- Not sure what to make of this
Posted by Raskolnikov
on November 3, 2021, 12:17 pm
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https://www.dumptheguardian.com/film/2021/nov/03/netflix-documentary-us-based-nazi-camp It's a new Netflix short, animated film that tells the " only recently released from behind redaction-marker bars" story of the first part of Operation Paperclip and other ops. where the US saved German war criminals from the Nuremburg trials and put them to work on their missile/space/weapons programs. So first of all, this isn't a recently revealed story at all and it's been widely known about for a long time and this film doesn't seem particularly interested in the details of even the vanilla Paperclip stuff, let alone the Gehlen business. The collected Germans were housed in a camp while they were vetted and sent out to various programs. Here the focus is apparently the Jewish guards who were put in charge of this camp. It's never made clear whether it was ONLY Jewish guards and administration or just that they found two that happened to be still alive and Jewish. The review seems to make this tension the main subject of the film which seems to be filming the trees and not the forest. The film makers end this strange review with: With domestic Nazi activity and Russia paranoia both having spiked under Trump, the takeaway from this brutal social studies lesson is clear: the nasty tendency to overlook transgressions for the sake of political usefulness hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re still repeating the mistakes of previous generations, putting what’s expedient over what’s right, leaving the civilian souls caught in the crossfire to be forgotten, abandoned, or ignored. Mayer and Weiss share their recollections in the hope that we can break this cycle, and hold our leaders to a higher standard of humanity. “This is not a story of the past,” Sivan says. “The US is collaborating today with a bunch of dark regimes, Israel as well. If you look anywhere in the world, Europe or Asia, everyone’s working with tyrants and other people who have blood on their hands. It’s always in the ‘national interest,’ too. This isn’t a story about terrible things that happened back in the ’40s. We didn’t learn our lesson.” which is an odd mix of "no shit Sherlock" stating the obvious hand wringing and virtue signalling, with an obligatory mention of Trump. The Israel line is also interesting; do they mean to separate Israel from the "dark regimes" or is it that Israel is also collaborating with dark regimes? Maybe it's just this review that is really mixed up; I suppose I'll have to watch it to find out, but it seems almost like another one in the almost endless line of "such and such of Auschwitz" stories. |
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