"Our mothers,our fathers"New guilt-ridden propaganda on WW2

[Barrington James]

..and all these soldiers died for no good reason...the poor,the gullible, and all those ignorant of the world died and will continue to die in order that their masters will go on being their masters...It has always been that way , it is that way now and, until these poor souls learn the truth, as they may some day, they will continue to follow the past to their doom without a single clue why they killed and were killed by men just like themselves.

[blacksmith]

Hi Barrington James,
Actually the German soldiers knew very well why they died and the Hitler government, including his generals tried to avoid war. The German general staff was particularly opposed to any kind of war even against the Czechs but the war was forced on Germany (read Hoggan's the The Enforced War). The BS that is taught in the history lesson in our schools is to perpetuate the concept that it was Germany's, fault that it came to war. The claim being that Hitler wanted conquer the World. All Germany wanted was to get back the portions of land that was populated by Germans. Would it have come to war in the final analysis? More than likely yes, as the Soviet Union wanted invade Europe sooner or later and it was left up to the single major power, Germany, to prevent that. So, there was a pre-emptive attack for which the Germans are still paying. BTW how come that nobody questions the fact that when war was declared, the West only made war on only Germany and not on the USSR as well; and further more how come that they could keep the territory which they got through the German-Soviet treaty? So much the war to protect Poland.

One final word, it is about the horrible way the German SS was treated after the war. Like it or not the SS was the forerunner of what we call NATO, except that it was more unified and defended Germany to the last man. In fact the last defenders of Berlin was a unit established in France. How's that for loyalty? The Germans should have erected statues to those unsung heroes, instead of statues for deserters.

Blacksmith

[blacksmith]

Hi Barrington James,
Actually the German soldiers knew very well why they died and the Hitler government, including his generals tried to avoid war. The German general staff was particularly opposed to any kind of war even against the Czechs but the war was forced on Germany (read Hoggan's the The Enforced War). The BS that is taught in the history lesson in our schools is to perpetuate the concept that it was Germany's, fault that it came to war. The claim being that Hitler wanted conquer the World. All Germany wanted was to get back the portions of land that was populated by Germans. Would it have come to war in the final analysis? More than likely yes, as the Soviet Union wanted invade Europe sooner or later and it was left up to the single major power, Germany, to prevent that. So, there was a pre-emptive attack for which the Germans are still paying. BTW how come that nobody questions the fact that when war was declared, the West only made war on only Germany and not on the USSR as well; and further more how come that they could keep the territory which they got through the German-Soviet treaty? So much the war to protect Poland.

One final word, it is about the horrible way the German SS was treated after the war. Like it or not the SS was the forerunner of what we call NATO, except that it was more unified and defended Germany to the last man. In fact the last defenders of Berlin was a unit established in France. How's that for loyalty? The Germans should have erected statues to those unsung heroes, instead of statues for deserters.

Blacksmith

[Barrington James]

Blacksmith.I agree with you. However It was a real blunder to compare the SS to NATO. NATO is a horrible organization. NATO is simply another means of exerting US control of the world. What NATO did to Libya, and Yugoslavia for example, we're two of the worst war crimes since WW 2.

[Hektor]

The Germans are so sick they now erect memorials to lynched bomber crews

These men had lives, family and children just like anyone else. Their sacrifice deserves commemoration the same as any other soldier in a war, surely? Especially considering that they were murdered.

But that's not a cemetery for fallen or deceased soldiers, neither was the incident ordinary. The lynching occurred just after Ruesselsheim was severely bombed killing hundreds of civilians. The crew was just mistaken for being part of that, which, according to texts on the subject, they coincidentally were not.
The whole "memorial" is an exercise in nose rubbing.

I've personally been to the American, British and German cemeteries in Normandy. I'm glad that all sides of the conflict have their own respectful memorials to those who died.

That's a subject for another thread, though.

There is no memorial for those who died as result of the bombing.

