‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’: the Representation of Germans in British Second World War Films

Robert Murphy Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans, For they’re civilised, when all is said and done. Though they gave us science, culture, art, and music, to excess, They also gave us two world wars and Dr Rudolph Hess. Let’s be meek to them And turn the other cheek to them, And try to arouse their latent sense of fun. Let’s give them full air parity, And treat the rats with charity, But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun! (Noel Coward, 1943)

Given the horrors of the Second World War – the bombing of civilians, the concentration

camps, the brutal occupations, the losses suffered by merchant shipping – the representation

of Germans in most British films about the war is surprisingly mild. And though this changes

over time, there are continuities as well as radical reassessments. Films made during the war

are bound by patriotic agendas that determine how the enemy could be represented. Films

made in the immediate post-war period exult in telling stories of missions and exploits which

would have been too secret or too sensitive to reveal while the war was being fought, but

their representations of Germans were affected by the fact that post-war Germany was a solid

and reliable ally in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Later World War II films often

revert to portraying Nazis as stereotyped villains in what are essentially adventure stories,

though they are frequently balanced against more positively represented Germans. As the war

receded into history, new generations have uncovered more private, small-scale stories where

the perspective is not necessarily a British one and German society is looked at from within.

Anglo-German relations were close throughout most of the nineteenth century, while

France was perceived as the common enemy until the Entente Cordiale of 1904. Queen

Victoria’s husband was Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, and their eldest daughter had married

Prussian Crown Prince Frederick, who for a brief period became Emperor of a united

Germany. It was only after his death in 1888 and the accession of his son, the militaristic

Kaiser Wilhelm II, that relations between Britain and Germany began to sour. The First

World War brought a rapid and virulent switch of sympathies, and the British film industry

enthusiastically encouraged jingoistic xenophobia, representing Germans as brutal, ignorant

and merciless. Films such as In the Clutches of the Hun (1915), The Bells of Rheims (1915)

and War’s Grim Reality (1915) showed German soldiers raping women and murdering

children. As news of the reality of life in the trenches seeped back, these fantasies were

superseded by patriotically slanted but factually based newsreel compilations such as The

Battle of the Somme (1916) and The Battle of the Marne and the Advance of the Tanks

(1917), which attracted large audiences eager for news of the war.

In the period between the wars, the predominant emotion in Britain was revulsion and

regret, together with a determination that such pointless slaughter should never happen again.

German soldiers make only fleeting appearances in the adaptation of R. C. Sheriff’s

Journey’s End (1929) and Anthony Asquith’s Tell England (where the Turks are the enemy),

and they are the heroes of the Hollywood adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s anti-war

novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). An understandable desire to avoid war at all

costs underpinned Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and, when he mournfully

informed listeners that ‘this country is now at war with Germany’ on Sunday 3 September

1939, it was a sad acknowledgement of failure rather than a belligerent call to arms.

Good and Bad Germans

Relations between the British and German film industry had been close from the mid-1920s.

The enterprising young producer Michael Balcon established good relations with German

production companies, and his protégé Alfred Hitchcock had made his first two features in

German studios. The prestigious German director E. A. Dupont was lured to Britain to work

for British International Pictures, and when the international market for silent films was

swept away by the advent of talking pictures, BIP responded by making ‘multi-lingual’ films

with the same director, sets and crew but different French, German and English casts.

Nazification of the German film industry not only put an end to co-operation but caused the

expulsion of numerous Jewish and left-wing inclined actors, directors and technicians to

Britain, France and Hollywood.

The British Board of Film Censorship’s prohibition of political controversy prevented

unfavourable depictions of Nazi Germany, though veiled criticisms were made in Balcon’s

1934 version of Jew Suss (remade as a vehicle for anti-Semitism in Germany in 1940) and

Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). The BBFC had discouraged Roy and John Boulting

from filming an adaptation of Ernst Toller’s Pastor Hall, a play built around the Lutheran

pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been arrested for his opposition to the Nazi regime. Once

war was declared, the embargo was lifted and the Boultings cast Wilfrid Lawson, an actor

best known for playing criminal masterminds in Edgar Wallace thrillers, as a saintly version

of Niemöller. In Toller’s play, he is imprisoned; in the film, he escapes but, after delivering a

passionate sermon denouncing Nazis as the enemies of God, he goes out to face his SS

executioners; in real life, Niemöller, a robust ex-U-boat commander who had initially

supported Hitler, survived internment in a concentration camp and became an outspoken

advocate of disarmament and a critic of the American war in Vietnam. In Britain, critics

greeted the film warmly, but in America the correspondent for the left-wing Documentary

News Letter reported that, although it had attracted some admiration,

[T]here is also a sneaking feeling that it is the old armless-baby-act of the last war being worked all over again [...] Jewish maltreatment, concentration camps, sadistic lashings are, one is afraid, old stuff, alien, slightly discredited, and do not command people’s deepest attention.1

Ironically, the propaganda excesses of the First World War had left a legacy which made

people sceptical about the very real atrocities being carried out in the Second. Subsequent

successful British films such as Night Train to Munich (1940) and Pimpernel Smith (1941),

which do have concentration camp episodes, defuse their critiques of Germany with jolly

japes and derring-do. In Night Train to Munich (which had originally been titled Gestapo), a

young man (Paul Henreid) is beaten up by concentration camp guards, but when he escapes

to London he reveals himself as an ardent Nazi; the ‘beating’ is in reality a show to establish

his credentials as a Czech patriot and win the confidence of a scientist who is abducted back

to captivity in Germany.

