Since we launched our Summer of the Eastern Front series in June to coincide with the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa (and the Soviet retaliation, Operation Bagration, which launched on the same date three years later), as well as in the months leading up to it, I have been watching a lot of movies, TV shows, and YouTube content about this aspect of the Second World War.
Additionally, I have always been fascinated by non-English-speaking film and TV. My Netflix recommends are half foreign by this point and and as a student of several languages I always like to watch them with the original voice tracks. At this point I may just be reading more movies and TV shows than not. In the same vein, I appreciate the different perspectives and alternate cultural assumptions that go into foreign media, and you can learn a lot about how people view a topic by how they tell stories about it.
So when we started this project, I was curious to see how the fighting on the Eastern Front was portrayed in the media of other nations – especially those from the primary combatants Germany and Russia. These are just a few that I came across that I thought were interesting enough to recommend.
Istrebiteli (The Attackers)
This one came across my Amazon feed earlier this year (before we started this project) and I watched it almost on a lark. Not expecting much, I was pleasantly surprised and ended up enjoying it quite a bit.
A 12 episode series, “The Attackers” tells the story of a squadron of Yak-1 fighter pilots. What makes this particular aerial unit interesting is that it is a mixed-gender combat unit. The Soviet Union was unique in that it was the only combatant in the Second World War to put women into aerial combat roles, and while most of these were all-female units (such as the infamous “Night Witches” of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment) mixed-gender aerial combat units were very much a thing.
The series mostly follows Lidiya, the squadron’s senior-most fighter pilot. She is a fictional stand-in for the real-life Lydia Litvyak, one of the Soviet Union’s most decorated WW2 fighter pilots and one of only a handful of women to ever earn the title of combat ace. Litvyak’s story is fascinating in its own right and worth following down the Wikipedia rabbit hole if you have a little time to spare.
There are a number of other interesting characters who come and go. One of the more intriguing of these is Ilya Bestuzhev, the son of pre-Soviet nobility whose motives are always looked upon with suspicion by his commanders. The plot arcs that include him give an interesting insight into the legacy of class distinctions in Russia after the civil war, something that is almost never really addressed in western media.
Another aspect I found really interesting was the introduction of a plot arc involving the “hilfswillinge,” captured Soviet soldiers who ended up voluntarily working for the German Wehrmacht. While one might expect such people largely considered traitors to the Soviet Union to be outright vilified in Russian media, their portrayal is more even-handed than I would have expected.
Similarly, one of the series’ recurring primary antagonists is the squadron’s political officer, who is a fairly reprehensible human being and who abuses what power he has at almost every turn. The series doesn’t candy-coat the control some of these officers held over the men and women in their units, and how power corrupts. That said, even this largely despicable character gets something of a redemption arc as the series goes on.
Ironically, for a series about fighter pilots, one of the most lackluster aspects of the show is the aerial combat. What isn’t in-cockpit stock footage is glaringly obvious CGI. Yes, the show released in 2013 so we need to make some allowances, but if you’re looking for a Russian “Top Gun,” you might be disappointed. But for my money, the series really shines when it’s looking at the relationships between the characters on the ground. In that context the aerial combat is akin to the backdrop, the scenery against which the human drama is taking place.
And speaking of scenery, the squadron is operating out of crude airfields in the middle of nowhere and it looks it! The sets, vehicles, and especially the uniform costumes are top notch and really go a long way to conveying the “day-in-the-life” stories of these soldiers. I particularly like the way they’re constantly messing with their boots, a detail that just screams of verisimilitude.
Spoiler Alert: be careful getting too attached to any particular characters, though. This is the Eastern Front, after all, and there is…attrition.
Note: There is apparently a second season, but none of my streaming services have proven particularly cooperative and I have not yet seen it.
Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter (Generation War)
Switching from the Soviet perspective to the German one, Generation War tells the story of five young friends in Berlin, and the series begins on the eve of the invasion of Russia. The series follows two brothers (bound for the army), the undeclared sweetheart of the older brother (heading off to become a nurse), their friend the tailor (who’s just trying to survive the increasing restrictions being placed on Jews in Berlin), and his girlfriend (an aspiring singer). The night before the brothers ship out, the group has a festive get-together and all five agree to meet back together at Christmas once the Soviet Union has been defeated and the war is over.