[blacksmith]

During one of the 1000 bomber raids, one of the US planes got shot down. It must have been due to AA fire as our fighters could not reach the bombers which flew too high. There too, the airmen who were not killed jumped from the plane and drifted down to the ground, where a bunch of Hausfraus attacked them with broom sticks of all things. Our military had a really hard time rescuing the flyers but they managed to get them separated from the infuriated women. Believe me, there was very little sympathy for those unfortunate men and the only thing that was surprising that our police managed to get things under control and take them to a POW camp. What infuriated the women was that these bombers came to kill the civilian population without any serious consideration whether they were committing a war crime. After all they were just "following orders".

Blacksmith

[Barrington James]

The British propaganda was so successful that even today, almost 70 years after their hideous, long planned bombing of German civilians , the policy of England at the time, we can still read the weekly obituaries in our newspapers of the bomb crews pictured so proudly in their uniforms of so long ago, so many wars ago, still presumably unaware of the war crimes that they had committed as young men. These men, now so old, cannot admit even to themselves today , that the war was wrong, that they were wrong, despite the fact that their actions led to the bombing deaths of hundreds of thousands German and French children in their beds and tens of millions in the dozens of wars that followed WW 2.

[Hektor]

Meanwhile the movie is shown in the US and received very critical. Here is the German Newspaper "Die Welt" reacting on this:

"Die keuschen Arier sind die Helden"
In Deutschland haben sieben Millionen die Weltkriegs-Fernsehserie "Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter" gesehen. Jetzt wird sie in New York im Kino gezeigt. Die ersten Kritiken fallen vernichtend aus. Von Hannes Stein

"Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter"1/11

Am 22. Juni 1941 überfiel die deutsche Wehrmacht die Sowjetunion und begann so den Deutsch-Sowjetischen Krieg, der am 8./9. Mai 1945 mit der bedingungslosen Kapitulation der Wehrmacht endete. Der ZDF-Dreiteiler „Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter“ setzt sich mit diesem Krieg auseinander. Im Mittelpunkt stehen fünf Freunde, drei junge Männer und zwei Frauen. Am Ende überleben nur zwei. Darunter sind die Brüder Wilhelm (Volker Bruch) …
...
Am 22. Juni 1941 überfiel die deutsche Wehrmacht die Sowjetunion und begann so den Deutsch-Sowjetischen Krieg, der am 8./9. Mai 1945 mit der bedingungslosen Kapitulation der Wehrmacht endete. Der ZDF-Dreiteiler "Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter" setzt sich mit diesem Krieg auseinander. Im Mittelpunkt stehen fünf Freunde, drei junge Männer und zwei Frauen. Am Ende überleben nur drei – darunter Wilhelm (Volker Bruch).
...In Amerika heißt jene Generation, die während der Wirtschaftskrise der Dreißigerjahre erwachsen wurde und dann im Zweiten Weltkrieg gekämpft hat, "the greatest generation". Amerikaner schauen mit Liebe und Respekt auf diese Leute zurück, nicht nur, weil sie so viel gelitten, sondern vor allem auch, weil sie geholfen haben, die Welt vor den Nazis zu retten.

Der Blick auf die "greatest generation" ist natürlich längst nicht mehr naiv. Schon 1985 brachte Studs Terkel sein klassisches Interviewbuch "The Good War" heraus – Gespräche mit Veteranen, in denen nichts begradigt und nichts beschönigt wurde. 2007 kam Ken Burns' 15-stündiger Dokumentarfilm "The War" ins amerikanische Fernsehen, und auch hier wurde kein Tabuthema ausgelassen.

Nicht die Internierung Amerikaner japanischer Herkunft unter Franklin Delano Roosevelt, nicht die Diskriminierung der Schwarzen, nicht die Bombardierung der Zivilbevölkerung in Deutschland und Japan, nicht die zum Teil idiotischen Entscheidungen amerikanischer Generäle. Können die Deutschen das auch? Sind sie zu echter, schonungsloser, radikaler Selbsterforschung in die Lage?

Ein deutscher Film im New Yorker "Film Forum"

In dieser Woche läuft im "Film Forum" in New York – der Adresse für die wirklich hartnäckigen Liebhaber des Kinos – der Fernsehfilm "Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter" an. Ein viereinhalb Stunden langes, also ziemlich erschöpfendes Leinwanderlebnis. Begleitet wird dieses Erlebnis von vernichtenden Rezensionen.

