Posted on 10/07/2008 6:26:45 AM PDT by Victory111
Flamboyant American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is scheduled to begin production on his new World War II movie “Inglorious Bastards” in Germany next week, to the consternation of leading German film critics.
The movie stars Brad Pitt, who plays an American-Jewish army officer who after being freed from a German prisoner of war camp leads a group of fellow American-Jewish soldiers in a spree of gruesome revenge killings against Nazi soldiers and officers.
(Excerpt) Read more at crossactionnews.com ...
What ever happened to the big budget WW II movie about the attempt to kill Hitler, starring Tom Cruise?
I don’t think it ever got released......
‘Atrocities’ trial shakes Poland’s victim image
FROM ROGER BOYES IN OPOLE, POLAND
GERMAN women were drowned in latrines and prisoners were buried alive during post-war internment in Poland, according to witnesses at the trial of a Polish camp commandant.
Czelaw Geborski, a stooped, snowy-haired pensioner of 76, is accused of murdering German women who, after the Second World War, were herded into deportation camps prior to being expelled from Silesia.
His trial is the first to be held in post-communist Europe for crimes committed against Germans. About 14 million of them were expelled from territory that is now part of Poland and the Czech Republic; two million died mainly of hunger, exhaustion and disease as they trekked westwards.
The revelations, coupled with the disclosure that Polish villagers took part in a bloodthirsty massacre of Jews during the war, have forced Poland to reassess its image of itself as one of the primary victims of Hitler.
The Silesian atrocities occurred in 1945 and 1946, after the end of the war. The Soviet Union laid claim to what was once eastern Poland and in return Poles gained territory in the west. Germans living there were thrown out. Once resettled in Germany they formed powerful political associations that kept alive memories of camps such as Lamsdorf (now known as Lambinowice) 30 kilometres from Opole.
Mr Geborski, sitting in the dock next to his often embarrassed lawyer, interrupts loudly as the witnesses try to reconstruct everyday life in the camp. “It was like a holiday camp!” he barks out, banging his stick on the floor. “They all had their own beds and three modest meals.”
The fact is that in the autumn of 1945 most Poles were in no mood to treat the Germans generously: five years of occupation, a comprehensive system of labour and concentration camps, and executions on street corners made the activities behind the high fences of Lamsdorf camp seem like small beer.
Nonetheless, more than 1,000 people are said to have died there and some of the stories emerging from the witness stand are horrific. If the queue for the women’s latrines was too long the guards would simply shoot the waiting women with a machinegun. Babies were separated from their mothers and allowed to starve. The mothers were chased with sticks around the periphery of the camp.
The charges against Mr Geborski have been narrowed down to the night of October 4, 1945. Fire broke out in barrack room 12. Women prisoners struggled to throw sand on the flames. Uniformed Poles, according to witnesses, shot at them and pushed them into the blaze.
“I can hear their screams even now,” said Helmut Gerlitz, now 62, who as a six-year-old boy stared out of the window of his hut. At least three women died, and others were seriously wounded and mutilated.
Mr Geborski claims that the prisoners started the fire themselves to stage a diversion and escape in the chaos. He merely used his right to order shots to be fired at escaping prisoners. Witnesses say, however, that graves were dug in advance of the blaze, suggesting that the incident was planned by the camp administration.
Strictly speaking much of what the witnesses say amounts to hearsay. At any kind of factual mistake, Mr Geborski interrupts and demands clarification. He does so in the strident tone of someone who spent much of the 1950s and 1960s working for the communist secret police.
Mr Geborski has been charged twice before. Each time the proceedings were dropped because he enjoyed high political protection. The Polish Minister for Recovered Territory - Mr Geborski’s ultimate political boss - was Wladyslaw Gomulka, like Mr Geborski an ex-partisan. The charges against Mr Geborski were dropped in 1958: by then Gomulka had become Poland’s Communist Party chief.
The German authorities, too, did not push very hard for a trial. To support openly the cause of the expelled Germans was to risk being branded a nationalist, someone intent on challenging the legitimacy of the German-Polish border.
So Mr Geborski has benefited from the long silence of politicians. His defence lawyer wishes on him a similar silence: Mr Geborski is not shy about denouncing what he says is the absurdity of a Pole being punished for crimes against Germans after a long and bloody war.
For medical reasons Mr Geborski is allowed to sit in court for only three hours a day. The result is slow proceedings.
The trial continues.
Hmmmm. They couldn’t be more obvious about the subtext here, could they? Moral equivalence — America and Israel are the new Nazis... Sheesh!
Thanks for the info.....I know what I won’t be seeing after Christmas....I am not a fan of recent Cruise movies....
Looks like the release date is now Dec. 26.
"I have issued the command — and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly I have placed my Totenkopf Units in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death, mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" - Adolf Hitler's Directive to his Staff before the invasion of Poland (1939)
So excuse me if I don't shed any tears for Nazi "victims."
The Tarantino script leaked to the web is pretty astonishing - it is in no way historical, but I guess I can report that as a man who lost 9 of my uncles in WWII the depiction of the scalping of nazis went over pretty well with me. There’s a strange love story in the film script between a Jewish girl who witnesses her family machine-gunned in Occupied France and a black film projectionist and their pact to kill top ranking nazis in a theater that is pretty much classic Tarantino. I’ll be honest and say this won’t be to everyone’s taste. I’m going to enjoy it however.
Just so I understand your logic - does that mean American soldiers can murder, rape and ethnically cleanse millions of innocent Iraqis? After all, we beat them in a war and their pre-invasion government was pretty terrible..
Iraq did not invade the US and commit the atrocities to American civilians like the Nazis did to Poles.
Brad Pitt as a JEW? Ha ha ha ha
I think “Pulp Fiction” was a pretty good flick, not great,but pretty good. Other than that, I don’t understand all the hype for Tarantino.
Is there a more apolitical filmmaker than Tarantino?
Only for morons who swallow whole the idiotic modern notion that victims are somehow made holy by their suffering and therefore incapable of committing evil themselves.
Victims and oppressors are not different types of people. They are often the same people in different circumstances.
Those gloating over these crimes fail to notice (or perhaps don't care) that the victims of the revenge killings are seldom the people who committed the crimes for which revenge is wanted. If they drowned, or burned, or hanged the actual perps, I have no problem with it.
But murdering random black people (or Jews or Germans) because a family member was killed by someone who shares physical characteristics with the killers is evil. The Poles doing such things were every bit as evil as the Nazis, although admittedly with somewhat greater justified motivation.
You should see my face! :-))
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.