Only a naive person could think this story strange. There are no permanent allies, there are only shifting alliances.
Report: “Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.”
* I thought he was in charge of the Werewolves, a Nazi outfit designed to fight on after the fall of the Reich and death of Hitler? Seems very at odds with this new story.
Hard to imagine a dude with that face blending in anywhere either…
* I’d really love a Hollywood production that treated the Germans with a little more depth and complexity and made some characters serving Wehrmacht or other Nazi forces look sympathetic or perhaps even heroic. I’m sure even Germans are capable of saving cats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Snyder#Origin_of_the_title
After seeing so many movies where the Yankees are the heroes, it’s hard to be surprised about who is going to win in the end. Hollywood usually is a sucker for the “underdog.” Well there have been hundreds of movies about World War II and the Holocaust, and so far the Yanks and the Allies are still as good as undefeated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_films
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_films
It’d sure be interesting for Hollywood to produce a story with a more nuanced characterization of the Germans and Nazis. The usual caricature of the Germans as inhuman monsters really does the crimes of that era an injustice. Animals and monsters can’t sin because they lack normal human feelings. Only humans with a full emotional range are at all capable of knowing moral good and evil. Hollywood’s usual depiction of Nazis has the usual depth and complexity as if they were portraying zombies. Can they do better? I doubt it and suspect well be served up much more a la Inglorious Basterds before they give us anything of real substance.
* Fascinating story. According to Wikipedia (yeah I know) he wanted Mossad, in return, to wipe his name off the Wiesenthal list and take his name off the international warrant. Mossad/Wiesenthal refused, but he did the job anyway–probably to avoid a Mossad assassination of him. But I can’t help thinking Mossad also promised to make sure Wiesenthal’s efforts were sabotaged by Mossad, and that Mossad would tip Skorzeny off if the Nazi Hunters were close.
It also could turn out Skorzeny was some sort of double agent, infiltrating Neo-Nazi groups and militias due to his impeccable credentials and then informing on them to Mossad and other government officials. That would seem likely: he seemed to have a lot of contact with Nazi groups post -war, even allegedly leading some, and yet he got a slap on the wrist at his trial, and various governments and Mossad never went after him for his later Nazi collaboration, despite his obvious dangerous skills and his obvious drawing power for the groups.
* Maybe they can start with a movie about the forced expulsion of 15 million Germans from their ancestral homes in the east with 3 million dying from various causes including mass murder.
But that doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing Hollywood would be interested in does it?
* Israelis are the plucky sort of people who don’t blanche at making Faustian bargains.
Also I don’t think that the English are an underrated people, in any sense, in the modern world (as De Gaulle always hectored on about the triumphalism of the Anglo-Saxons) but I do sympathise with the Germans who are far and away have the most disproportionate metrics between achievements & recognition. I also think the Russians, post Cold War, & Persians, post Revolution, have had the same issues but now it seems that the balance is tipping; Germany controls the EU, Russian is rising again & Iran straddles the Middle East. History has way of making itself go full-circle!
I wish this book was updated for a 2016 edition – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_of_the_World
* Hollywood movies in the 1950s-1970s tended to be more than fair to the WWII Germans. Rommel, for example, was over-emphasized by Hollywood as the Worthy Foe.
Germans As Demonic may not have emerged as a consistent Hollywood theme until the early 1980s with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Sophie’s Choice.
* The Hollywood and UK WWII movies I remember until that transition did depict Germans as the enemy and oftentimes as crude or rough, but rarely as evil. Genocide and race supremacy were rarely alluded to.
Looking back, this is striking, because those movies were made by people who lived through the war, and in many cases, actually fought in the war. It’s the boomer generation, starting with Steven Spielberg (though not Alan Pakula, who was a young teen during the war) that has consistently used the demon Nazi theme, most memorably in Quentin Tarantino’s fantasy “Inglourious Basterds.”
* The scar is a duelling scar (“schmisse”), which was a popular sport among university students in Germany and Austria until WWI and then vanished by WWII. Typically, the scar was acquired in student days and serve both as a badge of honor and a class marker.
So, even in the 1960s, Skorzeny would have been far from unique in having that scar, though it would have immediately identified him as Germanic to anyone acquainted with pre-war haute bourgeois European society.
As an aside, it is hard to see any of our latter day college students even being able to comprehend that mileu or mindset.
