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Top historian attacks Hollywood over Nazis

Films that glamorise the Third Reich distort children's view of the past, says author

Nicholas Pyke
Sunday 13 October 2002 00:00 BST
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Antony Beevor, the distinguished military historian and best-selling author of Stalingrad, has warned that Hollywood war movies are so historically inaccurate they could create a new generation of Nazi sympathisers.

He believes that "true story" war films such as U-571 and Enemy at the Gate have made the Third Reich dangerously appealing. Alienated young men could even sympathise with the concentration camp commandant in an openly anti-Nazi film like Schindler's List.

"I'm deeply concerned about the irresponsibility of the entertainment industry, at a time when young people have such an inability to distinguish between truth and fiction," he said last week. "The Hollywood portrayal of Nazis lends them a seductive glamour, even when they're shown to be evil."

A former Army officer who has won great acclaim for Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 and his heavyweight account of the siege of Stalingrad, Beevor believes that the distortion of the past is the inevitable result of using celebrity-laden casts and plot lines that purport to be based on truth.

This is particularly worrying, he said, when film and television have become children's main sources of historical information. Instead of accuracy, they get "a triangular love affair imposed on a great moment of history," he said ofEnemy at the Gate. And he argues that the sheer talent of actor Ed Harris lends his character, a German army sniper besieging Stalingrad, considerable appeal.

"Ed Harris acted everyone else off the screen. Even though he was shown to be cruel, there was an element of glamour. In Schindler's List, the most compelling presence was that of Ralph Fiennes [who plays a sadistic Nazi commandant]. A brilliant performance.

"It's not that it's deliberate from the point of view of the director. But it's an inevitable part of the star system, when you dramatise elements of history in that particular way. What irritates me is that Hollywood, unlike in the past, now feels compelled to try and sell films as 'the true story'."

Research carried out last year concluded that four out of 10 teenagers in eastern Germany feel admiration for some aspects of Hitler's regime, Beevor told an audience of teachers at a private conference convened by the Prince of Wales last week. "I wonder what the figure would be in this country or America?

He added: "For young males who feel disconnected in a fragmented society and have a sense of powerlessness, the images of power shown in the films are creating confusion."

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He also believes that TV and electronic games are fuelling extreme levels of aggression. "The more one sees the entertainment industry promote the sort of violence that dehumanises in the way that propaganda dehumanises, the more worrying it becomes. It is not surprising that teachers in deprived areas are deeply worried at the way some children are arriving at school having never been spoken to by their parents. They can only communicate through violence."

Fellow historians David Starkey from Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and Niall Ferguson from Jesus College, Oxford told the conference – which took place behind closed doors at Dartington Hall in Devon – that school history is in now in "crisis".

According to Professor Ferguson, sixth-formers applying to university know little of the past aside from Hitler and Stalin, thanks to the dominance of the Second World War in the national curriculum, GCSE and A-level courses – which he said should be scrapped.

But his suggestion that the Holocaust was too complex an issue to be studied in detail by teenagers met with a hostile reaction from the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

"The lessons of the Holocaust are easily absorbed by children of 13," said the Board's senior vice president Henry Grunwald QC. "There is still too much intolerance, bigotry and prejudice in our society to allow the industrialised murder of millions of people to be glossed over."

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