Ask Lemmy

conscripted German teenager

Watch Die Brücke from 1959 some time. There's a remake but it's not worth it. The author of the story was one of those teenagers and wrote it to express his sense of betrayal. Adults had thrown them into battle and then condemned them for fighting. It's a really good movie. You really get to know those kids as cringy teenagers.

A more modern German movie is Vilsmaier's Stalingrad (1993). It's in color and has a bit of budget, though it's far from Saving Private Ryan. If you are interested in these things, watch it together with Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? (1959).

The differences between those 2 Stalingrad movies say a lot about how German society changed. The older movie wanted to be historically accurate and had input from some of the commanders. If you pay attention, you can tell who was still around to tell their side of the story. You can't tell who was a convicted war criminal, though. Still, at the time, the movie was controversial for its (rather tame) anti-war message and not for its whitewashing.

In 1993, the conscripted teenagers were just retiring, after the german re-unification. That generation has been termed Flakhelfer generation (Flak-helper since they were made to operate anti-aircraft guns). Hans-Dietrich Genscher had been one of them. He was the (West-)German foreign minister during the reunification and had just retired in 1993. As a 17-year-old, he and, like many others his age, served in the Wehrmacht, in Wenck's 12th army. If Western forces had marched on Berlin, they would have fought their way past those kids, or more likely over their dead bodies. As that didn't happen, Nazi elites would have sacrificed them against the Soviets in the Battle of Berlin, as portrayed in Downfall. Wenck instead chose to secure a corridor from the Berlin region toward the West. Sabaton commemorates this in Hearts of Iron. Sabaton does not mention the Battle of Halbe, though. Genscher recalled seeing battle weary Generals marching past, wielding submachine guns.

Band of Brothers has that one scene where they're walking past a bunch of German POWs and Malarkey jokingly asks them where they're from, only for one of them to respond with "Eugene, Oregon".

Supposedly based on a real encounter, the guy's family was part of "The Aryan Call" wave of propaganda that happened early in the war, which had some native German families in the US return to fight for Germany. Poor guy just got swept up in his family's decision. It was an incredibly humanizing moment when you realize everyone there, on both sides, is just some scared kid, far from home, whose only there because circumstances in their lives beyond their control brought them.

Of course, shortly after, the guy gets executed with the rest of the POWs.