In the early months of the war, Ministry of Information policy had been to make a clear

distinction between good Germans and Nazis. In October 1939, an MOI pamphlet had gone

so far as to suggest that: ‘National Socialism began as an honourable experiment’ whose

leaders ‘started with many fine ideals and the German people had every right to expect that

they would be realised.’2 No British films afford any such sympathy for the fine ideals of

National Socialism, but Anthony Asquith’s Freedom Radio (1941), set in post-Anschluss

Vienna, does balance its Nazi bullies with freedom-loving Austrian men of principle. Clive

Brook’s Dr Roder is a society doctor (a throat specialist whose skills are appreciated by high-

ranking politicians who over-use their voices). Sickened by Nazi thuggery, such as the

murder of a priest, he teams up with a young engineer to set up a radio station to tell the

German and Austrian people the truth behind Nazi propaganda. He is eventually tracked

down and shot, along with his wife, who has abandoned her prestigious job as Hitler’s

‘director of pageantry’ to help him, but Roder has lit the torch of freedom and roused enough

of his compatriots to ensure that resistance will continue.

Louis MacNeice, writing in the Spectator, warned that the film’s attitude to the Nazi

menace was dangerously simplistic:

Propaganda either against the Nazis or to the German people must treat the Nazi revolution as something more than Machiavellian mumbo-jumbo if it is to make it comprehensible – and we must comprehend our enemy in order to combat him [...] we need more psychological subtlety and depth, a more imaginative grasp of that Nazi world which we ourselves – however indirectly – helped to create; it is a fantastic and horrible world, but it is not outside nature. (31 January 1941)3

In fact, an imaginative visual exploration of the Nazi world would have to wait until the

70s, when David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson produced The Double-Headed Eagle (1973)

and Swastika (1974), making brilliant use of archive footage. British films, both during and

after the war, tended to show Nazis as buffoons, sadists and brutes with no redeeming

features. And after the conquest of Western Europe, the threat of invasion, and the horrors of

the Blitz, official policy switched to blaming the whole German nation for the war (essential

to justify the growing bombing campaign against German towns and cities). Distinctions

between good and bad Germans looked too much like appeasement, and the myth of

widespread internal resistance to Hitler was abandoned. Michael Powell and Emeric

Pressburger, who had come under suspicion for showing a German U-boat officer (Eric

Portman) as dangerously resourceful in 49th Parallel (1941), attracted further condemnation

for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), structured around the long friendship

between ‘Colonel Blimp’ and a German officer, Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff. In their

pamphlet, entitled The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp (1943), E. W. and M. M.

Robson complained:

When one character is called ‘Sugar’ Candy and the other Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorf, it is pretty certain what the eventual relationship between the two will be. The one will be a big, fat lollipop of a walrus-whiskered Englishman and the other, the noble, handsome, awe-inspiring, able and wise German. The scales are weighted against poor old Blimp right away.

War Minister P. J. Grigg complained that ‘the thug element in the German make-up of the

German soldier is ignored and indeed, the suggestion is that if we were exactly like the

Germans, we should be better soldiers’. As for Churchill, he was so incensed by what he

thought was a scandalous attack on the British Army that he tried to stop the film being

made.4 But Powell and Pressburger, secure with a large budget provided by J. Arthur Rank,

were able to ignore such ill-informed attacks and assert that showing a good German helped

rather than hindered the film’s belligerently anti-Nazi message. As Kretschmar-Schuldorff

explains: ‘This time you’re fighting for your existence against the most devilish idea ever

created by the human brain, Nazism, and if you lose, there won’t be a return match next year,

or for 400 years.’

The Enemy is Among Us

One of the turning points for ‘Colonel Blimp’ is when he finds that his carefully rehearsed

broadcast, appealing for a return to the standards of gentlemanly warfare, has been dumped in

favour of one by the novelist J. B. Priestley. Throughout 1940, Priestley had broadcast a

series of radio ‘Postscripts’ commenting on the war and its effect on British society.

Although he was a fervent anti-Nazi, he was prepared to recognise a ‘bright face’ as well as a

‘dark face’ to Germany. But, he argued, if Germany’s bright face ‘which speaks to us of

beautiful music, profound philosophy, Gothic romance, young men and maidens wandering

through the enchanted forests’, could be eclipsed by the dark shadows cast by the Nazis,

could not the same thing happen to Britain (1940: 17)? The shock at how easily Western

Europe had fallen to Hitler’s armies and the willingness to collaborate so evident in Norway

and France suggested that ‘Nazis’ didn’t have to be German. Fear of a British fifth column

was understandable, given the series of pre-war concessions granted Hitler, and spies and

traitors figure prominently in a range of British films.

