Mick Hartley

From the Times:

Two decades after the end of the war, diplomats and civil servants were horrified by what they saw as a flood of “anti-German” films and television series that slandered the Wehrmacht soldiers as villains.

“You see them plundering, committing arson and murdering women and children,” the West German outpost in Caracas wrote in a cable to the foreign ministry, adding that it was quietly lobbying to have Combat! taken off the airwaves.

This was part of a clandestine international campaign to try to suppress unflattering depictions of the Third Reich’s war machine, which is detailed in a landmark historical study of the postwar West German government.

It was an era in which Germans still widely believed in the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht”, which maintained that the Nazi military and its generals were mere soldiers doing their jobs and innocent of war crimes. Where atrocities had been committed, the theory held, the Nazi dictatorship and its “party soldiers” in the SS were to blame.

Later scholarship demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case: the Wehrmacht had in fact committed numerous war crimes on its own initiative, including the massacres of thousands of prisoners of war, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the rape of as many as ten million women….

This belief was so entrenched that West German officials were outraged by postwar films that shed light on the Third Reich’s crimes against humanity.

Some of these incidents are already notorious: in 1956, for example, the West German interior ministry and embassy in Paris tried to have Night and Fog, the French director Alain Resnais’ award-winning documentary about the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps, withdrawn from the programme at the Cannes film festival.

Jutta Braun, a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, has uncovered evidence that these efforts were much more extensive than previously known, and lasted until well into the 1970s.

Sifting through the archives of the German Federal Press Office (BPA), Braun found officials had not only maintained a list of “anti-German propaganda” in war films but also used underhand means to try to get them pulled from cinemas and television schedules.

Its targets were numerous: not only Combat! and Night and Fog but also other popular American series such as The Rat Patrol, which told the story of American and British soldiers trying to sabotage Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and Jericho, which followed British, American and French spies behind enemy lines.

In 1965 the West German embassy in Washington, led by an ambassador who had previously headed the anti-American propaganda section in the Nazi German foreign ministry, went so far as to blame “the type of Jewish liberal who has great influence in the modern communications industry” for the tide of “hate-films” that had added murderous German soldiers to the pantheon of “bad guys”.

Amazing. And for decades everyone would have unquestioningly shared their horror that such a sentiment could be voiced. Not any more, though..