Armistice Day

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Just what i was going to say also 
He was even good to the civilians of the places he occupied 
He was good to his men and valued their lives 
There is evidence he was an antisemite  
He frequently praised by his enemies

To be honest, my philosophy on this sort of thing is "take what you can get." I tend to not have a very positive view of people for reasons that involve having to live with them for 29 years, and, in my experience, we all tend to be deeply flawed. Some are just better at hiding it. And honestly, this sort of thing especially applies when you're something of a Germanophile. I'm a big fan of Weimar cinema, and, honestly, it can be kind of depressing to look into whatever happened to people who worked on these films. Case in point: for Fritz Lang's M, one of my all-time favourites, of all the people involved worthy enough to have earned a Wikipedia article, which ones actually had the sense to get the hell out of there? Director Fritz Lang, Actor Peter Lorre, and actresses Rosa Valetti and Hanna Maron (who played, respectively, an innkeeper, and the little girl who does the nursery rhyme in the beginning.) The rest stayed: The blind balloon-man died in the Lodz ghetto, and, while Inspector Lohman was given special deferential treatment after paying a substantial sum to the Nazi Party, and the Safecracker basically became a collaborator. And that's to say nothing of Emil Jannings, star of The Last Laugh, Faust, and The Blue Angel, who became so active in the regime that he was virtually unemployable when the war was over. And yet the work he made before the Nazis took over remains powerful even close to a century later. I had a teacher of German history who, despite pointing out how poor a teacher Prof. Rath was in The Blue Angel, said that, in the final scene, where he dies, clutching his old teaching desk, that he wanted to go out like that.

Imagine how much worse it would have been for those Germans who actually lived through the war and had to pick up the pieces, to realise that, yes, their side were unequivocally the baddies, trying to reconcile their national pride with all the Hell that Hitler spent the last twelve years inflicting on them. And then, when it turns out that Rommel, the man they rooted for during the war, actually had some good qualities, was praised even by his rivals, and could potentially have even been part of the Resistance (admittedly a stretch, but it's enough for the people and the Rommel Myth), is it any wonder that the cult of Rommel continues?

Being anti-German is bigotry.  Being anti-Nazi is just necessary.

Boru