This is a revised version of a two-part article I wrote in 2020, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. Now that 80 years have passed it may be of interest again.

Within Germany, the official commemoration narrative of this day holds that the defeat of the Wehrmacht not only liberated “the world” from fascism, but also Germany itself. The victors of 1945 in both East and West framed themselves as “liberators”, and this idea was implanted into the minds of the German people through American and Soviet “reeducation” programmes. Gradually, in a process that lasted generations, the Germans learned to see themselves through the eyes of the victors.

Today we have reached a stage where, for example, “thank you” in the languages of the Allied Forces (Russian, English, French, plus German) was projected on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on May 8th, 2020. German leaders routinely fall on their metaphoric or actual knees to demonstrate how deeply sorry and “responsible” they feel for the crimes of WWII Germany, vowing that they will do anything within their power so that all of this will “never happen again”, for example by fighting against the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland.

The “liberation” frame was employed both in Eastern and Western Germany, with some differences. DDR (GDR), a communist country, annually celebrated the Great Victorious Soviet Union that freed the German people and the German workers from the tyranny of “Hitlerfascism”. At least, they did not claim that such a thing as “collective guilt” existed. In their portrayal, the German people were alright, only the “fascists” were bad.

The AfD-affiliated East German writer Michael Klonovsky, born in 1962, recently remarked how the talk of “liberation” will always ring to him as “communist propaganda, slave language, semantics of oppression”.

At the same time, he admits that it describes at least part of the truth. “Liberation”, he wrote, certainly came “for the prisoners of the concentration camps, for the Jews who had survived in hiding, for the nations who had suffered under the Nazis, for those Germans who had lived in opposition to the regime”, but not for the mass-raped “women of the defeated”, “the twelve to fourteen million” German refugees from the East, “of whom nearly two million perished” and for the “millions of prisoners of war, many of whom often returned home only years later or never at all”. One should also consider the fact that “a second German dictatorship was established” in what was now “Eastern” Germany, after East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and other parts of the Reich were “amputated” and lost for good.

This dual face of the German defeat (and the interpretation of defeat as liberation) was addressed in a famous speech by Richard von Weizsäcker, then president of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) from May 8th, 1985. “Famous”, because it officially established that the “8 May was a day of liberation” framing was binding for West Germany as well.

Nevertheless, Weizsäcker (1920-2015) emphasised:

For us Germans, 8 May is not a day of celebration. Those who consciously experienced it look back on very personal and therefore very different experiences. Some returned home, others were left homeless. Some were liberated, while for others captivity began. Many were simply grateful that the nights of bombing and fear were over and that they had survived. Others felt pain at the complete defeat of their homeland. Some Germans were bitter, their illusions shattered, while others were grateful for the gift of a new beginning.

But there it was, the ominous word “liberation”. Now that it had been uttered, it could not be taken back again. Unlike in the DDR (GDR), where the German people had been liberated only from “Hitler fascists”, people in the BRD (FRG) started to believe that they had been liberated also from themselves, or at least from a very problematic and sinister part of their own nature.

And what remained of this had to be systematically eradicated. In the 1980s, multiculturalism and the vision of transforming Germany into a multi-ethnic state started to become a tool for this policy, first embraced by elements of the radical left, and after the 1990 re-unification adopted by the entire political system. It is now basically the “unofficial” guiding doctrine of German state politics.

Today, the state of the “debate” about “liberation vs. defeat”, insofar as it is still being conducted at all, has fallen far behind Weizsäcker. In 2025, “8 May” is indeed supposed to be “a day of celebration for us Germans”. But there are only a few people who are in the mood for actually “celebrating” on this day (mainly because they just don’t care anymore), and the self-flagellation rituals of the political class appear increasingly sclerotic, tired, outdated.

Inevitably, all of this will find an end through biology some day. The generations who actually lived through World War II have almost entirely disappeared, and the guilt-ridden post-war Boomers are now in their seventies and eighties. German schools are still trying to guilt-trip and brainwash children, but I don’t think making the Zoomers feel bad for the deeds of their great-grandparents whom they never knew will seriously work out.

German politics are certainly still fatally informed by the trauma of National Socialism, war, defeat and its post-1945 ideological interpretations. It is pretty obvious that it is the German guilt complex that is primarily responsible for the fact that it has become impossible in Germany to pursue politics for the German people or even to think and act in a sovereign political manner.

I am aware of the objection that similar problems exist in the Allied “victor countries” France, Great Britain, the USA and, to some extent, even Russia. “White guilt” is a widespread syndrome around the Western world. The causes are manifold, but one of them is that the ideology, policies and crimes of German National Socialism serve not only in Germany but practically globally as a reason why “ethno-nationalist” politics must be morally rejected and defeated (the further away one is from Europe, the weaker this premise becomes). But that would be a topic for another discussion.