Spoiler alert: The war isn’t over by Christmas.
The series consists of three feature-length episodes. The first, (“A Different Time”), generally parallels the Wehrmacht’s lightning advance into Russia during Operation Barbarossa, coming to an end once that operation grinds to a halt and the first Russian counter-offensive begins. The second (“A Different War”) deals with the Wehrmacht’s reversal of fortunes and the advancing onslaught of the Red Army. The final episode (“A Different Country”) deals with the collapse of the Wehrmacht, Germany’s capitulation, and the new post-war reality.
The series is well-acted and the production values are high, which is good because the series does not shy away from the subject matter. The depictions of the fighting on the Eastern Front go a long way toward illustrating the viciousness and relentlessly dehumanizing effects of this particular theater of the war. Of particular importance to me is the fact that the series doesn’t prop up the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth, a false narrative which contends that it was “only the SS” that carried out atrocities. In Generation War, ordinary soldiers are depicted as complicit in the execution of both prisoners and civilians. Indeed, Friedhelm (the younger of the two brothers) starts out the series as a kind and compassionate soul derided and belittled by other men in his unit as a weakling and a coward at the outset of the war. But by a later episode he is shown following an order to execute civilians without hesitation or question. Completely desensitized to the horrors of war, it takes an extreme event to make him regain his sense of self.
Another cultural aspect that I found interesting was the depiction of the father of Viktor, the young Jewish tailor. It’s almost a case study in something that you’ll read about in any number of histories of the years leading up to the Holocaust, namely that so many German Jews viewed themselves as so intrinsically German that they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the country would turn its back on them. And as a result, of course, most waited to get out until it was too late, thinking that surely sensibility would prevail. Spoiler alert.
One of the aspects of the show which has drawn a lot of criticism is its depiction of a group of Polish partisans as virulently antisemitic. Poland has had an uneasy history with the Holocaust, at times decrying any involvement or claiming that surely the rounding up of Polish Jews by the Germans was somehow happening without their knowledge or consent. But the fact of the matter is that antisemitism was rife throughout Europe at the time and there is no question that at least some segment of the Polish populace was complicit – be it for ideological, religious, or just plain financial reasons. Informing on your neighbors is a tradition since time immemorial, and to think that it never occurred in Poland during the chaos of the Second World War strains credulity.
There are times when Generation War is legit hard to watch – not so much for gore or whatever, but rather because it is fairly up-front in its portrayal of the horrific nature of war in general and of this war in particular. But in some sense I think that makes it that much more important to give it a view. This is German filmmakers not shying away from the terrible things done by their country. It is also unsettling and deeply galling to see one of the chief Nazi antagonists of the series never see justice for his actions. It’s not quite an Operation Paperclip level of WTF, but it highlights the Western Allied powers’ complicity in “rehabilitating” Nazi functionaries as a callous crime of convenience.
Aside: The character of Wilhelm, the older of the two brothers, is played by German actor Volker Bruch, who I first saw in the series Babylon Berlin. In that series, he plays a police detective in the inter-war Weimar Republic. While it takes place before the outbreak of the Second World War and is not directly related to the Eastern Front itself, I mention it here because a) it’s a great film-noir detective story, and b) it touches on the Nazis’ rise to power, setting the stage for the war itself. Of particular note are all the pro-monarchist German industrial magnates with dreams of restoring the Kaiser to power talking about, “let’s just use these disorganized Nazi idiot rabble for temporary political cover and then dispose of them once we’re back in power.” Spoiler alert. Anyway, it’s a fun series, well worth the watch.
Battle for Sevastopol
Another Russian-language entry, this 2015 joint Russian-Ukrainian film is essentially a biopic about the life of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Red Army sniper with a staggering 309 confirmed kills to her credit.
While this one could easily have gone full “Enemy at the Gates” (the 2001 Jude Law film about Soviet sniper Vasily Zaitsev), it instead plays all sorts of games with the timeline, interspersing combat scenes with flashbacks of her life before the war and flashes forward to her travels to America as part of the effort to encourage the United States to open a second front to the war.
