AllMovie

The second in this series of three documentaries -- providing an overview of World War II as seen through footage that was available on the German side -- is the most interesting and viewable in terms of quality, but no less troubling than its predecessor. The visual materials are generally of much higher quality than those of the preceding volume, and there's ample footage depicting the back-and-forth of war as the tide began to turn against the Germans (the Hitler government saw no reason not to feed the propaganda machine for its own people, putting the best face on what were gradually turning into devastating situations). The material used has generally been well-preserved; there are also fascinating digressions such as the footage depicting a rare face-to-face meeting between German and Japanese allies (the two sides were supposed to join forces when the Germans secured the Middle East and Japan secured the Indian subcontinent, but that never happened, and there was virtually no direct military contact between the two sides, despite their diplomatic allegiance). The difficult part of watching any of this lies, of course, in what is not being said, about the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and others who were in the concentration camps -- which are similarly ignored -- or the fate of Russian civilians caught in the German-occupied areas. One can't escape the thought that well-intentioned though these documentaries are, and the goals of their makers in assembling them, that they help feed the mentality of Holocaust deniers and other Nazi-sympathizers. This is definitely not the first documentary that anyone, anywhere should see on this period of the war, though it is illuminating for those with a broader knowledge of the period.