Die wichtigste Besprechung stammt von A. O. Scott, dem Filmkritiker der "New York Times". Er bescheinigt dem Film von Philip Kadelbach und Stephan Kolditz zwar, er sei höchst professionell gemacht – Scott fühlt sich von dem Film an "Saving Private Ryan" von Steven Spielberg, an "Vom Winde verweht" und andere Kostümfilme aus Hollywood erinnert. Aber die Botschaft des Films findet A. O. Scott fatal.

Er schreibt, dieser Film, der "emotional zwar aufgeladen, aber nicht gerade von Schmerz geplagt" sei, stehe für einen Versuch, die deutsche Geschichte zu "normalisieren". Wenn man es abstrakt formuliere, so Scott weiter, sei daran nichts Verwerfliches. Aber "der Film gleitet in eine seltsame, üble Zone zwischen Naturalismus und Nostalgie ab. Letztlich ist er ein Appell zugunsten Deutscher, die in den frühen Zwanzigerjahren geboren wurden, damit sie einer globalen ,greatest generation' zugerechnet werden, eine Übung in selektivem Gedächtnis, die auf der Annahme beruht, es sei Zeit, dass die Toten ihre Toten begraben."

Die Vernichtungslager werden nicht gezeigt

Am Ende wird A. O. Scott noch schärfer: Laut diesem Film, schreibt er, gebe es Gute und Schlechte auf allen Seiten. "Aber die Andeutung, dass die Nazis im Europa der Vierzigerjahre nicht die einzigen Bösen waren, wird durch die mangelnde Neigung des Films untergraben, das Schlimmste zu zeigen, was die Nazis getan haben. Wir sehen, wie Juden von örtlichen ukrainischen Milizen unter Aufsicht der SS massakriert werden, aber ,Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter' lässt – trotz seiner geographischen Weite und der Liebe zum militärischen Details – die Vernichtungslager außen vor."

Diese Auslassung habe den Effekt, dass die Unschuld der Hauptfiguren zumindest teilweise wiederhergestellt werde. Die Auffassung, gewöhnliche Deutsche seien von den Nazis betrogen worden und hätten nichts vom Ausmaß der Verbrechen gewusst, werde von diesem Film weitergetragen; so würden letztlich auch die Deutschen zu Opfern Hitlers erklärt. Dies sei "troubling", verstörend.

"Der Künstler, der Intellektuelle und der Jude" werden laut A. O. Scott in diesem Film bestraft: "für Liederlichkeit, Schwäche und Naivität" – sie alle müssten extreme moralische Kompromisse eingehen. "Die keuschen Arier, die sich selbst zum Opfer darbringen, also der Leutnant und die Krankenschwester, sind die Helden des Films, obwohl auch sie Schuld tragen – in einem deutschen Film aus dem Jahre 1943 wäre das nicht anders gewesen. Dieses Mal lautet die Moral, sie hätten zu guter Letzt verdient, dass die Welt ihnen verzeiht."

"Selbstmitleidige Dritte-Reichs-Jugend"

Mit etwas gröberem Handwerkszeug als A. O. Scott rückt Ben Kenigsberg auf der Unterhaltungswebseite "AVClub" dem deutschen Film zu Leibe, aber im Grunde kommt er zu demselben Ergebnis. "Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter", schreibt er, serviere "fünf Stunden selbstmitleidiger Dritte-Reichs-Jugend". Gewiss, der Film sei kein Propagandamachwerk, der Zuschauer werde nicht aufgefordert, die Nazis zu beklatschen.

"Aber indem die Hauptfiguren von jeder Ideologie oder Schuldhaftigkeit ausgenommen werden, was sehr praktisch ist, fühlt sich ,Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter' weniger wie eine Abrechnung als wie ein Wegducken an: Ja, eure Großeltern waren vielleicht Nazis – aber sie hätten auch diese netten Leute sein können." Die fünf Hauptfiguren seien allesamt im Herzen gute Menschen.