The shortage of good news in the early years of the war, the change of events which could

make a contemporary war film quickly outdated, and the need to keep up morale in times of

uncertainty and danger led film-makers to concentrate on comedies where established comics

joined up to do their bit or rooted out spies and fifth columnists. George Formby in Spare a

Copper (1940) and Let George Do It (1941), Arthur Askey in Band Waggon (1940) and Back

Room Boy (1942), Will Hay in The Ghost of St. Michael’s (1941) and The Black Sheep of

Whitehall (1942), and a rabble of cheeky evacuees in Front Line Kids (1942), Those Kids

from Town (1942) and Gert and Daisy’s Weekend (1942) cheerfully unmask plots and

conspiracies organised by traitors and spies played by actors already typecast as villains in

pre-war films. Motives beyond pecuniary ones are rarely provided, but, in comedy-thrillers,

genial characters often reveal themselves to be evil German agents beneath their smiling

exteriors. Paul Henreid in Night Train to Munich drops his friendly, attentive mask to explain

that he is no Czech patriot but a Sudetenland Nazi; John Mills, the amiable Spitfire pilot, who

has crash-landed near the home of a brilliant scientist in Cottage to Let (1941), is finally

exposed not only as a cad (he does his best to entice his pretty nurse from her dull but decent

boyfriend) but as a German spy. In both cases, rather too charming men become stiff and

coarse once their Germanic identity has been revealed. Similar transformations occur in the

two wartime films that deal seriously with German infiltration.

The Next of Kin (1942) was planned as a short training film for the Army. But Michael

Balcon at Ealing Studios decided that a film about careless talk costing lives would have

wide appeal as a feature film, and agreed with the War Office to add £50,000 to the £20,000

budget. Sequences, which show British forces suffering heavy casualties during a commando

raid on a naval base in France because the Germans have had prior warning of the attack,

caused consternation in government circles, and it was only after a screening before Army

top brass that it was finally allowed to be shown. The preceding section of the film, which

follows the activities of German agents gathering information about the planned raid, is also

disturbing. We see two agents being sent over to England to make contact with a network of

spies already in place.5 At their briefing, we learn only that both of them have spent long

periods in England, so we must assume that, despite being well-known British character

actors (John Chandos as a villain, Mervyn Johns as a stalwart Welshman), they are Germans

rather than British traitors. Number Sixteen (Chandos), disguised as a soldier, is unlucky

enough to encounter someone from the same regiment who can pick holes in his cover story,

and he is quickly arrested. Number Twenty-Three (Johns) arouses suspicion for asking too

many questions while posing as a bombed-out shopkeeper in ‘Westport’, where troops are

training for the commando raid, but he is able to evade capture and transform himself into a

down-on-his-luck labourer seeking work in a munitions factory. After successfully passing

over damaging information, he reappears at the end of the film as an unobtrusive passenger in

a railway-carriage, eavesdropping on the careless talk indulged in by comic duo Naunton

Wayne and Basil Radford.

Neither of the two agents displays any stereotyped ‘Germanic’ characteristics, but Number

Twenty-Three shows his loose moral standards by leafing through a book of Italian nude pin-

ups while he waits in a bookshop to see his contact, and he acts with unexpected savagery in

murdering the Dutch refugee whom the bookseller has blackmailed into giving away vital

information. The two planted agents, a dresser who blackmails the cocaine-addicted fan-

dancer with whom she works to extract information from admiring officers, and the

bookseller are more ostensibly villainous. The dresser appears to be English (she is played by

Mary Clare, best known for playing cheery Cockney roles) and is herself a coke-addict, so we

can assume she is doing it for the money. Barrett the bookseller (Stephen Murray) casts aside

his courteous, otherworldly persona to reveal that ‘My mother was a German. I am a German.

I do my duty as a good German must’, and begins ruthlessly exploiting the vulnerability of

the young refugee he is ostensibly protecting.

Mervyn Johns, this time as a church sexton, introduces the equally disturbing Went the

Day Well? (1942), telling how a platoon of German paratroopers came to England as

invaders but could claim possession only of the mass grave with its black cross over which he

stands. ‘They wanted England, these Jerries did, and this is the only bit they got.’ We then

flash back to see the Germans arriving, disguised as British troops. An inquisitive young

evacuee and the Vicar’s daughter become suspicious when they notice that the men cross

their sevens and an officer has ‘Chokolade’ from Vienna (Wien) in his kitbag. But we have

already been shown a soldier acting as if he ‘is no better than a German’ by manhandling the

evacuee when he pokes his nose into one of the lorries, and the gruff, unsmiling soldiers

don’t fit the image of the cheerful British Tommy.

