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disappeared, especially from Canadian television screens. The television stations received them in large bundles of old movies. The Canadian television stations—probably more so than the American ones—were very careful not to broadcast them. And the small movie houses as well no longer had to rely on such a diet.
At a time when these movies collect dust in storage rooms, someone found it timely to give this subject another lift. There were quite a few excellent war movies, mostly about the navy, for instance about the “Graf Spee” and even, apart from the too obvious American heroic pathos, “The Longest Day”.
In recent war movies like “The Train”, “Operation Crossbow” and “Von Ryan’s Express” the German soldiers again mostly are characterized as brutal, fanatic and stupid. On the other hand the Americans, even when shooting at unarmed enemies, are the humane ‘smart cookies”.
It is harder to understand why those movies are produced now, twenty years after the end of the last world war. What could be the motives? Dominating seems to be the desire to make the cash registers ring. This explains why movie stars like Sophia Loren, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster and George Peppar are playing the leading roles.
But what else will be achieved by such movies? First, quite unintentionally, that intelligent viewers will shake their heads about the lack of intelligence of the responsible producers, and — when reminded of the financial success —— about American philosophy as such.
On the other hand, less intelligent people will revive the hatred against the Germans collectively though most of them live very ordinary and respectable lives. Those movies, circulating in many countries, are a very potent propaganda weapon.
The next result is, that the Germans become suspicious about the Americans who still seem to consider them mostly to be beasts and idiots. The first screaming comments from West Germany, after the new films have been shown there, are proving this assumption. One of the loudest newspapers was the sensational “Bild-Zeitung”, the most read West German boulevard daily.
The next step is that the radical rightists joyfully grasp the opportunity. Now they can prove conclusively that the Western democratic allies don’t consider the Germans to be equal, but somewhat of a much lower class. It is not unthinkable that this finally could result in a new “national movement”. And, rather absurdly, the same movie producers who made this possible, finally will say: “We told you so.”
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