* Funny thing about Valkyrie was that Claus von Stauffenberg was played by Tom Cruise, who’s like a foot shorter than real von Stauffenberg. Also Cruise’s mannerisms in Valkyrie were very similar to his mannerisms in Edge of Tomorrow… or maybe it’s just Cruise being himself.
* [he was acquitted on the grounds that Operation Griffin was a “ruse of war.” I don’t exactly understand that defense]
You’re allowed to put on the other side’s uniforms for purposes of deception, just not to open fire on the other side while wearing their own uniforms.
* In The Sea Chase, made in 1955, John Wayne (!) plays a German World War II merchant marine captain who is determined to avoid capture by the British Navy on the outbreak of World War II. He is sympathetically portrayed as a patriotic German, but anti-Nazi. There is a bad Nazi, as well, just to keep things PC. In the final scene, Wayne brings down the ensign of the Third Reich and hoists the Imperial Merchant Marine ensign that he has kept in his cabin. It’s quite well done.
Das Boot was a fairly sympathetic portrayal of U-boat personnel in the World War II Kriegsmarine. Rommel the Desert Fox featured James Mason as the famous Afrika Korps commander. The Cross of Iron was based on Willi Heinrich’s Das Geduldige Fleisch, but James Coburn was much too American to portray a German non-commissioned officer. One occasionally encounters sympathetic German characters in otherwise Germanophobic movies (e.g., a German enlisted man who returns a lost child in Europa, Europa or the German tank commander who blows open the bank vault door in Kelly’s Heroes).
If I were to make a WWII German-sympathetic movie, the German Merchant Marine would be a good subject. Its 1945 sea evacuations from the Baltic countries and East Prussia were epic, saving thousands of lives in appalling weather and under constant Russian attack. It was marred by the loss of the Wilhelm Gustloff with possibly 9,400, sunk by a Soviet submarine, but it was one of the most successful naval evacuations ever, far surpassing Dunquerque. But I’m not on the edge of my seat-I expect we’ll see twenty more Holocaust movies before we’ll see one that is a more balanced exposition of personalities during the Second World War.
* Otto Skorzeny was a person who I wished had been on our side. I think that it’s a fairly English (Scotts-Irish?) trait to be able to admire the fighting qualities of an opponent, even as one does one’s best to destroy him. I’ve read that Erwin Rommel, had he survived the war, would have been the guest of honor at reunions of the British 8th Army.
Maybe it was the Crow Indians who thought that a man’s prowess as a warrior was defined by the skill and valor of his opponents.
* This may have been the reverse for the Pacific War, where, due to truly barbarous treatment of American prisoners, the Japanese were rarely portrayed in a nuanced way. Pacific War movies tend not to do well at the box office, or so I’ve heard. Hell in the Pacific, featuring WWII Marine veteran Lee Marvin and Flags of our Fathers, may have been exceptions and Bridge over the River Kwai is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese commander, although it sugar-coated the conditions at the camp. I think that it was in Road Past Mandalay that the author paid tribute to the superb fighting qualities of the Japanese soldier. I had a language student in Paris whose uncle fought the Japanese, the Chinese (in Korea), and the Vietnamese. He said that the Japanese were far and away the toughest–they never gave up and had to be killed.
I’m not sure what campaign or engagement I would choose to try and achieve a nuanced view of the Japanese in WWII.
* I read Skorzeny’s memoirs as a young man which left me with the impression of a pretty straight-forward warrior whose instinct was for action rather than reflection. I gathered that he thought he was fighting for Germany qua Germany rather than any ideology IIRC.
Clearly the memoirs were self-serving but I would be slightly surprised if he had turned into a Mossad murderer, especially as they have never been short of such.
I do remember his concluding that the Russians were so careless in throwing away their own lives because they were essentially oriental rather than European.
* Martin Van Creveld, the foremost Israeli military historian, has written that the Mossad was essentially founded by Jews who had fled Germany before the war. They received their initial experience when the British used them, and their perfect German language skills, for intelligence work during the war. It would make sense that they might have reached out to their ex-countrymen floating around after the war. Who else would understand an exile from Germany better than they? Van Creveld also noted that the Israeli attitude towards German soldiers was admiring, stating that Moshe Dayan (and Israelis) considered Germans as the best soldiers of all.