"Kein Zweifel, es gab viele Deutsche, die glaubten, dass der Krieg sinnlos war, die darum kämpften, das Überleben ihrer jüdischen Nachbarn zu ermöglichen, die ihren Nazi-Oberen Widerworte gaben. Aber indem ,Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter' sich auf diese Perspektive beschränkt, wird daraus eine seltsame Haltung zu den Schrecken des Krieges: Werden Sie Zeuge von fünf Stunden voller Schlachten und ihren Konsequenzen, deren Lektion lautet, dass keiner etwas gesehen hat."

"Wie der Totalitarismus alles verdirbt"

Gut fand den Film allerdings Ella Taylor, die für die Webseite von "National Public Radio" schreibt. Sie vergleicht "Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter" mit der amerikanischen Fernsehserie "Band of Brothers", die von amerikanischen Soldaten auf dem europäischen Schlachtfeld handelt. Im Kern gehe es Philip Kadelbach und Stephan Kolditz um zwei Fragen: "Wer wusste davon?" und "Wozu das alles?"

Um die erste Frage drückten die Filmemacher sich herum, aber die zweite gingen sie dafür frontal an. Dieser Film "zeigt wie der Totalitarismus alles verdirbt, was in seinem Weg liegt, auch die individuelle Verantwortung, und wie er einen widerwärtigen Raum schafft, in dem Sadisten ebenso wie Konformisten aufblühen und jede Regel des Krieges brechen können" (gemeint ist wohl: jede Regel des Kriegsvölkerrechts).

Der Kommunismus, so Ella Taylor, erscheine in diesem Film wenig besser als der Faschismus. "Darum sollte dieser erfrischende Film nicht nur in Deutschland Pflicht sein, wo ihn sieben Millionen Menschen sahen, die heiß darüber diskutierten, sondern überall dort, wo der Absolutismus regiert."
http://www.welt.de/kultur/medien/articl ... elden.html

I still need to identify who those "critics" were, which would conveniently write in English.

Addendum.
OK, there is a wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_War
Note that they change the entry and that there is a discussion page.

I was lucky to get one of those "critiques" here:

A History Lesson, Airbrushed
‘Generation War’ Adds a Glow to a German Era
By A. O. SCOTT JAN. 14, 2014

“Generation War,” which was broadcast as a mini-series on German television last year, is perhaps more interesting as an artifact of the present than as a representation of the past. As the Second World War slips from living memory, as Germany asserts its dominant role in Europe with increasing confidence, and as long-suppressed information emerges from the archives of former Eastern bloc countries, the war’s cultural significance for Germans has shifted.

Coming after the silence of the ’50s and early ’60s and the angry reckonings of the ’70s and ’80s, “Generation War,” emotionally charged but not exactly anguished, represents an attempt to normalize German history. Its lesson is that ordinary Germans — “Our Mothers, Our Fathers,” in the original title — were not so different from anyone else, and deserve the empathy and understanding of their grandchildren.

Tom Schilling in video Video: Clip: 'Generation War'JAN. 14, 2014
This may, in the abstract, seem fair enough, but the film slips into a strange, queasy zone between naturalism and nostalgia. In effect, it is a plea on behalf of Germans born in the early 1920s for inclusion in a global Greatest Generation, an exercise in selective memory based on the assumption that it’s time to let bygones be bygones.

Launch media viewer
From left, Katharina Schüttler, Volker Bruch, Miriam Stein, Tom Schilling and Ludwig Trepte in “Generation War,” a film that tries to burnish the reputations of young Germans in the early 1940s. Music Box Films
Sensationally popular in Germany — decidedly less so in Poland, where its depiction of anti-Nazi partisans as unkempt anti-Semites provoked public outrage — “Generation War” tries to assimilate the unfathomable barbarity of the years between the invasion of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin into the conventions of popular entertainment. Part melodrama, part combat action movie, the film, written by Stefan Kolditz and directed by Philipp Kadelbach, chronicles the lives of five friends who are presented as more or less typical young Germans.