If I am asked, I cannot name a film about the end of the Second World War in Germany that I would consider really good, really truthful.

I explained the reason for this in my first book Besetztes Gelände (Occupied Territory, 2010), a treatise on the portrayal of the Second World War in film. Behind this is basically nothing more than the truism that the victor writes history in his own favour, and that it often does not take long before the defeated and subjugated see themselves through his eyes. In film, this is literally the case.

In my book, I quoted French film director Jacques Rivette, who wrote in 1961:

Making a film means showing certain things from a certain point of view. (...) There can be no absolute mise en scene, just as there can be no mise en scene in the absolute.

I commented on this as follows:

But there is also no film viewing in the absolute; it always has a subjective and filtering resonance space around it. A film about the past is always also a film about the present, as a mirror and projection surface of the “zeitgeist”. In this respect, historical and science-fiction films are similar. The claim of film as a medium of “memory” in the sense of “This is how it was!” is deceptive, because it works with physical evidence in front of the camera lens. But the location, angle and frame chosen by the cameraman alone make a statement about what is depicted.

Even in non-fiction film, the machine eye of a camera can only be “objective” to a limited extent. Even “documentary” material needs to be interpreted and contextualised through commentary and editing. Since the dawn of photography, we have known that even a photograph can lie or have an opinion.

All this applies even more to the history of the wars and revolutions of the 20th Century, in which the new media of film, photography, radio and television were used extensively (the printing press had already been serving propaganda for several centuries) to shape our perceptions and judgements of events and to heighten and control our emotions. This began with the Spanish-American War (1898) and did not end with NATO’s interventions against Serbia (1999).

It goes without saying that war propaganda, regardless of which side it comes from, is characterised by extreme exaggeration in its portrayal of the enemy, while one’s own atrocities are covered up, downplayed or justified. There is no time for differentiation in the midst of a life-or-death struggle, and it often takes a long time afterwards for the “heat” to cool down and more differentiated portrayals to emerge. The questioning of narratives established in earlier historical phases will sometimes be denigrated as “historical revisionism” although permanent revision is part of the historian’s craft.

The films produced about the Second World War since its end always have a political and contemporary background. It affects the perspective whether they were made in, say, 1945, 1955, 1965, 1985 or 2015, whether in the BRD or the DDR, whether in Hollywood or by Mosfilm, whether in an Eastern or Western bloc country, whether in a country that was occupied by Germany or was its ally.

There are chapters, aspects and events of the war and its pre- and post-history that have either not been depicted at all in film, or only rarely or in a highly distorted form. These include flight and expulsion, all Allied war crimes, Communist-Soviet crimes, the massacres of the political “purges” of 1944/45 (for example in France and Italy), but also the complicity of the victorious powers in the outbreak and escalation of the war, or even just an unfiltered portrayal of the perspective and motivations of the Axis powers and their allies and volunteers.

All these things are barely present in the collective public consciousness because, unlike other topics, they have much less frequently appeared in films, documentaries and TV series, and when they have, it has often been in a tamed form.

This results in different constellations and perspectives depending on the country. It took decades for Polish cinema to show the truth about Katýn and the Soviet occupation of Poland, or for Baltic countries to produce films such as 1944, in which Estonian Waffen-SS volunteers are portrayed in a nuanced manner and with understandable motives.

However, even in countries such as Romania, where communism raged particularly brutally after the war, it is difficult to portray the anti-communist side in a sympathetic light. The film Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man (2010) about Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu, who led a guerrilla war against the Securitate for over a decade, met with fierce international opposition because Ogoranu had been a member of a youth organisation of the antisemitic “Iron Guard”.

Yet the national histories of countless countries from east to west, north to south, are united by the common experience of German occupation and their liberation from it (here, the word is appropriate): Russia, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece. In his novella “German Requiem”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote: “Under the onslaught of vast continents, the Third Reich perished. It had raised its hand against everyone, and everyone’s hands reached for it.” There is an international consensus that Germany was the central villain of the war, and there are understandable reasons for this.

The extent to which Germany’s military expansion in all directions was due to the dynamics of the war is another matter (for historians to debate). For example, there can be no doubt that “Operation Barbarossa” was a pre-emptive strike to forestall an imminent attack by Stalin. The German-Soviet war was fought with unprecedented cruelty on both sides, but the sympathies of the world and the storytellers will always be on the side of the defender, which is why the atrocities committed by the Red Army on German soil are still seen by many today as deserved retribution and are downgraded on the scale of horror according to a hierarchy of victims.

In 2020, 75 years after it ended, the public image of the Second World War and the period of Nazi rule (as well as the Weimar Republic) is more flat, garish and ghostly than ever before. Alexander Gauland from AfD can basically say the same thing as Richard von Weizsäcker in his famous commemorative speech in 1985: mere ambivalence is considered intolerable, right-wing extremist, proto-Nazi.