The “based on a true story” line in the title poster is doing some heavy lifting here. But while many of the interactions depicted have been fictionalized and some of the supporting characters invented from whole cloth, much of the events in the US are taken directly from period news accounts. This includes her famous response to a pushy reporter during a 1942 interview in Chicago, at which she famously quipped: “I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?”
Spoiler alert: Operation Torch (the joint US, British, and Free French invasion of North Africa) would begin just a few weeks later, finally cracking open the door of a second front against Germany.
While parts of the film are pretty cheesy, it offers an interesting look at the Soviet Union’s frustration at its “allies” dragging their heels while Russian blood was being spilled. It also shows a window into the pre-Cold War years, before Josef Stalin lived rent-free in the collective heads of American leaders for 80 years and “communist” became such a dirty word. It’s worth noting that the organization at whose meetings Pavlichenko often spoke was the Congress of Industrial Organizations (which would go on to merge with the American Federation of Labor to form what we refer to today as simply the AFL/CIO), highlighting the spirit of cooperation of labor organizers the world over regardless of ideology.
Soviet Storm: World War II in the East
Available on Amazon Prime, this Russian-produced documentary series was released in 2011 and covers events spanning the entire war, from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa all the way through the Soviet capture of Berlin and even to the conflict between Russia and Japan at the very end of the war.
While criticism of Josef Stalin is much easier in post-Soviet Russia, the series looks at the Russian leader with a pretty sober eye, highlighting cases where he and the Stavka (the Soviet high command) got things wrong, especially during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa. History is of course told by the victors and it is very easy for a documentary to veer into jingoistic propaganda about how great we are and how bad the enemy is. This series avoids that pretty well, and is a relatively unvarnished recounting of events. Perhaps this is because it focuses on the military actions more than the political aspects, but the aforementioned criticism of Stalin highlights that where the political is necessary to understand the context of why things happened the way they did, the series goes there.
Further, as a documentary series it goes into a level of detail that rarely gets captured in fictionalized depictions of the conflict. It’s pretty well-produced and includes loads of archival footage, much of it from Soviet sources that I’m not sure have ever been aired in western documentaries. Though where archival footage is either unavailable or insufficient, the series delves into CGI. These graphics don’t hold up particularly well to the modern eye (conditioned as we are on a decade of visually gorgeous Marvel movies), but honestly I wasn’t particularly bothered by them.
The bigger drawback is that while there is an English-language voice-over available, all of the on-screen map captions are in Cyrillic! Fortunately, Cyrillic only has 33 letters and many of them are similar to the Greek alphabet (which you probably already know from math classes, if you can remember that far back). But even if you can’t be arsed to read it, the voice-over does a pretty good job of giving you sufficient context to interpret the graphics.
One word of warning on the series, however, and that’s that the original order in which the episodes were aired is not chronological, instead focusing on key actions (such as the battle of Stalingrad) earlier in the series. There’s a YouTube version that has them in chronological order, so if you’re not super familiar with the timeline you might want to give that a look.
Spoiler alert: It’s actually in reverse chronological order, so start with Episode 18 (Operation Barbarossa) and work backwards.
From a wargaming perspective, having longer documentary information about important actions (Capture of Kiev, Siege of Leningrad, Battle of Stalingrad, Kursk, etc) is cool and at the very least can give you a jumping-off point to do further research into aspects of those actions you’d find most interesting to game out on the tabletop.
Sisu
OK, this one’s mostly a joke, but if you want to see bad things happen to Nazis this 2022 Finnish movie is absolutely for you. It’s about an old Finnish soldier in the waning days of the war, as the Germans retreat from the Red Army across Finland. Now that the war is effectively over, said old Finn takes it upon himself to retire from the fighting and do something else, in this case prospecting. He discovers a massive deposit of gold, and in the process of trying to transport it to civilization runs across the ragged, cartoonishly despicable German remnants.
Spoiler alert: Hijinks ensue.
