Nazi Germany And The Nazi War - 1396 Words

The contents of culture are a good way to gauge the morals and beliefs of a society. Movies specifically are good indicators. It then comes off as more than a lighthearted issue when few American-made movies characterize Nazi Germany as actual people and instead dehumanize them. The Germans are nearly always shown in a negative light when in reality fewer than 40% of Germans voted for Hitler when he was elected. Furthermore, even fewer Germans knew about the Holocaust during the war. Most films inevitably depict all Germans as a single force hellbent on killing every Jewish person at whatever cost. World War II films such as Inglorious Basterds that dehumanize Germans through guilt by association, making them seem like an evil force, and†¦show more content†¦The Disney movie Mulan depicts them as one-dimensional evil characters that only have a lust for blood. Beliefs that dehumanize like these can affect our interaction with other cultures even today, so it is important tha t we understand the symptoms so we can eliminate it. The Inglorious Basterds are a group of Jewish-American soldiers that are chosen to fight Germans behind the front lines. Their goal, as stated by the commander Lieutenant Aldo Raine in the beginning of the movie, is â€Å"Killin Nazi’s.† He continues to state that â€Å"Nazi[s] ain’t got no humanity.† This not only sets the tone for the entirety of the rest of the movie, but also explicitly states that Nazis are going to be dehumanized in the Film. The first standard that a movie has to satisfy is that it tries to associate the actions of the one group of Germans such as the Schutzstaffel (S.S.) or Hitler with the entire German military. By relating the actions of one person to many others it becomes easier to do inhuman things to them such as torture. Inglorious Basterds fits this category well. In the first scene of the movie we see members of the S.S. driving to a Frenchman’s home. Upon his a rrival the audience finds out the a Jewish family is missing and the S.S. officer suspects the man of hiding them. The man confesses that they are hidden under the floorboards and the S.S. officer and his soldiers ruthlessly shoots them all but one. By opening with this