A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

On Quora, Eitan Krokowski asks: Why weren’t Auschwitz and the other concentration camps bombed by the Allies during WWII? My reply: There are several reasons why the Anglo-American Allies did not use the Eighth Army Air Force or British Bomber Command to bomb German extermination camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka during World War II. First, there was a great deal of skepticism among military and political leaders in Washington and London when European Jews began reporting on what the Germans were doing in Poland and the Soviet Union. A few American publications, including LIFE magazine, had published several illustrated articles about the plight of Poland’s Jewish population under Nazi occupation, but most newspapers of the day (the  New York Times  included) tended to publish “atrocity” stories in the back pages. (Editors, reporters, and publishers of the day still remembered the often-false or wildly exaggerated stories of German atrocities in France and Belg...

Could Hitler have been considered "good" in any way? Some argue he wasn't really evil as he really believed and followed his beliefs and thought he was right in his actions. No. Not in the slightest. There is no redeeming factor in Adolf Hitler’s life as a dictator and Commander in Chief of the Greater German Reich’s armed forces that can be even considered to be “good.” It’s amazing (and, frankly, appalling) that three-quarters of a century after the final campaigns to liberate Europe from Nazi domination, there still exist many people all around the world - including citizens of the Allied nations that waged war against the Third Reich - that think Hitler was a well-intentioned man who loved Germany and merely wanted to save Western Civilization from the scourge of Communism. It’s a matter of historical record that Adolf Hitler adored his mother Klara, was good to dogs, was kind to German children (except those who were Jewish or were related to his political...

What is a good counter-argument to “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns”? The best counter-argument is this: Even if thousands of Jews had access to rifles, shotguns, and pistols of the era, they still would not have defeated professionally trained, professionally-led mechanized German forces. It’s elementary. The Germans would have made mincemeat of a Jewish militia. They would have suffered losses, as they certainly did during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. But the Germans had tanks, planes, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery. The Jews did not. Also, consider: the victims of the Holocaust were not exclusively young men of military age in good health with access to firearms. They were civilians, and millions of them were elderly, children, and women. And it’s not like they had the ways and means to organize and arm themselves to form an organized resistance in several European nations occupied by the Germans and other Axis powers. That’s wh...

(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...