MovieChat Forums > Enemy at the Gates (2001) Discussion > Hollywood's treatment of Nazi Germany vs...

Hollywood's treatment of Nazi Germany vs. Communist USSR


A case can certainly be made that both were extraordinarily evil, and excelled in cruelty, murder and destruction.

Yet there are some differences in how Hollywood treats them.

There have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of feature films, TV shows and documentaries about Nazi Germany rightfully portraying it as a blight on humanity and horrible. But how many about the USSR, which was at least as bad? Nazism endured barely more than a decade, but the horrors of Communism almost a century. Nazism was never successfully exported outside of Germany, but forms of Communism infected many nations and a much larger population. There are actually Marxists employed at public universities in the US, paid with tax dollars. I don't think (and certainly hope not) that there are any Nazis. So why aren't there a lot more productions about Communism?

Search IMDb for titles:
Nazi: 1687
Communist: 564
Nazi Germany: 253
USSR: 94

With Nazism you have one wildly compelling central character, and several goons and oddballs after him. With Communism you have Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Molotov, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, etc. What a treasure trove of exceptional stories with a worldwide scope and really exploring the nature of totalitarian evil. And in some form it still exists today. But there's really not much compared to the obsession with everything Hitler. (In fact, A&E used to be referred to as "The Hitler Channel" because of all the programming having to do with him.

In movies such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, or "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and dozens of others, there is often a moral ambiguity proposed, and the characters often express this by saying things like, "We're not all that different, them and us." You never see that in films about the fight against the Nazis. It's almost as if the left-leaning folks who produce all that entertainment and documentaries kind of cut the Commies a break. "Sure they made some mistakes, but isn't equality a wonderful goal?"

Maybe it's Leftist naiveté. I don't know.

But if the tables were turned I just don't see a film like "Enemy at the Gates" ending with a note about a Nazi sniper's rifle being on display at a museum. Do you?







BIG GOVERNMENT = small citizen
No, that does not mean I am an anarchist

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It's very, very hard to say anything "nice" about the National Socialist Party. Go ahead. Tell us something "good" about the NAZI's.

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Why would I want to do a stupid thing like that? What a strange reply!




BIG GOVERNMENT = small citizen
No, that does not mean I am an anarchist

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They were the first to widely assert the health implications of tobacco. Developed the blitzkreig method of warfare which is still used today by the US military- though they call it 'shock and awe" with a slightly heavier emphasis on preliminary bombardments- but the theme of using armoured divisions and speed to simultaneously overrun and flank the enemy lines is still prevalent. I guess that's it.

That said, jsut to clarify, you should conflate Werhmacht with Nazi party. The werhmacht did allot of bad things to be sure, but they are in no way synonymous. And the Red army committed plenty of war crimes, which i think is the OP's argument.

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Nazis were as a species far more humane and honourable than the Bolsheviks. The Wehrmacht was far more professional than the Red Army. The Soviets committed more war crimes in WW2 than the Germans did.

However as long as history is written by the victors, Germany will suffer from biased coverage.

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The old Nazi scientists helped the U.S. get to the moon before the Russians.

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[deleted]

[deleted]

So why aren't there a lot more productions about Communism?

Because it's boring? This is going to be extremely informal, but I think that there are not that many movies about the reality of Communism because it's not as interesting a topic as Nazism is.
You see, Nazism had something, I don't know what it was, that perplexed and captivated people after it fell. I'm sure you've heard of 'Nazi Mysticism', where we hear about Nazi leaders being related with paranormal stuff such as UFO's, the Devil, Pagan gods, the Arc of Covenant, the Spear of Longinus, etc., and all of this has been exploited very well by filmmakers in movies like "Iron Sky", "Hellboy", "Indiana Jones", to name a few. And this is interesting to people, specially when you have a population that shares the same morbid interests. Consider Hugo Boss designing the uniforms for the SS and other parapolitical organizations. This would lead to, I think, modern Nazi fetishism. Think of Lemmy, from Motorhead. He collects Nazi paraphernalia not because he supports them, but because it's aesthetically appealing. It looks nice.
Also, some Nazi leaders were related to esoteric groups, like the Thule society, or believed in pseudo-scientific stuff such as astrology (not to mention the myth of superior and inferior races).
Nazis were interesting (think of Speer's Ruin Value concept), Commies were not. Hitler, being the failed architect that he was, wanted the buildings and everything architecture-related in Germany to represent his ideals of a superior people and culture, and you can see this in the plans he and Albert Speer developed to rebuild Germany after the war ended. Now, look at the architecture of Soviet-era, say, Berlin. Grey, dull, lifeless, uninteresting.
Nazis had religious faith, whether Christian or Pagan beliefs. Commies were atheists.
And I have run out of ideas, but I hope I have made my point clear. I'm very ignorant about both Nazism and Communism, but if Communism also had that much stuff that Nazism had, then maybe we would see an equal number of movies for both ideologies. Maybe Communism indeed had all that stuff that I mentioned, in some form or another, but maybe is not as interesting to filmmakers and public in general to exploit it.
With Communism you have Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Molotov, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, etc. What a treasure trove of exceptional stories with a worldwide scope and really exploring the nature of totalitarian evil. And in some form it still exists today. But there's really not much compared to the obsession with everything Hitler.