Most of the men can speak English, but they reveal their ignorance by not knowing, for

example, that there is a Piccadilly in Manchester as well as London. When they cast aside

their disguise, they reveal themselves as boastful and immoral, one of them telling the

postmistress that he isn’t married but has two fine sons. The officers undergo much more

radical transformations. Basil Sydney’s Major Hammond, a suave British officer, perfectly at

home at the lady of the manor’s dinner-table, changes into the barking bully Kommandant

Ortler. David Farrar’s Lieutenant Jung is even worse, since he shoots down the elderly vicar

in cold blood and degenerates from debonair politeness to slurring drunkenness, telling the

village men that he’s happy to spare them a bullet but their sacrifice will not save the children

he plans to shoot in reprisal for an escape attempt. Wilsford (Leslie Banks), the country

gentleman who organises the Home Guard, has to be more delicate because he retains the

trust of the villagers while colluding with the invaders. Although it isn’t entirely clear in the

finished film, he is actually a German agent rather than a Nazi-sympathising traitor.6 He

proves to be as brutal as his fellow Germans – knifing the village policeman in the back when

he tries to escape and encouraging Jung to shoot hostages to teach the villagers a lesson – but

he maintains a loquacious geniality throughout. Only the vicar’s daughter, who has amorous

designs on him and observes him very closely, is able to perceive his treachery.

Went the Day Well? was criticised at the time for caricaturing its Germans as brutal and

insensitive, though this now seems like acceptable stylisation. The Eagle Has Landed (1976),

which combines the disguised German paratroopers of Went the Day Well? with a German

plot to kidnap Winston Churchill, borrowed from Warn That Man, a forgotten comedy-

thriller from 1943, and was criticised for the opposite reason, namely that it was unduly

sympathetic to the Germans. Anthony Quayle plays Admiral Canaris, the head of

German military intelligence, the Abwehr, as a bumbling but decent chap with an intense

dislike for Hitler, and his underling Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall), despite his sinister eye-

patch, is dignified and intelligent, gloomily aware that he is a pawn likely to be sacrificed in a

game not of his choosing. Michael Caine’s Colonel Steiner, the man chosen to lead the

mission, returns from the notoriously brutal Russian front with a sentimental regard for Polish

Jews and an abhorrence of the SS. Steiner and his men are a noble band of brothers – one of

them plays Bach on the village Church organ, another sacrifices his life (and the success of

their mission) by diving into a foaming mill-race to save a little English girl from drowning –

none of whom does anything that isn’t fair, decent and honest. Suicidally, they release all

their hostages and make a heroic last-ditch stand against a much larger and better-equipped

American company.

S. P. MacKenzie makes much of the changing attitudes to Germans in his comparison of

Went the Day Well? and The Eagle Has Landed. But he concludes that it was not just a

matter of a more benevolent opinion of the former enemy:

By the late 1960s and into the 1970s, World War II had become a setting for action-adventure novels and films […] Older critics might complain, but for the younger generation presenting the Germans as the de facto heroes was merely a twist on an established form, and one they could adjust to with comparative ease. The war had ended years before they were born, and in any event Steiner and Radl were shown to be in opposition to Himmler and the SS, which for this generation was enough to establish their credentials as sympathetic characters. (2003: 91)

As with all the international films packaged by Lew Grade for his Incorporated Television

Company (ITC), the stars and the high-concept story are all important; here, everything is on

the side of the Germans. The only significant English character is a Catholic priest (an

anomaly in rural England, even in Norfolk), played by Sir John Standing, a distinguished

stage actor but hardly known to an international audience. The only others (apart from the

treacherous Jean Marsh, whom Colonel Steiner helpfully identifies as a Boer-supporting

South African) are an embarrassingly silly girl played by Jenny Agutter and a lumbering hulk

(Terry Plummer) who tries to stop her colluding with Donald Sutherland’s highly dubious

IRA-supporting Irishman.

Cold War Heroes

With the advent of the Cold War and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the new enemy –

Churchill made his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March 1946, the Berlin Airlift took place

between June 1948 and May 1949 – renewed efforts were made to distinguish good Germans

from Nazis. The defeated enemy was an essential buffer between the West and the hugely-

expanded Soviet empire.

Basil Dearden’s Frieda (1947), based on a play by Ronald Miller, investigates British

attitudes towards the Germans in the immediate post-war period. A British airman escapes

back to England with the help of a German nurse, expecting her to be welcomed by his

family and neighbours. But with the war still on, people are suspicious of even a ‘good

German’, and the local children mock her as ‘Lily the Werewolf’. The advertising campaign

asked audiences to decide – ‘Could you love Frieda?’ ‘Would you take Frieda into your

home?’ But the question is unfairly slanted, as Frieda is blonde, pretty, pure-hearted and

played by Swedish actress Mai Zetterling. Her looks, her humanist concern, her quiet

intensity, even the way in which she throws herself into the rushing stream when the man she

loves rejects her, all associate her with German romanticism, with the bright face of

Germany. Nevertheless, she has to confront what has been done in her name. Her pleasant

evening at the pictures is turned into a nightmare when the newsreel shows images of

conditions at Belsen; and she has to challenge the heritage of Nazism in the form of her

unrepentant brother.

