Personally, I’ve always found it a bit difficult to find a hero on the German side of things, no matter how ignorant they were of the evils to which they gave their implicit approval. The film seems to be asking the world for forgiveness by showing the human side of Germany.ĭid the film succeed? I suppose it depends upon who you ask, where they were during the war, if their parents were gassed like sub-human vermin, or what flavor of history books they have read. Any effort to ‘normalize’ Germany’s war effort, to humanize the stereotypical image of the “bloodthirsty Jew-hating Kraut,” or to put a face on the people who fought for Hitler’s personal grudges, is seen by many non-Germans as tip-toeing around the great many warty elephants in the room who are wearing Nazi arm bands and SS Death heads. The film succeeded in opening the conversation. The effort of this film was to get the Germans talking about the war, a topic that they did not speak much about in the immediate post war era, and generally spoke of with great hostility more recently. As one reviewer stated, this film “ represents an attempt to normalize German history.” It says, “these were our mothers and fathers, normal, regular people worthy of empathy.” Indeed, the direct translation of the German name for the film, Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter, is Our Mothers, Our Fathers. It seeks to make the war less about Nazis and more about average Germans. This was a German TV series that aired in Germany and Austria in March 2013. This is the great effort of Generation War (as it is named in the US).
After the war, when even the most adamant of German denial was shattered, and the most ardent of true believers shamed, the most zealous apologists silenced, it would be very difficult for a survivor to look the next generation in the face and say with Teutonic pride, “Yeah, I did that.” A toast to meeting here again soon The more one knew, the less worthy it became.
As the war progressed, it became more and more evident that the German cause was the Nazi cause, and that cause wasn’t very worthy. If they fought with a clean conscience in the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, or Luftwaffe, then those German enlisted grunts were fighting for the Fatherland and certainly the national pride stirred up by Hitler’s wild monologues and national propaganda.
“Father? What did you do during the war?” This is the question that WWII German fathers did not desire to answer.
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