Again, I return to my point of interestingness. Marx was a philosopher; enough said. Lenin died before a good propaganda film could be made starring him. Trotsky, well, a good movie could be made about his life in exile, specifically while in Mexico (don't know if such a thing exists in film). Molotov, while a prominent Soviet politician and early closely related to Stalin, maybe his person wasn't as appealing to us as his counterparts (and by this I mean in relation to their closeness to their leaders) in Nazi Germany, such as Hess or Bormann. As with the rest of the leaders, I believe there well could be many films that show us a part of their lives in the same way "Downfall" did with Hitler, but again, there's something with Hitler and the swastika that draws so much attention and fascination that filmmakers simply give the public what they want.

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[deleted]

They were on the winning side and they were on the same side as America and the British.
Don't you think this is an important fact?

The USSR did a lot of bad things but it did them in the USSR,Eastern Europe and their bit of Germany so people in Western Europe and the USA don't usually see them as the bad guys,at least until after World War 2.

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The ss were dressed very smatly by Hugo boss !!!!

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There have been hundreds of holocaust movies but not one about the holodomor which was the deliberate starving to death of 7 million Ukrainians in 1932-33 www.holodomor.org.uk I think why there aren't as many movies about communist criminals is because it shows the British and Americans in a bad light. Both Churchill and Roosevelt condemned Hitler but supported Stalin. It was sheer hypocrisy! Everything they were critical of in Hitler they were supportive of in Stalin - dictatorship, one party state, secret police, concentration camps, press censorship. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew about the holodomor which occurred years before the second world war even started and they both still supported him during the war. Another thing is that Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939 for invading Poland but when the USSR invaded Poland on September 17 1939 they did not do so! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
Churchill and Stalin - www.heretical.com/miscellx/churchil.html
Roosevelt and Stalin - www.jrbooksonline.com/fdr-scandal-page/fdr.html

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[deleted]

Another homophobe heard from, so comfortable with slurs against gay people.




Obama: The law is what I SAY it is.

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[deleted]

You're the one flinging homosexuality around like an insult, something I never do. I think your own words betray what you really think of gay people.

Also, I assume you're in your middle teens and don't understand that when you call people Nazis for no reason it's like spitting in the face of real victims of real Nazis. You may not understand that trivializing Nazism is terribly wrong, but hopefully you will when you mature, if you do.





Obama: The law is what I SAY it is.

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[deleted]

I changed my mind. You're older than I thought, but mentally unbalanced.





Obama: The law is what I SAY it is.

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[deleted]

no ones said it so I guess I will, because Hollywood is run by people of Jewish descent?

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no ones said it so I guess I will, because Hollywood is run by people of Jewish descent?


...whose people were treated horribly by both the Russians and the Soviets. neither have been friends of the Jews by any stretch of the imagination.




Obama: The law is what I SAY it is.

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You should have narrowed down your ideas to two or three sentences. It is not worth the time reading all that stuff you wrote.

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You raise some interesting points in your post. I'm probably not near as good as expressing myself as you are, but here's my take on the situation:

I think that the Nazis have always been portrayed as "the ultimate villains" in books, movies, etc., while Communism has been given more of the kid-glove treatment, as you describe. I also have seen the movies made from Le Carre's books, and thought they were a little too much "but we can still all be friends!" in their approach to Communism and the wickedness it has caused in the world.

I think Communism---while many do acknowledge the oppression and deaths it has caused---is perceived more as a mindless thuggery, a more indiscriminate brutality in what it is. Somewhat similar to what an African dictatorship is regarded today. With regard to the Soviet Union during the period in which it was set: Stalin, Beria, et al, while regarded as murderers and tyrants, were also seen as rather dense, not-well-educated, and crude. Basically as peasants. I think that Khrushchev is portrayed as this type in the movie itself. Russia itself was regarded as a backward and crude country.

The Nazis, on the other hand, were usually regarded--despite their undeniable evil--as educated, cultured, as well as being cold-blooded killers. Germany was always regarded as a cultured and highly civilized country. Many of the highest and most evil Nazis were indeed highly-educated individuals. Appreciative of Goethe, literature, art, the music of Wagner, etc. University educated. Otto Ohlendorf, commander of an Einsatzgruppen extermination squad that killed hundreds of thousands, actually had a double PhD.

So when it comes to movies and books: if you have a brutal, poor grammar, badly dressed, and lumpish lout as a villain. Vs. a dapper, well spoken, meticulous and obviously highly educated and intelligent bad guy---it's going to be the second one you focus on in your story.

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So when it comes to movies and books: if you have a brutal, poor grammar, badly dressed, and lumpish lout as a villain. Vs. a dapper, well spoken, meticulous and obviously highly educated and intelligent bad guy---it's going to be the second one you focus on in your story.


Kind of like James Bond: you got the brainless, brawny thug or the 'Head of Spectre' as the main villain.




Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?

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