Change Your Image
Kraxx
Reviews
So war der deutsche Landser (1955)
different point of view then nowadays documentaries
Born in '78 it was my first "close to the war"-documentary I have seen and first my feelings were quite ambivalent as it wasn't common for me to have an inside-look in the inner life of German soldiers.
So, first thing you notice are sentences we wouldn't call political correct, but to put them into perspective: they are far from downplaying the role of the Wehrmacht. But the very interesting thing is, that its not commentated from an "extern" point of few, as I was used from all others WW II-Documentaries but it was a look from the intern of the German "Landser". So the speaker always refers to "we" addressing the viewers, where at least the bulk of the male Germans was actively involved in the war ("thanks" to Hitlers Volkssturm even the elder and small kids).
But this kind of commentating combined with the rather low quality of the pictures shown gives a damn authentic self-image of German WW II-fighters. And for that it was one of the most interesting documentaries I have seen.
Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage (2005)
didn't convince me
Sorry, nice try but really missed the point. Specially the trial speech of Sophie Scholl was that pathetic that i immediately wanted to turn off. To make it worse, all confessed Nazis by-standing the trial looking uncomfortably at this speech mad me turn my feeling to the movie from neutral to negative: If it really had been that easy to get through Nazi-indoktrination and -ideology, there surely would have been a much wider resistance movement and a much smaller circle of hardcore Nazis, prefering to shoot themselves at the end of the war, believing that thats the better solution then living in a world without the Führer.
But paradoxically the best and the worst aspects of this film lie in the same scene: The behavior of the judge during the trial, yelling and enjoying himself shouting ego-maniacal accusations not for a process of truthfinding but for himself and the bystanders is a highly true picture of what processes against the "Volksfeinde" had been in Nazi-Germany.
But all in all just a 4.