I think the fundamental difference in Boll's approach is, that he depicted the killings in Auschwitz almost as "industrialized", and the "work" of the SS-guards as an "ordinary day at the office", which I think was exactly his intention.
After all, these guards were blunted and dulled down to such an extent, that they weren't able or willing to see, that they were part of an industrialized and meticulously planned killing process.
The almost unemotional depiction of the process and the quite indifferent looking "work" of the guards is, at least imho, more true to reality than Hollywood's usual heroism or typical Nazi-villains you see in so many movies.
At least to me, the horror of it all doesn't just lie in the ammount of killings, which you can't comprehend anyway, but also in this cold, emotionless process, that makes concentration camps like Auschwitz somehow a "killing-plant", a factory for the systematic erradication of people.
I don't think Boll's Auschwitz-depiction is a master piece by showing this, but it indeed brings something completely new on the table, nobody was willing to show, or dared to show, yet.
A few years ago, I read a book about German soldiers and their letters home. Indeed, some of these soldiers sometimes wrote letters to their loved ones that make you cringe. They wrote about mass killings like it was nothing special, just "business as usual", something you would see every day. In some way, the whole situation not only did de-humanize the jews as "Untermenschen", but it also de-humanized soldiers involved in these crimes against humanity, to some extent due to Nazi-propaganda, but also by putting them, as soldiers, into a setting, that is far away from "normal" life as a civilian. This is you can more or less observe in any war, but in WWII, it was also used for the national-socialist cause.
Imho, people are capable of things they couldn't imagine, once they are ripped out of their social structures and norms, into a surrounding where humanity doesn't count anymore. That's why Boll did this film in the first place, I think. It just can happen again, any time, anywhere.
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