Randy Boswell: : Hero of German Film Was Linked to Atrocity

Randy Boswell, in the Montreal Gazette (4-11-05):

Downfall, an Oscar-nominated German film about the last days of the Third Reich, is being condemned by historians for what they call its "sympathetic" portrayal of the Nazi general believed to have ordered the murders of dozens of Canadian prisoners during the invasion of Normandy.

Wilhelm Mohnke, who died in 2001 in Germany after failed efforts by Canadian investigators to have him tried for war crimes, was accused of committing the single worst battlefield atrocity in Canada's military history: the execution of 35 soldiers captured shortly after the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

At least 30 more Canadian PoWs are alleged to have been killed on Mohnke's authority, including the machine-gunning of three surrendered soldiers in a case that was thoroughly documented by the Canadian War Crimes Investigation Unit in the 1940s.

Mohnke was also accused of ordering the deaths of 80 British captives in France in 1940 and 72 unarmed American soldiers in Belgium in 1944.

But in Downfall, which has been seen by 4 million Germans and is now showing at theatres throughout Britain and North America, Mohnke is cast in a heroic light, two British historians have complained.

"Most astonishingly, Waffen-SS General Wilhelm Mohnke is depicted as a humanitarian pleading with Hitler to evacuate civilians and arguing with (Joseph) Goebbels against the suicidal deployment of poorly armed militia against the Red Army," University of London professors David Cesarani and Peter Longerich argue in an article published in The Guardian newspaper.

"This is the same Mohnke whose Waffen-SS unit massacred 80 captured British soldiers outside Dunkirk in May 1940. He later led a Waffen-SS regiment in Normandy that murdered more than 60 surrendered Canadian troops."

Downfall's director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, has responded that Mohnke's alleged crimes were never proved and that the characters and events in the film were scrupulously researched and based on scholarly accounts of the Nazi regime as it was imploding at the war's end.