Hitler opponent, not a genius, but pretty good considering what he had to work with under the circumstances. He depended a lot on the Italians for supply and many convoys suffered substantial losses. I wonder what von Mellenthin’s assessment would be if he had known about the Allied Ultra intercepts.

Isn’t there a saying about the sten gun being like a bed spring, pipe and trigger that shoots? Someone help me out here, I’m more of an Enfield/K98 guy. Love those long arms…

Italy effed up with Greichenland…And everything else!

I’m intrigued by what “political” means Erwin Rommel could have eliminated Malta. (It was British, and His Majesty’s government was committed to the war. Are you referring to Gibraltar,) Insofar as ports are concerned, their capacity isn’t terribly meaningful is most of the ships headed their way are sunk or damaged. Rommel wasn’t in charge of the Italian war effort, which was responsible for the supply of the North African forces, which were mostly Italian in their composition.

The opponent who didn’t panic, called Erwin Rommel’s bluff and was willing to “grind him down” (attrition is generally what you resort to when you are out of good options) had 3-5 times the resources of the Afrika Corps by October 1942.

So you cannot reason what would’ve happened. Maybe Hitler would’ve killed 150 million people. Maybe not. It’s just speculation.

Sure, we can’t be sure that Hitler would have carried out the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost, but his track record (11-12 million people killed) does not exactly inspire confidence…..

Mass murdering regimes have the habit of slowing down the mass murder part after the death of the founding dictator. Not always, but usually. The USSR didn’t do that after the death of Lenin, but after the death of Stalin they stopped the mass murder almost completely. In China the same thing happened after the death of Mao. Vietnam got less murderous after 1986. Pol Pot’s regime got destroyed.

A good point, but one can counter by noting that Nazi Germany was on an upward slope in terms of mass killing during the period 1941-45.

Hence, if the war had gone Hitler’s way……

I’ve read that German net assessors before the war hoped that Italy stayed neutral. They believed, quite reasonably as it turned out, that Italy’s Mediteranean ambitons would be a distraction to the major German war effort, which was in the east. There was no German encouragement for Italy to declare war on France and Italy did so only after France had been defeated by German forces. At the end of the war both sides claimed victory in the Italian campaign and for precisely the same reason: We tied down lots of your troops you could have better used elsewhere.

Where would those British forces “tied down” in the Mediterranean have been used between 1941 and 1943? A cross-channel invasion, even one involving the 8th Army, would have been very difficult before 1944. The entire Mediterranean effort was a total distraction from the German point of view. I suppose one could fault Rommel for giving the German OKW the idea that the Mediterranean was important by his early victories there.

You, sir, discern well among small arms. The Sten was an expedient: if you don’t have the time or the inclination to train infantry to shoot well, you give them a mass produced item that enables them to shoot a lot. The Sten could also be disassembled for covert transport by resistance forces–some people think that there are a lot of them still today in European rural barns and haylofts. The Sten was actually pretty well suited to those purposes.

I was comparing Erwin Rommel to officers of similar rank: Generals and Field Marshalls.

That is what Rommel whined about. But it was more like 2-1 advantage. And good for Montgomery for carefully planning, building up his forces and not wasting his material advantage in an early attack. Bringing all your advantages to the attack is not a flaw. Rommel put himself in a dangerous position and as soon as he met a competent general, he was crushed. But these debates never end.

You could make a fantastic movie about German pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel. He flew a Stuka dive-bomber equipped with a 37mm cannon, with which he took out Soviet tanks. He also took out a Soviet destroyer. After his plane was shot down, he made a spectacular escape from behind Soviet lines. He continued to fly in combat after he lost his lower leg to a 12.7-mm bullet. Hitler awarded him the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. Problem fo5r Hollywood is that he was an unrepentant Nazi.

