The
German soldiers of World War II have often been portrayed, both during
the war and in the decades since, as simple-minded, unimaginative and
brutish. Hollywood movies and popular U.S. television shows have for
years contrasted confident, able and “cool” American GIs with
slow-witted, cynical and cruel Germans.
“Propaganda
is an inescapable ingredient of modern conflict,” British journalist
and historian Max Hastings has noted. “In the Second World War, it was
considered essential for the struggle to defeat the German army that the
peoples of the Grand [Allied] Alliance should be convinced of the
qualitative superiority of their fighting men to those of the enemy. One
[American] dogface or one [British] tommy was worth three wooden-headed
krauts. Hitler’s robots could never match the imagination and
initiative of Allied soldiers on the battlefield …” Major wartime
American motion pictures portrayed German soldiers as dull-witted and
simplistic. In the decades since the war, Hastings notes, “a spirit of
military narcissism, nourished by such films as ‘The Longest Day,’ ‘A
Bridge Too Far’ and ‘The Battle of the Bulge,’ has perpetuated mythical
images of the Allied and German armies.”[1]
In
accord with the prevailing propaganda image of the enemy, Britain’s
wartime premier scornfully disparaged German soldiers and officers. In a
1941 radio address Winston Churchill spoke of “the Nazi war machine,
with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers … [and]
the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding
on like a swarm of crawling locusts.”[2]http://www.unz.com/article/german-soldiers-of-world-war-ii/
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