Word: waffen
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Romans still point out the narrow street not far from the Trevi Fountain where, in March 1944, a partisan bomb attack wiped out a 33-man Waffen-SS unit. Kappler, then an SS colonel acting as police chief of the German occupation force in Rome, received orders from Berlin to execute ten times as many hostages in reprisal. Within 36 hours, German troops had rounded up several truckloads of Italian civilians. The Italians were taken to the ancient Ardeatine Caves three miles south of Rome and there were shot dead. The precise toll was 335-five more than Kappler...
...rich in these cult objects. Money, talent, raw materials and the competitive pride of rival orders abounded there over the long centuries and spread through the churches of the neighboring Papal States. Despite theft and fire and the plunderings of tourists from Alaric the Visigoth to Hitler's Waffen SS, a stupendous amount remains. In this show, more than 500 examples have been assembled by a group of scholars headed by Art Historian Paolo Cercato...
...result, many felt compelled to serve the Germans in order to survive. Solzhenitsyn is careful to distinguish between degrees of collaboration. Some "scum" joined the Nazi polizei. Ukrainians, Latvians and other national groups, deeply embittered by Soviet persecution, joined Waffen SS divisions. The so-called "Russian Army of Liberation"* held the pitiful belief that a German victory would enable them to bring democracy to Russia. Other P.O.W.s escaped the Nazis to fight with the Soviet partisans or try to rejoin the Red Army. Whether scum or hero, all received the same sentence when they returned home: ten years...
Almost universally, people who see Sorrow and Pity come out with admiration and respect for Christian de la Masiere, a French aristocrat who fought in the Waffen SS for the Nazis on the Eastern front against Russia--in retrospect hardly the most justifiable position for a Frenchman during World War II. Ophuls himself said "I feel I have the right to judge Fascists" like la Masiere, and judge them severely. Yet we are unable to judge this man harshly--his principles, yes; his person, no. And this fact has confused many people who have tried hard to tease...
...French politics. He swallowed revolutionary ideology whole, and of the two forms possible to him in 1940-Communism or the Germans' national socialism- he chose the latter. This film follows De la Mazière all the way to the Eastern front where, in the uniform of the Waffen SS as part of the infamous Charlemagne division, he fought against the Russians. Rueful, logical, charming, ready to regret but not to grovel, French to his fingertips, De la Mazière, despite what he did, finally seems a sympathetic and even scrupulous man whose experience adds a small human...