Nazi armbands at the beginning...
We see them in a scene when Jim is riding his parent's car. A few people pass by the car wearing nazi armbands. Are they supposed to be western Nazi sympatizers...in a British colony?
shareIt wasn't a British Colony, it's the International Settlement in Shanghai, where the (effectively white) foreign population lived. This meant that Nazi Germans and Fascist Italians rubbed shoulders with enemy British and French, while neutral Spanish, Portuguese and Americans looked on. Just about every nation on earth in 1941 was represented in the International Settlement, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union.
I would recommend the book 'Secret War in Shanghai' by Bernard Wasserstein which puts EOTS into historical perspective. The truth is much stranger than fiction.
So what happened to these Germans and Italians? Were they under some kind of illusion that the war wasn't comming to them? Were they rounded up and repatriated or sent to some camps?
shareAccording to the book, the Italians were rounded up in 1943 when Italy surrendered to the Allies and the Germans ditto in May 1945. After that point the only whites left free in Shanghai were the effectively stateless White Russians, the exiles left over from the Russian Civil War, and the Jewish population who saw themselves as temporarily stateless as well.
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