We first see them together in 1941, after closing time in a Berlin bar, smoking cigarettes, drinking Champagne and dancing to the forbidden strains of American jazz. Two brothers, Wilhelm (Volker Bruch, who provides some voice-over narration) and Friedhelm (Tom Schilling), are about to leave for the Eastern front. Wilhelm, dashing in his lieutenant’s uniform, is confident that Stalin’s armies will be vanquished by Christmas. He is in love with Charlotte, nicknamed Charly (Miriam Stein), soon to report for duty as a field hospital nurse. She feels the same way about him, but neither has told the other.

Their friends Greta (Katharina Schüttler) and Viktor (Ludwig Trepte) are far less shy, though their relationship is illegal, since Viktor is Jewish. But even an ominous visit from a Gestapo officer — who confiscates their records and warns Greta about the “race shame” of dating a Jew — cannot quell the group’s youthful optimism. That will take a genocidal war.

Mr. Kadelbach, the director, has clearly studied the work of Steven Spielberg. He crosscuts deftly between scenes, alternating moments of tense violence with stretches of solitude and tenderness. Battles are staged with “Saving Private Ryan”-like intensity and precision, and the whole narrative — shifting from the mud and ice of Russia in winter to the wheat fields of Ukraine, the forests of Poland and the streets of the German capital — has a sweep and a vigor that recall “Gone With the Wind” and other old Hollywood costume epics.

The characters are sharply drawn (by a lively and uniformly excellent cast), their contrasting temperaments providing a pleasing, if not terribly challenging, sense of human variety. Greta is high-strung and passionate. Viktor is wary, excitable and perpetually unshaven. Friedhelm is timid and bookish, a mama’s boy whose stiff-necked father favors the manly and decisive Wilhelm. He and Charly, fair-haired and upright, are like Nazi propaganda posters brought to life and softened up for modern, liberal audiences. They exude a quiet pride in their own virtue.

None of the five friends are Nazi zealots, and none can see the catastrophe that is coming. Viktor’s father, who served in the German Army in World War I and whose tailor shop was destroyed during the state-sponsored anti-Jewish vandalism of Kristallnacht, believes that his fellow Germans will come to their senses “once they see how much they need us.”

Charly and Wilhelm are the most overtly patriotic, but this is more passive acceptance of the reality they have grown up with than the fervent embrace of ideology. They are happy to participate in their country’s heroic destiny and only gradually come to realize that this will involve the murder of innocents, the betrayal of comrades and the destruction of their own ideals.

Both of them witness — and do — terrible things, as do the others. Friedhelm, the most sensitive of the group, is transformed into a cold and effective killer. Greta, having begun an affair with the Gestapo officer who took her music, becomes one of the Reich’s top recording stars. Viktor, escaping from a train bound for Auschwitz, takes up with a group of fighters loyal to the Polish Home Army.

What happens to all of them is absorbing, exciting and sometimes very moving. The moral choices they face are credibly agonizing, even if the plot turns are sometimes a bit forced. (There are only so many times one movie can fool the audience into thinking a major character is dead.) As television drama, “Generation War” is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.

This has less to do with factual accuracy than with the way facts are shaped, juxtaposed and given emotional weight. The evil of the Nazis is hardly denied, but it is mainly localized within a few cartoonishly sadistic SS and Gestapo commanders, who are nearly as cruel to regular German soldiers as they are to Jews and Russians. There is also an element of moral relativism in the way the film portrays the Polish resistance, whose members hate Jews as much as the Germans, but with worse manners, and the bestial, rampaging members of the Red Army, who have no manners at all.

There is good and bad on all sides, a dash of mercy mixed into the endless violence. But the suggestion that the Nazis were not the only bad guys in Eastern Europe in the early 1940s is undermined by the film’s disinclination to show the very worst of what the Nazis did. We see massacres of Jews by local militias in Ukraine under the supervision of the SS, but “Generation War,” for all its geographical range and military detail, steers clear of the death camps.

This omission has the effect of at least partly restoring the innocence of the characters and of perpetuating the notion that ordinary Germans were duped by the Nazis and ignorant of the extent of their crimes — that they were as much Hitler’s victims as his accomplices and did not know what he was doing. They also suffered, after all, but there is something troubling about how the filmmakers apportion this suffering.