In the new world order, forgiveness was necessary with a new enemy at the door. Powell

and Pressburger present decent honourable Germans in their two 1950s war films, but, like

20th Century-Fox with The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951), they choose easy

targets. Peter Finch’s courteous and dignified Captain Langsdorff in The Battle of the River

Plate (1956) is a more complex, sympathetic and interesting character than the British Naval

officers who track him down, and the film is structured around his honourable treatment of

his prisoners on the Graf Spee.7 General Kreipe, abducted by Special Operations Executive

(SOE) agents Stanley Moss and Patrick Leigh-Fermor in Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), might

seem a less worthy case, given the German record of atrocities in Crete. But Kreipe was a

last-minute substitute for General Müller, whose brutal reprisals had earned him the

nickname ‘The Butcher of Crete’ and who was executed for war crimes in 1947. There is no

evidence that the real Kreipe himself would have continued his predecessor’s policies. As

played by Marius Goring, he is sly, haughty and devious, but he is also brave, dignified and

honest enough to acknowledge that he has been outwitted by his seemingly amateurish young

captors.8

Such fair-minded depictions of Germans didn’t go unchallenged. Ice Cold in Alex (1958),

which contrasted Anthony Quayle’s confident, strong, determined German spy with John

Mills’ nerve-wracked, alcohol-dependent Captain Anson, was condemned by Derek Hill who

couldn’t help seeing the film

as part of the policy of selling us the last war as a cleanly conducted exchange of differences […] it’s easy to be internationally-minded over past, beaten enemies, especially if the powers that be want to soften public hostility to re-arming them. Ice Cold in Alex is little more than part of the big white-wash. (1958: 11)

J. Lee Thompson – like Michael Powell – was a maverick figure, often at odds with

established authority, and the idea that he would participate in a ‘big white-wash’ is far-

fetched. Quayle’s van der Poel, with his tight shorts and boastful machismo, is viewed with

less than whole-hearted sympathy until – like Kreipe – he gracefully acknowledges that he

has been outwitted and ends up admiring those he had at first despised.

A more concerted campaign was launched against The One That Got Away (1957), where

the German officer at the centre of the film is undoubtedly the hero. British prisoner-of-war

camp films – The Wooden Horse (1950), Albert R.N. (1953), The Colditz Story (1954) and

Danger Within (1957) – were highly successful at the box-office in the 1950s, and director

Roy Baker persuaded the Rank Organisation (which wanted to increase sales of its films in

the increasingly profitable German market) to film an account of Franz von Werra’s escape

from an Allied POW camp.9 Baker had to fight hard to cast a German actor rather than the

Rank Organisation’s choice of Dirk Bogarde or Kenneth Moore to play von Werra, and the

young actor he chose, Hardy Kruger, faced considerable press hostility over his Nazi

background. A disastrous press conference and subsequent press boycott led Rank’s John

Davis, ever fearful of controversy, to attempt to close down production, but the resulting film

became an international success. Kruger’s von Werra, with his leather jacket, mop of blonde

hair and cheeky defiance of authority, could pass as a British (or American) teenage rebel

except for his pleasantly soft German accent. He is resourceful and intelligent, and his sheer

persistence in pursuing every avenue of escape wins the guarded admiration of his captors

and eventually pays off. Kruger, who proved to be an intelligent and likeable ambassador for

the new Germany and openly critical of his country’s Nazi past, represents von Werra as a

brave and resourceful rebel rather than an ideologically-driven fanatic; we can like him, as

we do Steiner, Langsdorff, van der Poel and even Kreipe, without endorsing the Nazi ethos.10

Willi Schlüter in The McKenzie Break (Lamont Johnson, 1970) is more of a problem.

The McKenzie Break was based loosely on events at a POW camp in Ontario where a riot

had occurred when an attempt was made to shackle prisoners (in reprisal for British POWs

being shackled) and an elaborate escape plot planned to enable four submarine commanders

to break out and be picked up by a U-boat in Chaleur Bay in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The

action is transplanted to Scotland and the escapees become Schlüter and his crew. Unlike the

submariners of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981), they have no worries about Nazi

ideology, the rightness of the war and the inevitability of ultimate victory. They chant

‘Erika’, the catchy marching-song beloved of the Waffen-SS, murder the less fanatical

Luftwaffe officers (after singling out one of them as homosexual), and even outwit Captain

Jack Connor (Brian Keith), the wily Irish maverick who is sent up by Army Intelligence HQ

to find out what is going on.

Schlüter harks back to Eric Portman’s Lieutenant Hirth in Powell and Pressburger’s 49th

Parallel (1941), another U-boat officer who is determined to escape back to the Fatherland.

But Hirth is almost as much an individualist as von Werra; Schlüter, like Michael Caine’s

Colonel Steiner, is a popular leader who commands the loyalty and respect of his men.

Connor unmasks Schlüter’s escape plot but his insistence on allowing it to go ahead in the

hope that he can catch the U-boat detailed to pick up the escapees backfires. It is not total

victory: Willi is so distracted by his rivalry with Connor that he doesn’t get aboard the

rescuing U-boat before it dives, and the bungling is made light of by Connor’s cynical

humour (‘Willi, looks like we’re both in the shithouse’) but Schlüter – a likeable Nazi rather

than a good German – is the winner on points.

The demands of fiction often override fidelity to the facts, and the political desirability of

showing good Germans had to be balanced against the charismatic attraction of a bad Nazi.

