MovieChat Forums > Steiner - Das Eiserne Kreuz, 2. Teil Discussion > Worth seeing if you're a big fan of the ...

Worth seeing if you're a big fan of the actors or WW2 movies


In spite of some bad performances, it's still fun to see all these legendary actors on screen together. Curd Jürgens and Steiger were especially good.

On the other hand, if you haven't seen The Cross of Iron, the movie that this film is a sequel to, it's a bit harder to understand the hostile dynamics between Steiner and von Stransky.

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What I want to know is if so many German soldiers were against Hitler, how come the war lasted nearly six years? Somebody besides a few thousand die-hard Nazis and Waffen-SS troops must have been on his side. More than likely, Steiner and his comrades were content to go along to get along until they started losing and the Allies started inching toward their precious Fatherland. Sometimes, I wonder how many Germans are secretly thinking, "Wait until next time." Many of the most rabid anti-Hitler plotters were Communists who wanted to replace one tyranny with another. Many others were monarchists who would have been happy to fight a second war if the Hohenzollern royal family had still ruled Germany.

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What can a common soldier or citizen do in a police state? By the time the war was clearly lost, Hitler wasn't even showin his face in public. It was up to the Army General Staff who could get close enough to make the hit to do the job.

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Exactly my point. Most of the non-Communist resistance against the Nazis sprang up when they started losing. Had they kept winning, I'm sure many of their opponents would have gone along with Hitler. Many were also aristocratic snobs. They would have gladly done everything Hitler ordered if he had been a Hohenzollern kaiser, with the exception of exterminating the Jews.

As for the common people, you are mostly right, although they too backed Hitler when he was a winner. If you are to believe the lying apologist pictures of the last 30 years, there were only maybe a few dozen Nazis in Germany, telling everyone else what to do.

Study after study has shown that if you give even a normally decent person power over others, especially those branded as "inferior," it can go to their head and lead to horrible abuses. The USA has had its share of demagogues too, like Huey Long for instance. He and Adolf would have gotten along fine.

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Yeah that's about right; so many of those 'plotters' were, "well, Hitler passed through too fast to set the bomb" or "Hitler didn't want to get on the plane with the bomb on it"...there seemed to be a lack of officers who were willing to just walk up to 'Dolph & just shoot him dead and then 'face the consequences'. None of them seemed to be willing to risk their hides in the effort to 'save' Germany.






Why can't you wretched prey creatures understand that the Universe doesn't owe you anything!?

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Von Stauffenberg took more risks than most, but suicide just wasn't a German thing like it was with the Japanese. The idiot who trained him in how to set the bomb didn't tell him he didn't have to set the fuses in each explosive block. If he had just thrown the second block of HE in his briefcase, the exploding first one would have set it off too and that would have been it for everyone in the bunker. They did an experiment on The Military Channel (now AHC) that proved it. He didn't know much about explosives himself. There was one German general supposedly willing to throw himself on Hitler and explode a bomb to kill them both in 1943, but he never got close enough, or so he said. He survived the war.

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I'll have to see it sometime.

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i sort of like these movies that are duds but have big names stars that are long dead.

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