From Wikipedia:

Hans-Ulrich Rudel (2 July 1916 – 18 December 1982) was a German Luftwaffe military aviator during World War II, a ground-attack pilot credited with the destruction of 519 tanks, 1 battleship, 1 cruiser, 1 destroyer and 70 landing craft. He also claimed 9 aerial victories, and the destruction of more than 800 vehicles of all types, over 150 artillery, anti-tank and anti-aircraft positions, 4 armored trains, and numerous bridges and supply lines.[Note 1] He flew 2,530 ground-attack missions all over the Eastern Front, usually flying the Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive bomber, and 430 missions flying the Focke-Wulf Fw 190.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

Fascist Italy did not know they were sitting on a giant pool of oil in Libya. They did not even have to undertake a drive to capture that. They had it.

http://youtu.be/eXnJr2fn-Uw

How about this show about the Yamato?

You could make a great movie based on the memoir Samurai, written by the Japanese ace Saburo Sakai. It’s a great read. Sakai became a very popular guest at reunions of US pilots who had fought in the Pacific.

Ja. And don’t forget the real workhorse of mechanical wizard Paul Mauser: the Model 98, a superb bolt action. A fine iron, tho the Brit Lee Enfield 303 was probably even sturdier. And you betcha this article brings em all out,eh?

One thing for sure: There is no equivalent for Hogan’s Heroes for the Allied POWs and millions of Asians who felt the boot and bayonet of Nippon Maru. Nothing funny about that.

Hitler was 56 in 1945. Had he not died of lead poisoning, he probably had another good 20 or even 30 years in him. Maybe even more – Churchill smoked and drank and he live to 90. Franco was right around Hitler’s age and he lasted until 1975. Hitler was a vegetarian, so no worries about cholesterol.

And some of Hitler’s possible successors might have been just as bad if not worse. In the Soviet Union, if Beria has succeeded in taking power (and it could have easily gone the other way), he would probably have killed even more people than Stalin. If the Gang of Four has stayed, they might have been even worse than Mao.

“My dear flyingtiger, have you given this one a look-see? – : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056234/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1”

I can vouch for that being a good movie. 1962 was a good year for film generally.

Crossing the Nile and the Suez Canal would have enabled linking up with the Grand Mufti in Palestine.

I heard about the Holocaust (they didn’t generally call it that then) as an Irish Catholic boy growing up in Davenport, Iowa in the 1960s. Do you mean he didn’t know all that much about it until well into middle adulthood? In addition to being Jewish, I think he grew up in Southern Cal. People who are very incurious about history, especially history closely connected to their own heritage, wouldn’t ordinarily become celebrated filmmakers. Please explain.

There actually was a notorious SS brigade made up of criminals, led by Oskar Dirlewanger, himself a criminal and alcoholic. I’m not aware of any film portrayals of them.

36th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS

To the best of my knowledge nothing like this existed in the armed forces of other European countries.

I believe that the the problem was that no one at the time could drill to the depths required to find or pump that oil.

By the 1950’s there were numerous movies that portrayed German servicemen favorably. Probably the most excessive was The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum (playing a US surface commander) and Curt Juergens (playing the U-Boot captain.)

It really is an amazing film if you like sentimental portrayals of war. Two points of interest: #1 – the wardrooms in submarine are HUGE, it’s obvious they were using just ordinary naval movie sets; compared to Das Boot it is quite amusing. #2 – The XO second in command on the U-Boot is played by Austrian Jewish Zionist Theodore Bikel, who does a good job, but, in context, weird. (Bikel reprised the role as a sub commander in <The Russians are Coming x 2. Also worth mentioning for those who do not know, Bikel also created the role of Admiral von Trapp in The Sound of Music on Broadway.

The last movie I recall that had both sympathetic Germans as well as mentioning German crimes particularly against Jews was Ship of Fools in 1965. There are numerous anti-Jewish confrontations, point of interest is that the main Jewish guy in the story was played by the Aryan Heinz Ruehmann, who however had many Jewish associates and whose wives were either Jewish or part-Jewish. He was also Anne Frank’s favorite actor.

Things changed in the 1970’s, who knows why. I do know I rarely see anti-German agitprop anymore. Even Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance (TV) from 28 years ago had sympathetic Germans, and the miniseries even went so far as to do an obvious ripoff of both The Enemy Below and Das Boot in one sequence — again featuring Robert Mitchum. But then Wouk was Navy.

Naaaah, no movie potential at all.

Where’s the young guy breaking into the establishment angle?

Where’s the rebel rejecting authority angle?