Otto Kretschmer, the model for Schlüter, was much less villainous than his screen

counterpart, and was noted for his humanitarian care not only for his crew (when his U-boat

was eventually sunk) but for the victims of his attacks.11 In Sink the Bismark! (1960),

Admiral Lütjens – in reality a quarter-Jewish, critical of Hitler and an extremely astute naval

commander – is shown as so preposterously arrogant and over-confident (‘we are faster, we

are unsinkable, we are German’) that we are made to feel he richly deserves a watery grave.

Films set among the Germans, such as The Night of the Generals (1965), could strike a nice

balance. Peter O’Toole’s convincingly mad General Tanz, who switches from the Wehrmacht

to the Waffen SS halfway through the film, enjoys pulling down the Warsaw Ghetto,

gleefully rounds up high-ranking officers implicated in the July plot to kill Hitler, and

murders prostitutes on his days off. But he is almost outweighed by roguish Corporal

Hartman (Tom Courtenay), dragooned reluctantly into serving as his chauffeur, and Major

Grau (Omar Sharif), a military investigator whose unimpeachable integrity leads him to defy

all threats and all danger in the pursuit of truth and justice.

‘We Have Ways of Making You Talk’

The belief in widespread resistance to Nazi oppression in occupied Europe was important in

sustaining British morale, particularly during the early years of the war when Britain stood

alone, and from 1943 onwards when the invasion of the heavily fortified coast of France

threatened unacceptable levels of casualties.

After Freedom Radio, a cycle of resistance films followed, but resistance to the Nazis

came from Dutch, Czech, Scandinavian, French, Belgian and Yugoslav patriots; good

Germans were no longer to be seen. Those Germans who did appear were in varying degrees

unpleasant, but were rarely very formidable adversaries. Francis L. Sullivan, who specialised

in playing bombastic or villainous fat men, appears as a comically ineffective propaganda

minister (who looks more like Göring than Goebbels) in Pimpernel Smith (1941); Albert

Lieven is plausibly charming as a German spy masquerading as a Polish count in The Yellow

Canary (1943); Walter Rilla is a heel-clicking braggart, fatally susceptible to glamorous

women in The Adventures of Tartu (1943). Post-war resistance films, many of them based on

the exploits of Special Operations Executive agents working undercover in occupied Europe,

are more harrowing and realistic.

Against the Wind (1948), which charts the training and operations of a cell of SOE-backed

Belgian resistance fighters, is interesting for the casting of popular light comedy actor Jack

Warner (soon to find fame as kindly police constable George Dixon in the long-running

television series Dixon of Dock Green) as Max Cronk, the oldest member of the group. It is

assumed that his loyalties lie with his Belgian mother rather than his German grandfather, but

this turns out not be the case. Cronk never displays any German characteristics and, apart

from a brief scene where he attempts to seduce an Irish girl who appears to be his partner in

treachery, never shifts from his genial bonhomie. He is trusted and well-liked by the group,

particularly by the radio-operator, played by Simone Signoret, but, on learning of his

treachery, she shoots him in cold blood.

Shocking brutality also seeps into Odette (1950), despite being made by Herbert Wilcox as

a vehicle for his wife, Anna Neagle, then at the height of her fame as the star of escapist

musical romances such as Spring in Park Lane (1948) and Maytime in Mayfair (1949).

Marius Goring’s Abwehr officer, Colonel Henri, appears to be so silkily threatening that we

share Odette’s suspicion of him, but his appreciation of luxury, Mendelsohn, and beautiful

women, along with his distaste for Hitler and the Gestapo turns out to be genuine. His

inability to protect Odette might be contemptible, but it is left to the torturers of Avenue Foch

to display the barbarous face of Nazism. Her interrogator, a runtish little man played by

Guyri Wagner (his only film performance), tells her that ‘we have ways and means of making

you talk’, reporting to his superior that he has applied a red-hot poker to her spine and pulled

out all her toenails. In Carve Her Name With Pride (1957), Violette Szabo dodges the over-

confident and romantically-inclined head of the Abwehr in Rouen, but, like Odette, finishes

up at 84 Avenue Foch, the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst.12 Her interrogator, played by

Noel Willman, best known for playing evil aristocrats in Hammer horror films, is remarkably

forbearing, not losing his temper when he gets only a slap in the face in return for his offer of

nice clothes, good food, sunshine and romance in Paris, and, like Colonel Henri, he is

frustrated and upset when force has to be resorted to.

Not all Nazi torturers are squeamish though. Malcolm McDowell’s Captain Von Berkow

in J. Lee Thompson’s The Passage (1979) takes the sadistic Nazi into gleeful excess –

preparing to chop off one of his victim’s fingers to add to his stir-fry, pouring petrol over a

Basque gypsy (a stoical Christopher Lee) before setting fire to him, and raping the daughter

of a fleeing Jewish scientist. He is the fantasy counterpart to Ralph Fiennes’ monstrous but

horribly real Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (1993). Goeth’s excesses can be carefully

weighed against the good deeds of the increasingly good German, Oscar Schindler (Liam

Neeson). Any attempt to balance Von Berkow with good Germans would be futile. As he

gladly admits, everybody hates him, even his own family, and the only possible

disappointment for the audience is that he is allowed the relatively comfortable death of being

battered by an avalanche rather than being ripped apart by the Basque shepherd’s dogs.

