Film: Germans react to Wehrmacht atrocities

Most Germans today will acknowledge the wartime atrocities of Hitler’s Waffen SS units, but many insist that the regular army Wehrmacht soldiers fought and behaved honorably.

It’s not difficult to understand the rationale. In the light of overwhelming evidence, Germans, like Americans after Mai Lai or Abu Ghraib, can confess to the brutality and sadism of some of their “atypical” countrymen in uniform.

But to admit that one’s caring father or grandfather, whose photo rests on the mantelpiece, enjoyed massacring helpless civilians is so wrenching a thought as to mobilize every psychological self-defense mechanism.

These defenses were put to the test in 1999, when the Wehrmacht Exhibition opened in Munich, the cradle of Nazism, and went on to tour major German cities in the following five years.

Included in the exhibit were photos and letters that ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers on the Russian front had sent to the folks at home, much as tourists might mail pictures of exotic landmarks and colorful natives.

But these pictures and film snippets showed grinning German soldiers posing with the lynched bodies of civilians or playfully cutting off the beards of Jews or mowing down groups of naked women.

Wherever it went, the exhibit triggered demonstrations, not only by skinheads but also respectable burghers, who refused to believe what they had seen and claimed the photos and footage had been manufactured by Russian propagandists.

In “The Unknown Soldier,” German director Michael Verhoeven sees the exhibit as a litmus test of German willingness to confront the past, a theme he examined earlier in “The White Rose” (1982) and “The Nasty Girl” (1990).

Verhoeven shows some excruciating material from the exhibit itself, but the film focuses mainly on the reactions of German historians, veterans and ordinary citizens to the indictment of widespread national guilt.

In choosing the film’s title, Verhoeven played with an incendiary double meaning. The Unknown Soldier is, of course, among every nation’s most revered icons, but in this case, the title also refers to the unknown crimes of the German fallen and surviving veterans.

Besides its emotional impact, the film cites some facts from German archives well worth noting.

While we tend to link the Holocaust to Auschwitz and other death camps, some 40 percent of victims were killed in individual and mass shootings.

Among some 4 million Russian prisoners of war taken by the German Wehrmacht in the early stages of the war, and who never returned, half were killed almost instantly and the other half died within nine months. Even here, Jewish POWs were separated from their comrades and shot first.

However, the film’s most damning indictment of the Wehrmacht is that in all Nazi-occupied areas, the regular army’s officers were in command and had the authority to support or block the SS death squads. With very few exceptions, Wehrmacht commanders gave the SS the green light.

“The Unknown Soldier” opens Oct. 19 at the Grande 4-Plex in downtown Los Angeles.