Please name good WWII movies that were made from the German perspective

It is Spanish and it means ... wait for it ... "Holy Blood".

Stalingrad is definitely worth watching. Be warned, though, it‘s brutal.

As an opposite to all those Allied Forces POW breaking out of prison camps movies, there is The McKenzie Break 1970, about German POW's breaking out of a prison camp in Scotland, apparently based on a real story that happened in Canada.


Not the best movie in the world, but worth mentioning.

As I tend to ignore movies made before the year of my birth (the way Christians used to declare that anyone born B.C. was ineligible for Heaven - do they still?), I did not understand that reference.

I have seen the odd film with the cast list of the main players in the opening titles then the full cast listing at the end as well. Is it that to which you were referring?

You don't watch movies made prior to your birth year, London?  Does that mean then  that you haven't seen CRASH or BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN?

I watched this last night. It is quite good, but not a patch on Downfall (2004) dir: Oliver Hirschbiegel, which covers much the same ground, and there is nothing about it to suggest that it is a late work of one of the all time historic directors.

Maybe it needed the prestige of a famous name to get it made at the time. It was the first German film after WWII to portray Hitler on screen played by an actor, at a time when de-nazification controversies were still raging.

I think the two main problems were:

1) Combining a documentary style with the story of a fictional officer (played by Oskar Werner) who was introduced to portray a "Good German" is somewhat insulting to the intelligence. It suggests the German audience cannot evaluate the horrors of Nazism unless they are personalized by the suffering of one man on-screen.

In "Decision Before Dawn" (1951) Werner plays the same role of a "Good German" for the same propaganda reasons. Curiously, Werner is Austrian, nor German. The Anschluss lived on!

2) The actor who plays Hitler (Albin Skoda, who was Austrian like Hitler) does not begin to approach the depth of Bruno Ganz's stunning portrait in Downfall. Skoda shows the manic-depressive mood changes, but his Hitler is just a monster and madman. So is Ganz's, but he also goes deeper and makes Hitler a rounded human being - sad, possibly tragic and almost sympathetic in some scenes with the female staff.

The Pabst film includes scenes at the end where Hitler orders the flooding of the subway system, knowingly killing thousands of refugees and wounded soldiers. This is not in the later film. Did it actually happen?

The Pabst film includes scenes at the end where Hitler orders the flooding of the subway system, knowingly killing thousands of refugees and wounded soldiers. This is not in the later film. Did it actually happen?

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On 26 April 1945, German Army Officer Gerhard Boldt wrote the following about Hitler's order to flood the underground railway:

"When we arrived for the talk, Hitler rose and we followed him into the conference room. Though no encouraging message from General Walther Wenck (Twelfth Army) had been received, Hitler continued to clutch at that straw. Regardless of the fate of the starving, thirsting, and dying population, he was determined to postpone the inevitable end even further. And then he gave one of the most inhuman of all his orders: because the Russians had repeatedly thrown back the German lines by advancing through the underground and other railway tunnels to attack the German forces from the rear, he now detailed special units to open the locks of the river Spree, thus flooding the railway tunnels south of the Reich Chancellery. These tunnels were crammed with civilians and thousands of wounded. They were no longer of interest to him. His insane order cost the lives of very many people." 

Yep.