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Originally Posted by PzJgr
Eh, I don't agree with the author. I doubt it if Stauffenberg knew the exact details of what was going on in the camps, especially those in the East. They knew about the camps but not all of the details. So, putting the holocaust in the movie would just add more time to it, be inaccurate and would just not fit into the plot.
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I take your point but I also feel the author was making a good point in that these men were perfectly happy to go along with the Nazis, they knew about the racial policies, they knew people were being beaten in the streets, Stauffenberg even seems to have approved of the use of Poles etc for slave labour. I think the general point is that portraying these men who helped keep the Nazi regieme going for so long as heroes is to say the least controvercial.
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Many of the anti-Nazis did not do anything because they were outnumbered or at least thought so. At the end of the war, there were those who spoke against the Nazis but only after the war. Kind of like being a Dallas Cowboys fan. You're a fan when they are winning but when they are losing, fans are like rats abandoning a sinking ship. But these guys have been conspiring for a long time, they just did not do anything as drastic until 44'.
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Good analogy, but again, these men only decided to act as the ship was sinking, it isn't really heroic
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So I totally disagree with the author's assessment on the 'trend' of recent movies. It is funny that the article did not print the author's name.
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Again, this came up when Downfall came out. The point being made is that there is an increasing trend in current movies to portray the German people as victims of the Nazis, to say 'look at all the horrible things Hitler and a few people did, but it wasn't us!' Now right or wrong there was a definate sense of this in Downfall and (from the review though of course I have yet to see the film) there seems to be in Valkyrie.
It is interesting that in terms of historiography there was a period immediately after the war when historians were effectively saying 'Germans are different from the rest of us, nobody else could have allowed this to happen' and so on, effectively a backlash against the shock of learning what people are capable of. A decade or two later people came in on the other side (in keeping with the EU etc) to say that the German people aren't different from the rest of us, that it was circumstances which led to the events of the 30's/40's. The risk is that this may have gone too far.
Now we all know not every German was a Nazi, we all know that most people were simply victims of circumstance and we can all clearly see that the modern generation aren't to blame for the crimes of their forebears. However I think the general, overriding point being made by this article and others on the subject is that the trend now seems to be to totally absolve the entire German nation of blame and to focus on the victims/resistance. Is this right? In fact, is it dangerous to totally take away responsibility for what happened from the people who not only allowed it to happen but actually took part in it? Therein lies the rub I think...