Free Republic

By STEPHEN HOLDEN ecause Menno Meyjes's film "Max" presents a humanized portrait of the young Adolf Hitler as a desperately ambitious young painter, it has been prejudged in some quarters as an inappropriately sympathetic apologia for one of history's monsters. But as the film observes the edgy relationship of Hitler (Noah Taylor) and Max Rothman (John Cusack), the warmly solicitous (and fictional) German-Jewish art dealer who advises him, it presents a fascinating and psychologically credible interpretation of events that may have been crucial to that monster's formation.The movie has the temerity to imply that had Hitler found a patron, his...

The German historian whose book has sparked a debate over whether Winston Churchill was a war criminal for ordering the bombing of German cities yesterday challenged the British to re-examine their war history.And I challenge you to eat excrement and die, you sick twisted blighter - Ivan Jörg Friedrich, the author of Der Brand (The Fire: Germany Under Bombardment 1940-45), has said that the fire storm which consumed large parts of Hamburg and killed 45,000 people after bombing raids in July 1943 should have prompted Allied leaders to stop and reconsider tactics. The book's serialisation this week in the mass...

was effectively a war criminal who sanctioned the extermination of Germany's civilian population through indiscriminate bombing of towns and cities, an article in the country's biggest-circulation newspaper claimed yesterday.You have some bloody nerve, Fritz. Perhaps we should ask the Jews what they think of you getting all huffy like this? - Ivan In an unprecedented attack on Allied conduct during the Second World War, the tabloid Bild has called for recognition to be given to the suffering inflicted on the German population during the strategic air campaign of 1940-45. The suffering of the population in London is far more relevant....