* Even movies of that era with fictional stories (Guns of Navarone, etc.) portrayed the Germans more realisticly than did the cartoonish portrayals of them that became common with and after “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
“Band of Brothers”, which Spielberg produced, had a rather even-handed portrayal of Germans, and did not seem to demonize them. For that matter, “Schindler’s List” did not either.
* With personal disfigurement being so much in vogue, perhaps dueling scars such as adorn Skorzeny’s face will have a comeback. In the 19th and early 20th century, fraternity members at German universities developed a style of fencing in which there was no thrusting, only cutting, and the head and face were the only targets exposed–the rest of the body, including the arms, was swathed in heavy padding. Scars to the face, called Renommierschmisse (bragging scars), were emblems of social status, signifying that one had belonged to an exclusive fraternity. They provided entrée to top positions in the military, law, medicine, academia, and government. As the scars were prized, the stitching of them was deliberately clumsy, and it is said that students sometimes had a horsehair sewn into the gash to ensure it healed poorly or poured wine on it to inflame it. Mark Twain, who attended a German duel, or Mensur, on his European trip, described seeing students whose facial scars seemed to “form a city map.”
Apparently these illegal duels went on until recently. Fencing scholar J. Christoph Amberger participated in seven while a student at Göttingen in 1987, and carries a photogenic scar on his cheek. He describes the experience in The Secret History of the Sword.
* Blog: Like, everyone gets that the conceit of Inglourious Basterds is that the (enlisted) Basterds are all monoethnic, weakly distinguished horrific monsters driven by ethnic hatred while the Nazis are noble, individual down-home types with distinct regional accents who share tales of the homes and loved ones they’re fighting to protect?
That the Nazis are multilingual humanists with a sense of chivalric honor, a taste for art, an appreciation of the nuances of foreign cultures, and a desire to end the war with a minimum of death while the Basterds are provincial, monolingual, sadistic thugs who have a superficial understanding of German culture, kill for joy, torture their own allies, and mutilate captives they’ve promised safe passage?
That the marketing campaign for the movie involved the principals doing interviews about how awesome it was to have a movie about Us wreaking mayhem against Them, while the principal of the Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film leaves the premiere because he hates how it valorizes the act of killing?
That after the whole movie we’re expected to cheer the Basterds as they go on a nihilistic homicidal rampage, setting fire to fragile artworks to destroy a temple of high culture, because after all what matters is that they’re Us, and anyway our popular media has long constructed Them as an insect collectivity to be incinerated en masse without compunction?
Right? But, I never saw anyone mention that, even though Tarantino made it COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS.
* One true Nazi hero about whom a great Hollywood action movie could be made is general Walther Wenck.
The youngest German general, he was in command of Germany’s last functioning armored units. Instead of breaking Hitler out of encircled Berlin, as ordered, or surrendering to the Americans, he lead the last German counterattack of the war to rescue a hospital full of wounded soldiers, nurses, female military personnel, and civilians trapped in a pocket outside Berlin by the rapacious Russians. He fought his way in, the wounded soldiers and civilians helped fight their way out, and he delivered them to the Americans for surrender.
Of course, such a thrilling and heroic true story could never be made into a Hollywood movie because Nazis.
* At Skorzeny’s trial, at least one ex-Allied operative testified on Skorzeny’s behalf. He and other Allied soldiers had put on German uniforms. It was standard procedure on some Allied commando operations.
* Now that is a 180 turnaround from the last version I saw of Skorzeny’s postwar history. A documentary on The Hitler Channel, or one of those other cable channels, did a show on Skorzeny claiming that after the war he helped to create the modern Muslim terrorist system. According to the show he worked with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini. Al-Husseini fought before the war to overthrow the British rule of Paestine and exterminate the Jews who were flooding into Palestine. Al-Husseini spent most of the war in Germany and allegedley spent his time organizing and recruiting an all Muslim SS division, and advocating the Holocaust with the intention of bringing the gas chambers to Palestine after Germany won the war. The Nazis for their part were delighted to work with someone who hated Jews even more than they did, and charmed by the fact that Al-Husseini had fair hair and blue eyes so he even looked like a proper Nazi.
According to this documentary after the war Skorzeny lived in Egypt where he trained the nascent PLO in the terrorist tactics he had developed for the Werewolves and he was an unrepentant Nazi to the end. Nothing in the documentary would suggest that Otto would ever work for the Jews, but who knows, maybe he was just a self-promoting opportunist willing to change sides for his own benefit.