The artist, the intellectual and the Jew are all punished, for wantonness, weakness and naïveté, and pushed into extreme states of moral compromise. The chaste, self-sacrificing Aryans, the lieutenant and the nurse, though they are not without guilt, are the heroes of the story, just as they would have been in a German film made in 1943. The moral this time around is that they have, at long last, earned the world’s forgiveness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/movie ... n-era.html

[Cozz88]

When i saw the scene in this so called good show when it showed an SD Officer shooting a jew in the head i lost interest

[onetruth]

Hi Barrington James,
Actually the German soldiers knew very well why they died and the Hitler government, including his generals tried to avoid war. The German general staff was particularly opposed to any kind of war even against the Czechs but the war was forced on Germany (read Hoggan's the The Enforced War). The BS that is taught in the history lesson in our schools is to perpetuate the concept that it was Germany's, fault that it came to war.

mmm it must have something to do with to fact that Germany invaded :

-Poland (1939)
-Denmark (1940)
-Norway (1940)
-The Netherlands (1940)
-Belgium (1940)
-Luxembourg (1940)
-Yugoslavia (1941)
-Greece (1941)
-The Soviet Union (1941)
-Italy (1943)
-Hungary (1944)

All this according to you indicates that the Nazi leadership desired peace.

~

[blacksmith]

Hey Onetruth,

Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses. Next thing you are going to tell me that Japan surprized the Yanks with the Pearlharbour attack. One more thing, churchill made it quite clear he wanted to destroy Germany, Hitler or no Hitler. The man was a blood thirsty idiot. So may I suggest you go and read the book I suggested in the first place. I did not say you had to believe it but at least it will give a little light into the darkness of your brain.

Blacksmith

[onetruth]

So may I suggest you go and read the book I suggested in the first place. I did not say you had to believe it but at least it will give a little light into the darkness of your brain.

Blacksmith

Allow me to ignore your suggestion as your insult. And yes Japan did launch a surprise attack on pearl Harbour but don't let me stop you from re writing history.

[Hannover]

onetruth, enough of your Amateur Night nonsense.

For starters:

- Britain invaded Norway (the Germans found them there when they arrived) , Iceland, Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Faroe Islands which were territory of Denmark.
Of course all of the British Empire was due to invasions.

- USSR invaded Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, invaded & annexed parts of Romania, invaded Iran, invaded northern Norway and the Danish island of Bornholm.

- Poland invaded and annexed parts of Czechoslovakia, held large parts of German territory, was engaged in atrocities against German civilians.

- Belgium and The Netherlands claimed to be "neutral". In reality, they had been assisting the Allies in their preparation for an attack upon Germany, and they allowed their air space to be used by the French & British.

- And then there is the US Empire, the French Empire, both accomplished via massive invasions.

- Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack to the US leadership. It was only a surprise to the US troops who were allowed to be killed.
By way of intercepted Japanese messages the US knew weeks ahead of time that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, this fact is now in the mainstream.

This information is easy to find, educate yourself.

Hannover

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The 'holocaust' storyline is one of the most easily debunked narratives ever contrived. That is why those who question it are arrested and persecuted. That is why violent, racist, & privileged Jewish supremacists demand censorship. What sort of truth is it that denies free speech and the freedom to seek the truth? Truth needs no protection from scrutiny.

The tide is turning.

[blacksmith]

Thank you Hanover for putting an end to ignorance. Beautifully expressed and in a very simplified form so we all could understand what really happened. I love the Schoppenhauer quote especially. Brilliant. blacksmith.

[onetruth]

- Pearl Harbor was not a surprise attack to the US leadership. It was only a surprise to the US troops who were allowed to be killed.
By way of intercepted Japanese messages the US knew weeks ahead of time that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, this fact is now in the mainstream.

This is NOT mainstream fact as you claim, What exactly do you mean it is mainstream ? Is it taught in schools and universities as a history fact?

You are here by challenged to prove that your lame conspiracy theory about Americans allowing most of their fleet in the pacific to be destroyed as well as 2500 to die is considered " mainstream "

~