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In Reply to: Stalag 17 - The swrongest contestand for the worse, the most offensive, the most brainless piece of shit that I have seen in decades posted by Victor Khomenko on April 18, 2000 at 07:28:08:
..I'll be the first to admit that it has its hollywood moments but this depiction isn't as far off as you suggest. The conditions for Western (read American & British) POWs were actually quite good compared to those of Russian POWs who were rather routinely sent to forced labor or concentration camps if not simply shot on the spot.Not all POW camps were created equal by the way. I believe the camp in the movie was for US airmen was it not? US & British airmen were enterred by the Luftwaffe rather than the SS. Why? Well I guess having an air force look after members of another air force seemed logical to the Germans though it seems quite odd in retrospect. So while concentration camps were run by the notoriuosly heartless SS, most US & British POWs (who were mostly airmen since the war on the western front was waged primarily from the air until the D Day landing in 1944) were held in camps run by the German air force. The result? General adherance to the Geneva convention for those prisoners.
In fact, until the last few years of the war when the US & British bombing campaign began to tell on Germany itself, the POWs and Luftwaffe camps in which allied airmen were kept had a rather open one upmanship game of escape & recapture going in which many airmen escaped from the camps with fake papers & civilian clothes only to be recapured as many as 3 or 4 times! More than a few actually made it back to England with the help of the French resistance to rejoin the war. As the air war dragged on and civilian casualties mounted and German hatred of the aircrews grew, this policy turned to one of intolerance & retribution - but still not piles of bones & dentures, ovens and mass graves for Western prisoners. I know that compared to the experience of Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans this might all seem a bit idealistically surreal - it is none the less true. And please dont get me wrong - I'm no Hitler apologist - I am well aware of the millions of jews and Russians the Third Reich put to death mercilessly. The historical fact however is that the German treatment of American & British POWs held fairly well to the standards of the Geneva Convention while their barbaric behavior towards other combatants and many Jews and Poles did not.
For whatever set of reasons, the Germans never waged the war of extermination towards its enemies to the West that it did those towards the East (or towards those members of its own society it deemed undesireable).
joe
> The conditions for Western (read American & British) POWs were
> actually quite good compared to those of Russian POWs who were
> rather routinely sent to forced labor or concentration camps if not
> simply shot on the spot.I've read that this difference was due to the simple fact - Geneva Conventions required the country of POWs citizenship to pay the other side (i.e. those who captured them) for their keeping expenses (food etc.). US and Great Britain did this. Stalin declared that every Soviet soldier was fighting until the last drop of his blood, so those who got themselves captured by enemy were declared the traitors (and the fact of their very existence was declined), and Soviet government refused to pay for their keeping.
...ultimately had more to do with the professed Nazi fight for aryan ethnic purity and Hitlers obsession against Communism. The behaviors German troops engaged in on the Eastern Front itself (as per Hitlers edict for how war in Russia was to be waged) defied human characterization. It wasnt war as much as an all out attempt to erase all life from the Russian territory they conquered. Military as well as civilian.Of course Stalins treatment of repatriated prisoners of war was not exactly a human interest story as you say.
joe
but...
you could have simply let Victor have his moment. As you noted,
he has just cause.
..more like trying to give a historical context that Vic apparently doesnt have. I actually agree with his sentiments...joe
***..more like trying to give a historical context that Vic apparently doesnt have. I actually agree with his sentiments...In fact, I am *generally* familiar with the differences that existed. However, I shall submit to you, that splashing mud at the camp commendant was not too common even in the most forgiving of those forgiving camps.
The problem, as I see it, is that of generalization. When covering historically significant events, a particular duty is on the creator. He must realize that his work can be, and likely will be, used as a document to some degree. That means that one should not concentrate on atypical that goes completely agains the "typical", without making the existance of that "typical" known.
When talking about the war in Europe, that "typical" was NOT playing practical jokes with German soldiers. It was not boredom - it was horror.
One would be ill-advised to make a movie about, say, the SS concentration camp guards playing with their cats and decorating their apartments. When we say "SS" we mean something other that a cat-lover. We mean something much more "typical".
Again, all this would not mean much had there been an alternate way of learning the truth - the horrible truth in that case. The way it was presented in that work creates a rather innocent, boring, if you will, view of that most atrocious war.
I see where you are coming from, but I suspect that the people who made this movie were being true to the US experience in their own way. Witin its narrow context (US POWs) the comments I have seen from American prisoners to charcaterize their experience was precisely, to take your own word, one of "boredom". They were not terrorized by their captors - which was one of the reasons the US was so I'll prepared for what happened to POWs in Korea, where the US simply expected that their prisoners would be treated according to the Geneva convention as had already been the case with the Germans. (Why they forgot the lesson of what the Japanese did is beyond me.)In that regard I think you put the film makers on the horns of a dilemma here - do they tell a story of prisoners sitting out years of war in tolerable and immensly boring conditions with the occaisional escape (definitely accurate to history)? Or transform the pic into a concentration camp picture with brutality that didnt exist in the US POW situation? In either case you must expect that contrievances will be added to make a movie that will engage an audience. But which do you choose as a starting point? Which is propoganda and which is truth in that context?
I suspect that expecting any film to capture the full breadth of experience and destructiveness (both human and material) of war is asking too much of any one film - particularly in the case of a war of the scope & brutality of WW2. But who knows, maybe someone will do it someday...
joe
he has all the context he needs ;)
no problemo, he has strong feelings. Agree with most of it,
but definitely not Nicole Kidman. Got a fatal weakness for redheads...
Redhead shreadhead... I don't know if you have heard, but she was so uninvolving during the hot scenes of the Eyes, that Kubric had to hire the sex consultunts. They tought the Hollywood's "hottest" couple how to behave medium-hot on screen.
My dad was in WW2--ship's dentist on the USS Indianapolis--yes, the ship Quint talks about in Jaws. My father-in-law was in WW2--signal corps in Europe; he was in the group that first entered Auschwitz.My point is that I BELIEVE WW2 happened, it has a contextual reality for me. My generation (I'm 43) is probably the last with a direct connection to that awful war. I remember Collier's Illustrated History of WW2, seeing those pictures of bodies stacked like cordwood,when I was 6 of 7. How many growing up today believe in the scale of such horrors? We hear of aberrant rage every day in the schools and on the highways, but hearing, in today's world of CNN and the net, of WW2, the idea of such a massive bureaucracy of genocide seems laughable.
Victor's disgust is palpable, and I think, justified. Stalag 17 (and its seeming offspring, the even sicker Hogan's Heroes) and even The Great Escape presented a whitewashed war, one reduced to Little Rascals-like hijinks. My father's generation was not well served by films such as these which, curiously, were usually made by them. I don't understand it, didn't even in my rebellious teen years (but then, I started reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was eight). Just another of life's mysteries.
Cheers, Bill.
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