Remembering the War

By the 1980s, the war at last seemed to be sinking back into history. The Sea Wolves (1980),

a geriatric action film with former Boer War heroes being brought back in to service for one

last mission, seemed to signal the end of the line. Those World War II films that were made –

Yanks (1979), Hope and Glory (1987), The Dressmaker (1988) – were exclusively concerned

with the Home Front. Steven Spielberg, who had found that Nazis made useful villains in

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), brought the war back into focus with Schindler’s List (1993)

and Saving Private Ryan (1998), re-educating younger generations about the Holocaust and

the D-Day Landings. British films tended to concentrate on smaller, more obscure and

intimate stories – the mysterious fate of Hungarian Count Almásy, dying from his burns in a

mine-strewn Italy at the end of the war in The English Patient (1996); the Bletchley Park

code-breaking operations in Enigma (2001), the Italian occupation of Kefalonia in Captain

Corelli’s Mandolin (2001), French collaboration in the extermination of Jews in Charlotte

Gray (2001). Germans play only peripheral roles in these films (though there is a marked

contrast between the amiable, fun-loving, musically-gifted Italians and the brutal,

treacherous, merciless Germans who take over from them in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin),

but in 2008, two films were released where the central characters are German.

In The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), the normal family life of a concentration-camp

commander is troubled when his eight-year-old son befriends a boy of a similar age the other

side of the barbed wire, not understanding that he is destined for extermination. Father hides

behind his soldier’s duty to obey orders, cutting himself off from his wife and mother when

they try to make him face up to the horrors for which he is responsible. Even the callous

young thug who acts as his adjutant is somehow rendered more sympathetic when it is

revealed that his father is an anti-Nazi fugitive. Implausibility may abound, but the central

conceit of the film – that the natural goodness of children exposes the hypocritical evil of

adults – works with a directness that avoids sentimentality.

In The Reader (2008), the story unravels to show Kate Winslett’s Hanna Schmitz,

conductor on a Heidelberg tram, not only as the seducer of a teenage boy, but as a former

concentration-camp guard who has colluded in mass murder. Nonetheless, our sympathies are

weighted in her favour. Her honesty – she is the only one among her co-defendants willing to

admit to what she did – the banality of her guilty secret (that she cannot read and write), the

way in which she is made a scapegoat for collective guilt, and her stoical acceptance of the

inevitability of death make it impossible to simply despise her as a monster. In both films, the

emphasis is less on the Nazis as Germans than on the ease with which quite ordinary people

slide into acts of unspeakable evil and cruelty, which signalled a move from the Second

World War as a forum for assessing and judging the character and nature of Germans to the

conflict as a field for exploring the nature of evil and the horrors of war generally.

References

‘The Other Side of the Atlantic’. 1940. Documentary News Letter September: 4.

Chapman, J. 1999. ‘Why We fight: Pastor Hall and Thunder Rock’, in Alan Burton, Tim

O’Sullivan and Paul Wells (eds), The Family Way: The Boulting Brothers and British Film

Culture. Trowbridge: Flicks Books, pp. 81–88.

Hill, D. 1958. Tribune, 4 July: 11.

Houston, P. 1992. Went the Day Well? London: BFI Publishing.

MacKenzie, S. P. 2001. British War Films, 1939-45. London and Hambledon: Continuum.

______________. 2003. ‘Nazis into Germans: Went the Day Well? (1942) and The Eagle

Has Landed (1976)’, Journal of Popular Film & Television, 31 (2): 83–93.

MacNeice, L. 1941. Spectator, 31 January.

McLaine, I. 1979. Ministry of Morale. London: Allen & Unwin.

Murphy, R. 2000. British Cinema and the Second World War. London: Continuum.

Priestley, J. B. 1940. Postscripts, London: Heinemann.

Pronay, N. 1988. ‘The British Post-bellum Cinema: a survey of the films relating to World

War II made in Britain between 1945 and 1960’, Historical Journal of Film Radio and

Television 8 (1): 39–54.

Ramsden, J. 2006. Don’t Mention the War: the British and the Germans since 1890. London:

Little Brown.

Robson, E. W. and M. M. 1943. The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp. London: The

Sidneyan Society, 1943. Accessed on http://www.powell-

pressburger.org/Reviews/43_Blimp/TheShameAndDisgraceOfColonelBlimp.html

[accessed 5 August 2013].

Williams, M. 2006. ‘“The most explosive object to hit Britain since the V2!”: the British

films of Hardy Kruger and Anglo-German Relations in the 1950s’, Cinema Journal 46(1):

85–107.