However, Germans have never been good at tolerating ambivalence. The brilliant conservative commentator Thorsten Hinz rightly remarked:

The longer the Third Reich recedes into the past, the more maniacally it dominates German history. The simplification of the historical situation corresponds to the needs of a levelled society that wants to spare itself any cognitive dissonance. This would be inevitable if it had to question, even in the slightest, the integrity of its 1945 conquerors, whom it recognised as moral superpowers under the influence of re-education. (...)

Two lost world wars, the devastation, losses and moral burdens, the division into two states, which were caught up in hostile power blocs and thus became frontline states once again, are more than a people can bear. Freed from inner turmoil, the Federal Republic is liberating itself from Germany.

In a comfortable and somewhat infantile age, the concept of tragedy has been lost, and so the past becomes a projection screen for simplistic films, rampant emotions, complexes and ideological justifications of all kinds. We are called to celebrate “liberation” on 8 May and to trivialise, repress and deny the suffering and sacrifices of our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, now already great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, to condemn their generation wholesale as “Nazis” and to view them as cartoonish demons from a Hollywood film. This must seem utterly despicable to any feeling and thinking person who really “remembers” history.

But let us now return to the question of how the end of the war was portrayed in films. A central thesis of Besetztes Gelände is that, over time, Germans increasingly lost their own perspective and were unable, for political and historical reasons, to confront their own trauma without putting on the interpretive glasses of the victorious powers (and not doing so does not necessarily mean putting on National Socialist glasses instead).

Certainly, even under these conditions, films and novels of merit and value were produced that were able to come to terms with, preserve, interpret and make comprehensible a good deal of the reality (or realities) of the war. But one must always examine these films and books for gaps, whitewashings, compensations, omissions, cover-ups, for what has not been said, for what you can read between the lines or see between the images, as well as for the historical context in which they were produced.

For example, it is particularly revealing to compare the book Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin, 1959), a personal account of the Red Army invasion of Berlin and the mass rapes that came with it, with Max Färberböck’s 2008 film version. This is not merely a matter of dramaturgical “translations” into another medium, but of deliberate, “pedagogical” retouching.

According to a press release, Färberböck initially even planned to tell the story from the perspective of a Russian soldier – there could hardly be a clearer illustration of the Germans’ neurotic fear of their own perspective. But even the perspective of the “anonymous” author Marta Hillers was only partially adopted. The content of the book (itself a partly fictionalised reworking of original diaries) was considerably softened, and a “German guilt” angle was emphasized (“for balance”, I guess). The film is an attempt to present Hiller’s and other women’s reports of Russian mass rapes without shaking up the overall narrative too much, to keep it intact while admitting some basic facts.

I will not say much about what is probably the best-known film about the end of the war in Germany, Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), as it focuses on the fate of Hitler and the occupants of the Führerbunker rather than the civilian population. It is characterised by a heightened realism, which was received with considerable irritation by some critics because it showed a very “human” Hitler and not so much the one-dimensional demon of countless other films.

Wim Wenders complained that it was a film without a (sufficiently anti-fascist) “stance”, a common reaction when a film about World War II and National Socialism is straining the usual interpretative framework. Some felt that Downfall lacked the firm grip of an educational “message”, which was only added as an afterthought in the credits through a few self-accusations by the real Hitler secretary and Führerbunker veteran Traudl Junge, who had died in 2002, and who appears as a character in the film.

Miraculously untouched by the celebrating Russian soldiers, she manages to escape from Berlin, riding off on a bicycle into freedom in the final scene, accompanied by a former Hitlerjunge, equally liberated from the horrors of war. To its credit, the film does show how nightmarish and horrifying the capture of Berlin was for the Germans trapped in the city, both soldiers and civilians, as for many of them it brought suffering, death and destruction. It is “liberation” only in a very abstract sense, as it brings an end to the war. Yet many will not live to see it, many will spend years in Soviet camps as prisoners of war, and many women will be brutally raped.

Despite impressive scenes and acting performances (you all know countless “Hitler finds out” false subtitle parodies), I find it overall a somewhat hollow film. Like its Eichinger produced successor, The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), it is a technically perfect and detailed ghost train ride through German history, a mere reenactment without much depth.

Personally, I prefer Der letzte Akt (The Final Act, 1955) by G. W. Pabst with Oskar Werner and Albin Skoda (as Hitler). It is far more focused on a moral message (against war, militarism and fascism) than the Eichinger film, but distinguished by its historically “authentic” atmosphere, especially with regard to the way the soldiers and military personnel speak and act (many of its actors, including the deserter Werner, had actually served in the Wehrmacht).

Instead, I will take a look at the DEFA production Ich war neunzehn (I Was Nineteen) from 1968, directed by Konrad Wolf, a film that is partially communist propaganda but still manages to capture a great deal of the reality of the war, especially in respect to the defeat/liberation question.

More on this in the second part of this article.