Comedic mayhem aside there’s an interesting historical framing going on here. For most of the war, Finland was actually allied with Nazi Germany. There were pragmatic geopolitical reasons for this – mainly that Russia had invaded Finland in 1939 (a disastrous Soviet endeavor that would come to be known as the “Winter War”) and England and France had basically hung the Finns out to dry. But everybody knows that Nazis are the bad guys, so they rather than the Russians are the antagonists of this film. These German soldiers know the war is over, but they are not shy about extracting whatever they can from the local populace as they retreat. And once they find out about the gold, well…
There’s much about this movie that’s terrible – starting with the tank. It always irks me when tanks from later eras are dressed up and passed off as a Panzer III or whatever (the notorious “Hollywood Tiger” being such an egregious example that Warlord Games made a model kit for it). The antagonists are the most two-dimensional of mustache-twirling villains and the main character’s sheer unwillingness to die shatters any sense of suspension of disbelief.
But god DAMN do Nazis get killed in a staggering number of ways. The sheer creativity alone makes the juice worth the squeeze. If you are bored and have 91 minutes available, this one’s definitely chuckle-worthy.
World War Two
Busted, you got me – this one isn’t foreign language and not specifically focused on the Eastern Front, but honorable mention absolutely must go to the World War Two YouTube channel, brain-child of documentarians Indy Niedell and Spartacus Olsson. It follows from their fantastic “The Great War” project, which was a week-by-week retelling of the events of the First World War. Running from 2014 to 2018, that series’ weekly YouTube video episodes (which each generally ran about 15 minutes in length) covered in detail the events that transpired in that same period 100 years before.
In September 2018, they teamed up again under the “Time Ghost” banner to give the same treatment to the Second World War. Again a week-by-week retelling, the series breaks the events of the entire war down into manageable chunks such that you can easily follow their progress. They definitely upped their game, and the research, maps, graphics, commentary, and coverage is top notch. It is without doubt the most thorough video documentary coverage of the Second World War in history. Unbelievably well-produced.
In addition to the weekly episodes about the war itself, the series includes a number of special episodes that do deeper dives into a specific technologies, personalities, or events. There are also the adjacent series “Spies and Ties” (hosted by Astrid Deinhard, about all of the covert shenanigans and clandestine hooliganism that all sides engaged in during the war) and “The War Against Humanity” (hosted by Spartacus Olsson himself, covering the atrocities conducted by all of the war’s major combatants) that give loads of additional context to the events of the war itself. Taken collectively, they are an immensely exhaustive resource well worth the time to watch.
Though Neidell is American, Olsson, Deinhard, and much of the research and production staff are German and their chief graphics animator is Ukrainian. Olsson’s War Against Humanity series in particular is a poignant and unflinching analysis of the core ideology of hate that drove the actions of the Nazi regime. His admonition at the end of each of these episodes – “Never forget” – is an important reminder that the destructive urges of hate and the catastrophic effects of war feed from and reinforce one another.
Even though their week-by-week coverage of World War 2 is over, they continue to put out new content, doing Q&A sessions and going deeper into the weeds about some of the war’s more esoteric topics. It’s all fascinating stuff, honestly. And the Time Ghost team is now covering the Korean War in the same way. Given that the events in Korea were a direct result of the shifts in power in the post-war world and would very much set up the tensions of the Cold War, it makes for an interesting segue. And if you’re prone to paying attention, it puts a lot of what’s happening in modern events into sharper context and focus.
As documentarians, this team is top-notch. I am a proud member of the “Time Ghost Army” (as they call their supporters on Patreon), and if you are even a little bit interested in history they are absolutely worth checking out.
Closing Credits
These are just a few examples of media told from a different perspective, something that is important if we’re to understand history more fully and completely. Even if closed captioning isn’t really your cup of tea, I think stepping outside of our comfort zones and watching things that might not initially seem to be our jam is worth doing. You’ll almost certainly learn something you didn’t know before, or think about something you already knew in an entirely new way. So put new batteries in your remote and go nuts!
Have any non-English WW2 movies or TV series you like? Drop us a note or a link in the comments below or give us a shout at contact@goonhammer.com. Our Netflix queues are always hungry for more!
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