Filmography

The Adventures of Tartu. 1943, dir. Harold S. Bucquet

Albert RN. 1953, dir. Lewis Gilbert

Against the Wind. l948, dir. Charles Crichton

All Quiet on the Western Front. 1930, dir. Lewis Milestone

Back Room Boy. 1942, dir. Herbert Mason

Band Waggon. 1940, dir. Marcel Varnel

The Battle of the River Plate. 1957, dir. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger

The Battle of the Marne and the Advance of the Tanks. 1917, dir. Geoffrey H. Malins

The Battle of the Somme. 1916 (no credited director)

The Bells of Rheims. 1915, dir. Maurice Elvey

The Black Sheep of Whitehall. 1941, dir. Will Hay/Basil Dearden

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. 2008, dir. Mark Herbert

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. 2001, dir. John Madden

Carve Her Name With Pride. 1958, dir. Lewis Gilbert

Charlotte Gray. 2001, dir. Gillian Armstrong

The Colditz Story. 1955, dir. Guy Hamilton

Cottage to Let. 1941, dir. Anthony Asquith

Danger Within. 1959, dir. Don Chaffey

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel. 1951, dir. Henry Hathaway

The Double-Headed Eagle. 1973, dir. Lutz Becker

The Dressmaker. 1988, dir. Jim O’Brien

The Eagle Has Landed. 1977, dir. John Sturges

Enigma. 2001, dir. Michael Apted

For Freedom. 1940, dir. Marcel Varnel and Castleton Knight

49th Parallel. 1941, dir. Michael Powell

Freedom Radio. 1941, dir. Anthony Asquith

Frieda. 1947, dir. Basil Dearden

Front Line Kids. 1942, dir. Maclean Rogers,

Gert and Daisy’s Weekend. 1941, dir. Maclean Rogers

The Ghost of St. Michael’s. 1941, dir. Marcel Varnel

Hope and Glory. 1987, dir./p/sc. John Boorman

Ice Cold in Alex. 1958, dir. J. Lee Thompson

Ill Met by Moonlight. 1957, dir. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger

In the Clutches of the Hun. 1915, dir. Joe Evans

Jew Suss. 1934, dir. Lothar Mendes

Journey’s End. 1929, dir. James Whale

The Lady Vanishes. 1938, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Let George Do It. 1940, dir. Marcel Varnel

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. 1943, dir. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger

The Mackenzie Break. 1970, dir. Lamont Johnson

The Next of Kin. 1942, dir. Thorold Dickinson

The Night of the Generals. 1966, dir. Anatole Litvak

Odette. 1950, dir. Herbert Wilcox

The One That Got Away. 1957, dir. Roy Baker

The Passage. 1979, dir. J. Lee Thompson

Pastor Hall. 1940, dir. Roy Boulting

Pimpernel Smith. 1941, dir. Leslie Howard

The Reader. 2008, dir. Stephen Daldry

Saving Private Ryan. 1998, dir. Steven Spielberg

Schindler’s List, 1993, dir. Steven Spielberg

The Sea Wolves. 1980, dir. Andrew V. McLaglen

Spare a Copper. 1940, dir. John Paddy Carstairs

Swastika. 1974, dir. Philippe Mora

Tell England. 1931, dir. Anthony Asquith

Those Kids from Town. 1942, dir. Lance Comfort

War’s Grim Reality. 1915, dir. David Aylott

Went the Day Well? 1943, dir. Cavalcanti

The Wooden Horse. 1950, dir. Jack Lee

Yanks. 1979, dir. John Schlesinger

Yellow Canary. 1943, dir./p. Herbert Wilcox

Notes

1 ‘The Other Side of the Atlantic’, Documentary News Letter (September 1940: 4). See also James Chapman

(1999: 81–8).

2 I. McLaine (1979: 141), quoting from Hitler and the Working Man, October 1939.

3 Louis MacNeice, Spectator, 31 January 1941.

4 See Ian Christie, ‘The Colonel Blimp File’, Sight and Sound, Winter 1978/9, p. 13.

5 The Germans had not built up an effective intelligence network in Britain before the war, and what there was

had been easily dismantled by MI5 in the early days of the war. Getting agents in and out of Britain and

embedding them in a society which, apart from a tiny number of IRA supporters, was overwhelmingly hostile to

the German cause was a problem that was never successfully overcome.

6 Penelope Houston’s study of the shooting script shows him to have been ‘officially British’ since 1935 and

expressing the hope that his ‘seven years exile’ will now be justified (1992: 27).

7 Langsdorff had been acknowledged as an admirable adversary much earlier, in the 1940 film For Freedom.

8 For an account of Kreipe, see Max Hastings’ review of Leigh-Fermor’s Words of Mercury, which can be

accessed on Steve Crooks’ invaluable ‘Powell and Pressburger’ website: http://www.powell-

pressburger.org/Reviews/57_IllMet/WordsOfMercury.html (accessed 12/12/2013).

9 Based on Kendal Burt and James Leason’s well-researched book The One That Got Away (1956).

10 See Melanie Williams (2006) for the box-office success of the film – in Germany as well as Britain – and for

Kruger’s relationship with the Austrian-Jewish film critic Thomas Wiseman, which began with a heated

exchange that sparked the press boycott, but subsequently blossomed into friendship.

11 Operation Kiebitz, the attempt to free Kretschmer and other U-boat commanders from Bowmanville POW

camp in 1943, failed.

12 The German Security Service or Sicherheitsdienst was the intelligence agency of the SS and the National

Socialist Party in Nazi Germany.