Last September I wrote a post on my blog titled “With Apologies to Paul
Verhoeven“ that took a new look at the conclusion of his 2007 film “The
Black Book,” one in which the Nazis executed a deserter in newly
liberated Holland. Although I am willing to believe the worst about the
allies, I found it hard to believe that they would have permitted the
Nazis to assemble a firing squad after their army had just been
defeated. Not long after dismissing the ending of “The Black Book” as
over the top (Verhoeven, after all, has never been accused of excessive
restraint), I learned that he was basing his ending on a historical
incident, as recorded in “The Myth of the Good War”, by Jacques Pauwels.
Pauwels wrote:
[I]t is a fact that many captured German units were secretly kept
in readiness for possible use against the Red Army. Churchill, who not
without reason had a high opinion of the fighting quality of the German
soldiers, gave Field Marshall Montgomery an order to that effect during
the last days of the war, as he was to acknowledge publicly much later
in November 1954. He arranged for Wehrmacht troops who had surrendered
in northwest Germany and in Norway to retain their uniforms and even
their weapons, and to remain under the command of their own officers,
because he thought of their potential use in hostilities against the
Soviets. In the Netherlands, German units that had surrendered to the
Canadians were even allowed to use their own weapons on May 13, 1945, to
execute two of their own deserters!
My post prompted Zoltan Matheika to recommend “The Fifth Day of Peace,”
which he described as “a fairly good (IMHO) Italian-Yugoslavian movie
from 1969 about the death of those two German deserters.” I finally got
around to ordering it from Netflix and concur with him that it is
“fairly good.” I also read military historian Chris Madsen’s account of
their execution that is available here.
The “Fifth Day of Peace” was originally titled “Dio è con noi”, God is
with us in Italian–a stronger title that evokes Bob Dylan’s “With God on
our Side.” Directed and written by Giuliano Montaldo, it is in full
accord with Pauwels and Madsen’s analysis of a West that was beginning
to see the German army as a potential asset against Soviet power.
Montaldo’s leftist credentials are fairly well established. He was an
apprentice to Gillo Pontecorvo, the director of “Battle of Algiers” and
started out as an actor in Carlo Lizzani’s “Achtung banditi!,” a 1951
film that celebrated the Italian anti-fascist resistance. Montaldo’s
best-known film is the 1971 “Sacco and Vanzetti,” scenes from which
appear in Peter Miller’s documentary of the same name.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/fifth-day-of-peace/
