Editor's Note: I am proud to call Hans Schmidt, the
author of the following, my friend. I have had the privilege and honor to know
several German WWII veterans personally, from Wehrmacht privates to
Major-General Otto Ernst Remer, and I found each of them to be fine men and
great human beings.
In the annals of modern
history, I do not believe there are military veterans who have had to face the
ordeal of vilification and falsification which these German veterans have
endured. They are hated and reviled in spite of the fact that they generally
fought cleanly and honorably in a war that can hardly be said to have been of
their choosing.
Having met these men in the
flesh, my intellectual convictions about the horrors of the fratricide that was
World War Two were confirmed emotionally and personally. To regard these blood
brothers of Americans as the enemy was the real "war crime."
Spielberg's "Pvt.
Ryan" is about saving a surviving brother from the fate which befell his
other siblings in the American army. But concern only for the life of the
brother in American uniform is fatally short-sighted. Saving Private Fritz was
just as necessary. To think otherwise is to engage in deadly self-hate masked
by the slick celluloid of Spielberg.
It is this hatred for the
image of the German stranger, who is in fact not a stranger, but the face in
our own mirror, that is at the root of the rot we observe today in
Contrary to Spielberg's
suggestion that Western, Christian civilization was saved in WWII by the
killing of Germans, the opposite obtained. One cannot make so colossal a
blunder as to mistake one's own brother for the enemy and compound that tragedy
a million times and expect the restoration of anything.
I now present to you the
only reaction I have thus far seen to "Saving Private Ryan" from one
of those brothers our American countrymen sought to destroy. --Michael A.
Hoffman II
Mr. Steven Spielberg
Dreamworks Productions
10 Universal City Plaza
Dear Mr. Spielberg:
Permit me, a twice wounded
veteran of the Waffen-SS, and participant in three campaigns (
Having read many of the
accolades of this undoubtedly successful and, shall we say,
"impressive," film, I hope you don't mind some criticism from both a
German and a German-American point of view.
Apart from the carnage
immediately at the beginning of the story, during the invasion at
You made some commendable
efforts to provide authenticity through the use of several pieces of
original-looking German equipment, for instance, the Schützenpanzerwagen
(SPW), the MG 42s, and the Kettenkrad.
And, while the appearance
of German infantry soldiers of the regular Army in the
My comment about the
unreality of the battle scenes has to do with the fact that the Waffen-SS would
not have acted as you depicted them in "Private Ryan."
While it was a common sight
in battle to see both American and Russian infantry congregate around their
tanks when approaching our lines, this rarely if ever occurred with the
Waffen-SS.
(The first Americans I saw
during the
Furthermore, almost all the
German soldiers seen in "Private Ryan" had their heads shaved, or
wore closely cropped hair, something totally in conflict with reality. Perhaps
you were confusing, in your mind, German soldiers with Russians of the time.
Or else, your Jewishness
came to the fore, and you wanted to draw a direct line back from today's
skinheads to the Waffen-SS and other German soldiers of the Third Reich.
Also, for my unit you
should have used 18 or 19-year old boys instead of older guys. The average age,
including general officers of the heroic Hitlerjugend division at
The scene where the GI
shows his Jewish "Star of David" medallion to German POWs and tells
them: "Ich Jude, ich Jude!" is so outrageous as to be funny.
I can tell you what German
soldiers would have said to each other if such an incident had actually ever
occurred: "That guy is nuts!"
You don't seem to know that
for the average German soldier of World War II, of whatever unit, the race,
color or "religion" of the enemy didn't matter at all. He didn't know
and he didn't care.
Furthermore, you committed
a serious error in judgment when, in the opening scenes of "Private
Ryan" you had the camera pan from the lone grave with the Jewish star to
all the Christian crosses in the cemetery.
I know what you wanted to
say but I am sure that I was not the only one who immediately thereafter
glanced over all the other hundreds of crosses one could see, to discover
whether somewhere else was another Star of David.
And you know the answer. In
fact, you generated exactly the opposite effect of what you had intended. Your
use of that scene makes a lie out of the claim now put forth by Jewish
organizations that during World War II Jews volunteered for service in numbers
greater than their percentage of the general population, and that their blood
sacrifice was (therefore) higher also.
I visited the large
After World War I, some
German Jewish leaders mounted the same ruse: They claimed then and still do to
this day that, "12,000 Jews gave their lives for the Fatherland,"
which would also have made their general participation higher, which it was
not. But perhaps the "12,000" figure is intended as a symbol
denoting, "from our point of view, we did enough."
During World War II, as
now, about a quarter of the American population considered itself German-American.
Knowing the patriotic fervor German-Americans harbor for
Yet in "Saving Private
Ryan" there was not one single German name to be heard or seen among the
Americans.
Did you forget Nimitz,
Arnold, Spaatz or even Eisenhower? Well, perhaps Capt. Miller from
Well, maybe someone thinks
that the abundance of German sounding names such as Goldberg, Rosenthal,
Silverstein and Spielberg satisfies the need for "German-American"
representation.
My final comment concerns
the depictions of the shooting of German POWs immediately after a fire fight. A
perusal of American World War II literature indicates that such incidents were
much more common than is generally admitted, and more often than not, such
transgressions against the laws of war and chivalry are often or usually
excused, "because the GIs got mad at the Germans who had just killed one
of their dearest comrades".
In other words, the anger
and the war crime following it was both understandable and, ipso facto
excusable. In "Private Ryan" you seem to agree with this stance since
you permit only one of the soldiers, namely, the acknowledged coward, to say
that one does not shoot enemy soldiers who had put down their arms.
As a former German soldier
I can assure you that among us we did not have this, what I would call,
un-Aryan mindset.
I remember well, when in
January of 1945 we sat together with ten captured Americans after a fierce
battle, and the GIs were genuinely surprised that we treated them almost as
buddies, without rancor.
If you want to know why, I
can tell you. We had not suffered from years of anti-enemy hate propaganda, as
was the case with American and British soldiers whose basic sense of chivalry
had often (but not always) been dulled by watching too many anti-German war
movies usually made by your brethren.
(For your information: I
never saw even one anti-American war movie-- there were no more Jewish
directors at the UFA studios.)
Sincerely,
Hans Schmidt
Fax: 850-478-4993
Hans Schmidt is chairman of
the German-American National Public Affairs Committee (GANPAC) and publisher of
the monthly "GANPAC Brief" ($50/yr. [$35 for students and
pensioners] $60 overseas). In 1995 he was arrested in
The 71 year old Schmidt
remains unbowed and continues to address American audiences and write his
memoirs. His 490 page paperback book, "Jailed in Democratic Germany"
is available from him for $25.00 postpaid.
Links: Saving Public
Myth: Hoffman reviews "Pvt. Ryan"
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