Generation War

The Unquiet Ghosts of Nazi Germany

This 3 part miniseries made in Germany that I have just recently watched on Netflix is about five young Germans who lived during the Second World War, 1 Jew and 4 others, none of them an actual Nazi Party member, of whom only the Jew and two of the others survive to the end of the conflict.

The other two survivors never actually give up their rather too pro-war, pro-Nazi sympathies and never accept any personal responsibility for Germany's, and Europe's, disaster.

Much less for the Holocaust or indeed for any of Germany's war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The two who died during the war were a more or less implausibly a-political opportunist young female singer in love with the Jewish fellow and a young cynic with no particular politics who ends up a brutal nihilist war criminal.

And the show overplays Russian, and especially Polish, anti-Semitism in a pretty clear attempt to deny or diminish Germany's spectacular and unique responsibility for the Holocaust.

German viewers who thought the show somehow, through those young folks, portrays ordinary Germans as more or less innocent victims seem to me marvelously obtuse.

We should not forget that when Hitler came to power in January of 1933 the Nazis got no more than a third of the vote.

But the combined anti-Semitic and anti-republican right wing vote included about another 8 percent or so.

And it appears Hitler's plan to make Germans a Herrenvolk in Eastern Europe, though not publicly known in detail, enjoyed more than majority support, a support that many of the characters of Generation War - and some of the central five - voice, and that the surviving two who are not Jews never repent of.