World War II films recently viewed

In Hitler's Berlin bunker, early on the morning of April 29, 1945, der Führer and Eva Braun were wed. At about 3:30 in the afternoon the next day, each of them bit into thin glass vials of cyanide, and Adolph also shot himself in the head, just to make sure. Their bodies were wrapped in a blanket and carried into the garden of the chancellery, doused with gasoline, and burned.
    Goings-on in the bunker during the final ten days of the Nazi regime are dramatically portrayed in the extraordinary 2004 German film, Der Untergang (Downfall). Its factual basis includes the published memoir of Hitler's 22-year-old secretary, Traudl Junge, who was in the bunker throughout these days until a day or two after her boss's suicide, when she finally left and wended her way through the invading Soviet troops.
    For its excellence as cinema, including Bruno Ganz's masterful performance as Hitler, and its credible (if still unbelievable) look into the bunker in those final days, I recommend this film, too, as must-see.
    The day after Hitler's suicide, his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and his wife Magda had morphine administered to their six children and (as the movie makers chose to portray it) Magda herself pressed each sleeping child's jaw to crush an ampoule of cyanide between its teeth. (This action is shown in heart-stopping deliberation for each of the six children.) Then the parents walked out into the garden and silently faced each other. He was dressed in his official regalia, she wore one of her fine dresses. Joseph raised his pistol and shot Magda in the heart, then shot himself in the right temple. Underlings burned their bodies too, but perhaps not so well as Hitler and Eva's bodies had been burned....
    At any rate, the equally excellent 2005 documentary, Das Goebbels-Experiment (whose narration consists almost entirely of Kenneth Branagh's reading from Goebbels's diaries), ends with photographs of the burned bodies of the entire family laid out on adjoining tables. You can see on Goebbels's right leg the charred brace he wore for a deformity, the result either of club foot or osteomyelitis. In this film, Branagh narrates a statement of Magda's that she didn't want her children to survive into a world in which National Socialism would no longer exist. (I have subsequently learned of testimony that she'd indicated as early as a month before the end that she didn't want her children to live to hear that their father had been a mass murderer, and she hoped they would have a better life through reincarnation.)

The 2006 German TV miniseries, Dresden, had a week before reminded us of the fire-bombing of that German city by the British and American air forces in February 1945. Perhaps 135,000 people died there in those three nights of Allied bombing, which was done as a strategic favor for Josef Stalin, an even greater mass murderer than Hitler.
    Dresden is the locale of Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
    The bonus material for Der Untergang pointed out that a million people had starved to death in Leningrad during the Nazis' siege of that city in 1941-42.
    Die Fälscher [The Counterfeiters] is a 2007 German film based on the true story of master counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff's being allowed to live, and live relatively plushly, in concentration camps in return for helping the Nazis "create" millions of pounds of British currency for their war effort. When his camp was liberated, its general population at first assumed Smolianoff and his cohorts must be Nazis and almost killed them, but they were offered food and drink and relented. An excellent film in its writing, editing, acting.
    The very next night we watched the oddly romantic 2006 film Zwartboek [Black Book], which centers around the expropriation of wealth from Dutch Jews by members of the Dutch establishment (including the Dutch resistance movement). The Jews were decoyed to a place they had been told they could flee the country, then machine-gunned, their bodies looted then buried in mass graves.
    And (as we learned Friday night from the 2007 documentary, "Nanking") in December 1937, Japanese soldiers had committed tens of thousands of rapes (often followed by the victim's being butchered by bayonet) in Nanking during the first weeks of their occupation of that Chinese city. About 200,000 civilians and 90,000 prisoners of war died there as well.
    When it comes to numbers, there's those six million Jews who were shamed, robbed, beaten, slashed, shot, lynched, starved, gassed, "medically" experimented on...murdered.

And let's not forget that we have treated black folks similarly here, as my recent reading of Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 autobiographical book, Blood Done Sign My Name, reminded me. White supremacy has been American as well as Nazi. And the election of Barack Obama doesn't prove that we're not still infected by it.