Where’s the White Knight saving the disabled, the vulnerable women and the innocent from vicious rapists angle?

Where’s the charismatic leader-of-men convincing his troops to go one more time into the breach angle?

You don’t know Hollywood at all.

I’m trying to do my part!

An Italian professor actually made a discovery of oil before the war while digging water wells. But the war put an end to the exploration. Had Italy stayed out of the war a bit longer, who knows what would have happened?

They were vigorously implementing the plan during the war–somewhere around a million Poles were expelled in an area that was planned to be integrated into Germany–so I don’t think it’s speculation. The time frame envisioned was also near term. The main portion of the overall plan was expected to be conducted over a period of about 10-20 years. Probably within the span of a victorious Hitler’s lifetime.

There was a Japanese movie based on Samurai. An English dubbed version used to be available on VHS.

Italy’s mess in Greece ended up leading to the British coming to aid the Greeks which brought the Germans in. This ending up costing the Germans a few weeks delay in their invasion of the USSR. Who knows whether those extra few weeks might have allowed them to get further into Russia before the first winter hit.

According to film-maker and friend of Adolf Hitler Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler said that “if the Italians hadn’t attacked Greece and needed our help, the war would have taken a different course. We could have anticipated the Russian cold by weeks and conquered Leningrad and Moscow. There would have been no Stalingrad”

Regarding his face:

If the Nazis had won the war, Arnold Schwarzenegger would have starred in a series of big budget Otto Skorzeny movies.

Give the Nazis more artistic credit, Steve! Based on the photo, and the Loki-like persona, they would have cast Christopher Walken as Skorzeny. Also starring Henry Rollins as Rudolf Hess.

Wikipedia:

Loki sometimes assists the gods and sometimes behaves in a malicious manner towards them. Loki is a shape shifter…

I will take a look at it. I wonder if this was based on the Charlton Ogburn book?

According to Von Braun his surrender to the Americans had more to do with their adherence to Christianity.

We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured

I have seen it. It is good, especially the “Two enemies” speech.

The soviets had penal units also.

Audie Murphy offed the German scientist in Egypt. See his movie Trunk to Cairo.
If you were in Mossad, who would you trust for this important mission, Scarface or the Utica Kid?
Everyone would pick the guy who stood on the burning Tank Destroyer.

Judging from the # of replies to your comments, there’s a real demand for movies depicting Nazis as heroic among Sailer blog readers, if nowhere else.

Hit the road, Jack.

It’s still a thing in some German fraternities. Matt Miller of Bloomberg TV did it when he studied in Germany: http://www.businessinsider.com/matt-miller-dangerous-man-bloomberg-financial-news-2014-5

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is a very capable Democrat. Her skills in the airborne assault are unknown.

As an aside, it is hard to see any of our latter day college students even being able to comprehend that mileu or mindset.

They just get tatted up.

Maybe that’s why they were the most fierce Germans, due to Slavic influences.

Ha, here is a quote from Henderson (1939):

In what proportion militant Prussianism is due to its Slavic blood mixture, to
the harsh northeastern German climate, or to the militarism imposed on it by
its old indefensible eastern frontiers is an open question.”
“But the fact remains that the Prussians, of
whom even Goethe spoke as barbarians, are a distinctive
European type, which has imposed itself and its characteristics
upon the rest of Germany. Also, from the point of view
of the western world, it has prostituted or is prostituting the
great qualities of order and efficiency, probity and kindliness
of the purer German of Northwest, West, and South Germany,
with whom an Englishman on his travels abroad finds
himself in such natural sympathy

And later:

“no one can deny the German’s tendency to be a bully when he is strong.”
“put him [German] in any abnormal position of
authority, and in the majority of cases he will at once abuse it…
“I have endeavored earlier in this history to find some explanation for this in
the very considerable amount of Slav blood which flows in the German veins. The
mixture is probably a bad one; yet it cannot do more than account partially for
this distressing and distinctive trait.”

Marie Vassiltchikov in her Berlin Diaries 1940-1945 wrote that the aristocrat officers were sent back from their units by the Nazis, who mistrusted them. She worked in the Foreign Office for a while and described the many decent people there. The Nazis were feared.

