While some criticism about the movie -especially concerning the German part- are certainly justified (it’s a Spielberg film after all) the web site you linked to is more than just dubios and both the meanwhile deceased Hans Schmidt as well as Michael A. Hoffmann II are/were Holocaust deniers of the worst kind.
Not just because it’s a Spielberg film, but because the writer is a cornball tool who likes to rewrite history with an awful nostalgia bent. He also wrote the hoaky and dubious “The Patriot” as a fanciful distortion of the America Revolutionary War in the South. I think what could have been a great film is hindered by sentimentality, which is a single greatest killer of war films. Casting Matt Damon didn’t help…
But Schmidt is also full of shit with his odes to mythical SS professionalism. Certainly it existed. But perhaps he and his SS compatriots, as their internet fanbois would like us all to know, didn’t cluster behind armored vehicles in urban fighting. But there are numerous accounts taken from The Battle of the Bulge where German Heer and SS troopers were mowed down wholesale while attempting frontal attacks clustered together with poor tactical movement as they essentially reenacted The Somme. Most assume that this was due to the fact that Germany was perennially on the defensive and their training of Landsers lacked fire and maneuver since they were rarely on the offensive anymore anyways. There’s one account of a group of encircled and cut-off rear echelon U.S. Army intelligence soldiers that basically had to give up because they ran out of ammo, and the German SS-troopers still had difficulty taking their surrender as they had a hard time getting over the piles of bodies in the snow. The GI’s all assumed that, after suffering no casualties, they were going to be summarily executed. To their surprise they were not only treated correctly by the SS, but actually treated very respectfully…
Not sure what the benefit is of someone giving us a link to the website of Michael A. Hoffman II, someone who occupies a position towards the further end of the nutsy spectrum of anti-Semitism, Holocost Denial and various other reactionary, occultist etc. notions. Hardly surprising that the “review” is so bad that it is extraordinary that even Hoffman would put it up on the Web. By the way - “Private Ryan” undoubtedly had its flaws but, compared to “The Patriot”, it seems an unqualified masterpiece … Best regards, JR.
Not sure what the benefit is of someone giving us a link to the website of Michael A. Hoffman II, someone who occupies a position towards the further end of the nutsy spectrum of anti-Semitism, Holocost Denial and various other reactionary,
It seems people either forgot or don’t even know that there was antisemitism long before Hitler became in power and that Jews had been prosecuted out of so many Europeans countries for centuries way before Hitler and the 3rd Reich were even born. Why were they? I dunno. Was it right? No! but Hitler wasn’t not the first.