As I watch all these World War II movies I know that I only see a glamorous reflection of the horrible things that were happening at the time.  I’m not seeing reality, but the fantasy life of the American and British movie audiences.

The image these movies present of the world contains lies and gaps.  They treat China and the Soviet Union in a way that bears no relation to reality.  There are almost no references to European Jews, and then only to “oppression”, not mass murder and genocide.

Wartime movies usually present Germans as authoritarian – and not much more.  Evil authoritarians, naturally, but the “evil” part often feels like a patriotic exaggeration.  Like something you’d say because you’re a war.  The Germans are a dangerous enemy, but they wouldn’t do anything truly inhuman.  Or at least movie goers wouldn’t accept it.  A wartime movie that told the truth about Nazi Europe would have been campy.  It wouldn’t have fit inside the plot structures studios were operating with.

So now it’s 1945, and the first footage from concentration and extermination camps shows up in my marathon. Like this one.  Which is basically 50 minutes of footage of corpses, some of them alive, and of German civilians forced to see, carry and bury the corpses.  As I watched these revolting pictures, I asked myself why I was doing it.  The answer I arrived at is that, after all those Hollywood fantasies, turning off this would have felt like lying to myself.