She also reported how Germans she knew expressed sorrow at the loss of life when HMS Hood was sunk.

Eric Newby in his Love and War in the Appenines wrote of being woken up by a German officer when he took a nap in the mountains. The German had been, I think, a biology teacher. He shared his lunch with Newby, whom he knew to be an escaped POW, and left him without calling out the hounds later.

“The Young Lions” was sympathetic too. The ending was stupid alas.

My dear flying tiger, yes, the movie is based on Ogburn’s book: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056234/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_wr#writers

There’s also this:

Some of the German units that managed to surrender to the Americans were in turn handed over to the Sovs.

They are hard to find, but the Gunner Asch series follows a German artillery grunt from the pre-war era to the days of the Federal Republic.

I was a big fan of the sympathetic gunner Asch books written by the German Hans Hellmut Kirst, in print in English translation in the 1960s and 1970s. The books were anti-war and anti-Nazi, but witty and satirical, with the grunt Solomon Asch relating typical grunt disaffection stories about his military service in a morally corrupt cause.

The English language translations sold well during the Vietnam war era, perhaps not surprisingly.

Hans Hellmut Kirst’s other claims to fame were his superb murder novels, “The Night of the Generals” and “Officer Factory”, and a very good non-fiction account of von Stauffenberg and the Hilter bomb plot titled “Soldiers’ Revolt.” I recommend all three.

A footnote: “The Night of the Generals” was also made into a rather ordinary late 1960s movie with a completely different plot than the book. The movie requires a considerable suspension of disbelief in that it stars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif as Nazis…

A friend in my ROTC unit mentioned a book about that, but I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently it’s not entirely based on reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Guard

The Soviets also killed Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who thousands of Jews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Wallenberg

Masters’ Bugles and a Tiger is pure delight.

I’ve heard people say it might be fiction, but I read it and I certainly believe that whoever wrote it had some serious military experience. The detailed accounts of battlefield tactics are most interesting. I was turned onto the book from some guys serving in Iraq. Apparently they were of the opinion that the book had some useful lessons.

I’d like to see a movie about Major Erich Hartmann. Not only did he achieve great fame during the war by shooting down 352 planes, he also spent 10 years in a Soviet gulag for refusing to join the East German Air Force. He was finally released 10 years after the war and immediately joined the West German Air Force.

The movie could even appeal to women given that the Soviets threatened to kill his wife as part of their coercion. She also waited for him to return and was finally reunited with him in 1955. It’s got a lot of potential.

It was that in spades. Brad Pitt and his merry men were war criminals to a man and Pitt’s character was, what else, a Southerner with The Accent. The SS colonel was outstanding. Worth putting up with the rest of the drivel in the movie.

In my experience, American troops in Nam were intent on doing their jobs from one day to the next. It was a professional opportunity for man careerists. There might have been two guys I knew who had any awareness of why we were there.

Simple patriotism goes a long way.

I think you overestimate the degree to which all the troops were aware of all the details of Hitler’s initiatives or of the actions of other units on all fronts. Yes, he wrote MK but I bet as many read that as our guys read Profiles in Courage.

I wouldn’t like to see any big-budget film about the past. They only contribute to entrenching public ignorance.

Masters’ Bugles and a Tiger is pure delight.

It most certainly is.

It is worth noting for the purposes of this thread that “Bugles and a Tiger” is the first volume of John Masters’ autobiography and details his life as a British Indian Army officer in the 2/4 Gurkha Rifles in the 1930s.

So, little to do with Skorzeny or Nazi Germany, though it is an extraordinary, evocative account of army life in that place and time.

Plenty of heroism along with terrible tragedy. Just about all of the most lethal ship sinkings in history occurred when overloaded liners got torpedoed in the icy Baltic by Soviet submarines.

The good ol’ days when whites were a high proportion of the world’s population. I am going to throw out 35% for a number. And children per family was 4-5. So we could afford to kill off millions of other whites wholesale. These days Putin is seen as a white race savior. Just look at him compared to the alleged men and loony feminists who currently call the shots in Western European nations. Once thing about Islam. It can smell rot and weakness from a thousand miles away.

Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but Spielberg apparently really didn’t know about the Holocaust until his middle adulthood, some time in the 1970s or even 1980s! I think I actually read about that here…apparently Spielberg at one point asked John Milius “Did you know the Germans killed millions of Jews during the war?”…he apparently had just realized that a short time before. Don’t ask me how such a thing is possible, if true it’s definitely strange. But my main point was that the Nazis in the Indiana Jones movies aren’t “demonic”…they’re ridiculous comic book villains who are just incidentally Nazis. As for Schindler’s list, that one actually had a “good German” with Oskar Schindler (for which Spielberg was criticized). Spielberg may have a lot of faults as a filmmaker, but I don’t think he can be blamed for excessively anti-German attitudes in Hollywood films.

That may have been the best aspect of the series…though there were some fighting scenes that seemed too action movie-like to me.
In general it was just a very weird setup…you’ve got some young people who are even somewhat anti-Nazi (no one but courageous non-conformists would have celebrated with a Jewish friend by 1941, to the tunes of Jazz music, as is shown at the start of the series)…and then go on to willingly commit war crimes because they feel it’s their patriotic duty. But in the end of course there’s redemption and even reconciliation between the surviving “Aryans” and their Jewish friend. It all seemed highly unrealistic to me…nothing like what my late grandparents told about the 3rd reich and the war (which in a sense was both more banal and more terrifying). And the portrayal of the Polish resistance fighters was just thoughtless.

” . . . Hitler is only seen as the man who lost WW II, rather than the most evil man who ever lived.”

Agree. My understanding of post-WWII history is that West German Chancellor Adenauer and the leaders of newly independent states that had only recently been under colonial British or French rule quickly achieved good diplomatic relations that were favorable to a rebuilding German industry and trade, and for just that reason.

Back around 1980 I spoke with an Asian Indian, a fellow grad student and son of a wealthy banker, who pretty much said Hitler was a good guy for standing up to the imperialist British and French, the grasping Americans, and the murderous Soviets.

He struggled once we realised the Axis were reading all the communiques with details on Allied positions and plans from that American attache in Egypt.

Screw Hollywood.

I’m shocked that no one has mentioned Der Untergang or Downfall (2004), a German film about the last days of Hitler.

The scene in Downfall where Hitler freaks out after he’s told that Steiner will not be coming to save the day is almost identical to the one in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1970), an English film starring Alec Guinness (!) as Der Fuehrer:

The Ten Days clip has fake subtitles, mocking the hundreds of Downfall parodies with fake English subtitles (“Hitler freaks out because his pizza is late,” etc.) on YouTube.

Franco knew it was British support that had ensured victory in the civil war, so also a matter of honour.

In Hong Kong in the 1980s there was at least one Hitler Wong in the government phone book and a couple of Adolfs.

There were reputedly more in the general population.

OK, so a million Poles were expelled in five years. (Actually, another maybe couple million were killed, but some of that were victims to disease or the Soviets or the fighting.) Give another twenty years, and at that rate it would be another four million expelled. How much time do you think would have passed before the Germans colonized Russia? Especially that the German children who were to populate the East were yet to be born… Does it make sense to exterminate all Russians (in peacetime, when there’s no shortage of foodstuffs), when there is a shortage of colonists available?

It must also be noted that the Nazi leadership often was cognizant of the fact that it was easier to mass murder in wartime – in summer 1942, when many in the top Nazi leadership (but probably not Hitler) were expecting an imminent victory, many top Nazi officials felt the urgency to “solve the Jewish Question” before the final victory came, because – as they explained – in peacetime it would be nearly impossible to continue the “solution”.

So I stick by what I said: while it’s quite possible that the Nazis would’ve killed 150 million or more people after victory, I’d find it more likely that their rate of mass murder would’ve slowed down considerably.

Probably it would have been better both for the Fascists and the Nazis if Italy stayed neutral throughout the war.

But once Italy joined the war effort, an Italian collapse would have been catastrophic. In fact, it was catastrophic when it did happen in 1943: it tied up at least a million German soldiers to occupy the Balkan peninsula (the parts of it which had been occupied by Italy), Southern France (the parts which had been occupied by the Italians), and Italy itself.

So keeping Italy in the war effort was worth three German divisions.