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unable to convince German Protestants and Vatican officials to act against the Nazi Holocaust, Gerstein, after the war, finds himself unable to convince allied forces of the scope of the Final Solution. He commits suicide before his war crimes trial as an act of atonement for his own guilt during the Final Solution. Before the mass genocide of Jews began in Europe, the Nazis had already commenced racial hygiene, particularly of the mentally retarded, then mentally disabled adults, as part of Aktion T4, a ‘euthanasia’ pogrom of fall 1939. Ridding Nazi society of
previously occluded questions of French society during the Occupation. Another semi-autobiographical work but one which challenges both its narrator and audiences is Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants. Released in 1987, it focuses on childhood and solidarity between the Jewish and French populations during the Second World War. Rousso has described it as a work embroiled in the context of Barbie's 1986 trial for war crimes and the kidnapping of forty-four Jewish children housed at an orphanage at Izieu, although Malle's motivations as director did
story of heroic self-sacrifice in a just war. When the King’s Road shop owned by McLaren and Westwood was renamed ‘Seditionaries’ at the end of 1976, it was decorated with large photographs of the bombing of Dresden, which was beginning to be seen as a British war crime that eroded any previous sense of moral superiority over the Nazis. In complete contrast to this iconoclasm, Jarman, the son of a bomber
Mosley, who declared that Attenborough’s performance ‘is about as close to the real thing as Donald Duck is to Greta Garbo’.7 Greene, however, found Attenborough’s performance particularly pleasing, and endorsed this by sending him a copy of the novel of Brighton Rock which was inscribed: ‘To my dear Dick, my perfect Pinky [sic]’.8 A similar view was expressed by the Monthly Film Bulletin, who declared that ‘Richard Attenborough, as Pinkie, is all Pinkie should be, ruthless, craven, sinister and sadistic, and he looks and lives the part.’9 In the post-war crime drama
who fought there began to be presented in markedly less positive ways – as drug-addled, deluded, even as engaging in war crimes, and returning home more damaged than ennobled (see for example The Deer Hunter, 1978, Apocalyse Now, 1979, Platoon, 1986, Hamburger Hill, 1987). While several important films critical of the Vietnam War were released as late as the 1980s (Platoon; Full Metal Jacket, 1987; Hamburger Hill), these films arguably show a shift away from the implied criticism of both national leadership and the soldier characteristic of the 1960s/1970s films
. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986), pp. 36–8, 69–70. 32 Smith (2001), pp. 61–2. 33 The sympathetic treatment of the Japanese Navy, comparable to that of the German Navy in post-war films and distinct from negative portrayals of the Japanese Army, is remarkable given the evidence of Japanese naval war crimes. The perception of naval officers as honourable traditionalists, even in the cases of former enemies, seems to preclude associations with atrocities except in the (largely unjustified) portrayal of war crimes perpetrated by U-boats. See Samuel Eliot Morison, The
peace-keepers, perceived as neutral and acting in a supervisory capacity’, to be drawn from other African countries (20 July). The Times also called for the establishment of a UN war crimes tribunal so that ‘by seeking to punish the architects of genocide it can atone for its earlier sins of omission, and for its failure to comprehend the horror of Rwanda. These prescriptions for action to atone for
: Airlife, 2003), pp. 27–38. 31 Post-war, sufficient evidence was accumulated to convict only one U-boat commander of a war-crime: the shooting of survivors in lifeboats ordered by the commander of U-852. The scarcity of reliable condemnatory evidence is more than counterbalanced by records and recollections attesting to U-boat crews’ scrupulous treatment of shipwrecked Allied sailors (often in defiance of standing orders), and their frequently stated loathing of their work and its consequences. The so-called ‘Laconia Incident’ (in which a U-boat engaged in rescuing
order for the wartime massacre, and whom Mertens believed had died. Mertens is shocked to discover that Brueckner is not only alive, but has become a successful capitalist entrepreneur, with no pangs of conscience disrupting his bourgeois existence as a jovial family man. Mertens decides to punish and kill his nemesis, but is prevented at the last minute by Susanne from doing so. Brueckner is arrested for his war crimes. By
officer at Treblinka. Lena and David’s mothers were childhood friends in Germany. When David’s mother was to be taken away, Lena’s mother hid the girl and helped her escape to America. After the war, Lena’s grandfather, thinking that the whole of the Jewish family they had once known had been wiped out, decided to adopt their identity in order to escape prosecution for war crimes. David’s mother, discovering the existence of