Were there any good Germans during WWII? Over the past two decades, the odds have narrowed. “No serious scholar has attempted to argue that ordinary German men did not become mass killers,” Holocaust historian Christopher R. Browning wrote recently, “or that the Wehrmacht—the institution shaping the experience and behavior of by far the largest groups of Germans in World War II—was not heavily implicated in Nazi criminality.” At one time it was thought that most German civilians were ignorant of the deportations and mass murder, but that too has been shown to be false. And as scholar Wendy Lower has most recently chronicled, hundreds of thousands of German women were enthusiastic participants in the German colonization of Eastern Europe and its attendant horrors.
I had to keep reminding myself of these ugly facts as I watched Generation War, the blockbuster German TV miniseries that is now making the rounds of art-house cinemas in the United States as a two-part, nearly five-hour film. Called Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter (“Our Mothers; Our Fathers”) when it aired on German public television in three parts last March, the series aims to depict what the war was like for average Germans by following the interconnected stories of five friends in their early twenties from June 1941 until the fall of Berlin in May 1945.
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From Tablet Magazine
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