The whole movie was sad but what hit me the most. Was the Hitler Youth and the girl operating the artillary piece spouting Nazi nonsence. Later they show her dead in the streets. A whole generation brainwashed.
Wonderland Exile
Uh, perhaps you are forgetting about the very real Communist horde that was advancing in to that city? If she didn't fight, she would have been gang raped and murdered. She chose the honorable path, and her bravery allowed countless others to escape West to (realtive) safety.
shareShe would have been raped but likely not murdered. Unlike what the Germans did in the East.
shareShe would have been raped but likely not murdered. Unlike what the Germans did in the East.
Oh please....The Western Allies were the tamest of the lot, and whenever Germans had a choice, they preferred surrender to the Americans or the British.
The Soviets are *not* the Western Allies, as later events would prove.
Oh please....The Western Allies were the tamest of the lot, and whenever Germans had a choice, they preferred surrender to the Americans or the British.
Yes it is an argument worth making. If any trope is tired and clichéd, it is "tu quoque" moral equivalency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
The lesser of two evils ideology... As tired and proved to be counterproductive as any concept ever has.
Evil is evil, you evil cold-hearted degenerate.
Yeah, it seems the western allies were far more ruthless to civilians.
Maybe try reading it.
many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies.
many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies.
whats this got to do with civilians? You said "Yeah, it seems the western allies were far more ruthless to civilians."
Incidentally, are you comparing treatment of German POWs in the West to German treatment of POWs in the East? You are aware the Germans followed policies of extermination of Soviet POWs?
have you actually read either the review or the book itself? Nowhere is it said "the western allies were far more ruthless to civilians" as you say.
In fact, it would be impossible for MacDonogh to compare western allied ruthlessness to German ruthlessness because MacDonogh mostly avoids talking about German ruthlessness. He focuses almost exclusively on German suffering.
I get your shtick - everyone is equally evil. However, the devil is in the detail and not in banal generalities.
You are talking about Russia, who lost the most people(civilians and soldiers) and had a deep resentment(understandably) to the Nazis, and made those intentions clear, compared with western countries that suffered far less of a tragedy and who promised adequate and legitimate care for prisoners. They were also in charge of all the war crime trials, which never mentioned their own.
You have a one sided narrow scope of history. I bet you think Germany started WWI.
I am talking and have only been talking about your claim that "the western allies were far more ruthless to civilians"
You have not supported it in any way. Neither the MacDonogh review nor the book say this.
You have a one sided narrow scope of history
without pity or compassion; cruel; merciless
This is true because they promised just treatment. They lured them in with false promises. The Russians made their (arguably just)intentions clear and no one had any doubts. Hence the massive exodus towards the western allies in a futile attempt to get fair treatment.
Get it?
The deception is what makes it worse.
Nonsense. The western allies and the russians both promised only one thing - unconditional surrender.
no deception, no false promises and no expectations of fair treatment based on false promises.
the attempt to get better treatment in the west as opposed to the east was evidently not futile.
Nonsense. The western allies and the russians both promised only one thing - unconditional surrender.
no deception, no false promises and no expectations of fair treatment based on false promises.
the attempt to get better treatment in the west as opposed to the east was evidently not futile.
That occurred to me as well when I re-watched this on the weekend.
Those young people manning the artillery piece were all teenagers. Thus they would have spent nearly all of their conscious lives up to that point, including their most impressionable teenage years, living with Nazi propaganda coming at them almost non-stop. Most would have gone through the deprivation of the early 1930s as small children, and then the rise of fascism. They would have seen their country go from next to nothing, to arguably the most powerful on earth, and then to smoldering ruins with enemies coming at them from all sides. By which point they'd all been turned into little fanatical fascist pawns by their fascist rulers.
That raises the question of the extent of their culpability for the things those teenagers may have done during the war, or for the things they DIDN'T do (i.e. resist, not follow blindly, etc.). Historian Gwynne Dyer has pointed out that, if you want to bring about fundamental change in people, you do two things. First, you isolate them: you place them in an environment in which the only right way to think and behave is the way you want them to. Second, you apply enormous pressure (psychological, physical, whatever) over a prolonged period of time. Such efforts are effective enough when applied to adults; apply them to children or teenagers, and presumably the outcome is even more certain. Thus one could argue that those kids never even had a chance to become anything other than little Nazis.
And then, on the flip side, there's what Traudl Junge says in the interview snippet at the end of the movie: "All these horrors I've heard of during the Nuremberg process, these six million Jews, other thinking people or people of another race, who perished. That shocked me deeply. But I hadn't made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it. But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was about my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment I actually realized that a young age isn't an excuse. And that it might have been possible to get to know things."
The young, and their unrealized potential, are inevitably the most tragic victims of both totalitarianism and of war.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
-- Klingon proverb
Yes, but this was Berlin, 1945. The girl on that anti-tank gun did not need "fanaticism" to keep her there. It was fight, flee, or die and she had stayed beyond the point where flight was feasible so her only option was to fight. Traudl Junge said we she had to say, but the reality is nobody in German, Eastern Europe, or Russia cared one wit about the fate of Jews in camps. Jewish Propaganda has conditioned youths in the West to think that is the most important aspect of WWII, but for the people living it, it was an irrelevancy. Tens of millions of Russians, Germans, and Eastern European gentiles were dying in this war. It was carnage unmatched in the history of civilization. And you think they honestly cared about the plight of a relatively paltry number of Jews who died too? Absurd.
shareThe stated motivation of those kids wasn't "we have no choice", it was "we swore an oath to the Fuhrer". An older, presumably more experienced adult tries to explain to them the futility of their continued resistance, and they spout off more of their Nazi fervour. He asks one of the teenage gunners which front he fought at, and the response is "I haven't been given that honour yet." The young gunners believe in the "heroism" of their actions (one of them lauds another for having destroyed two Soviet tanks out of however many thousands were surrounding them), and they proudly line up to receive their Iron Crosses directly from Hitler. Later, the girl on the anti-tank gun doesn't simply get her compatriot to shoot her to save her from what may befall her at the hands of the Soviets; she shrieks "Heil Hitler" and gives a salute while he shoots her. Difficult to see their motivation as something other than fanaticism.
I would agree that the extermination of the Jews wasn't much of a motivating factor for the Allies during the war; most Allied governments closed their doors to Jewish immigration, and regarded the stories of the atrocities against Jews with skepticism. The true nature of the death camps and the sheer scope of the genocide against the Jews really didn't become known until the war was all but over.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
-- Klingon proverb
The whole generation brainwashed was the Allies, not the Germans. This is absurd propaganda that has been so widespread that everybody presumes it's universal truth. Hitler was the good guy of world war 2. See how crazy that sounds? That's how powerful the propaganda is. They take one of the most softhearted and kind of rulers and turn him into the greatest monster the world has ever seen through propaganda.
sharesometimes the things that sound crazy...they are crazy.
shareBack in your cave, troll.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
-- Klingon proverb
I think that without a doubt the saddest scene is where Frau Goebbels kills her own children by medicating them and having them eat cyanide pills, one of the most heartbreaking scenes ive ever seen
shareGoebbels murdering her own, innocent, kids was extremely disturbing indeed. But the scene that finally brought me to tears was at the very end:
what Traudl Junge says in the interview snippet at the end of the movie: "All these horrors I've heard of during the Nuremberg process, these six million Jews, other thinking people or people of another race, who perished. That shocked me deeply. But I hadn't made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty. And that I didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it. But one day I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was about my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment I actually realized that a young age isn't an excuse. And that it might have been possible to get to know things."share