The danger of distort historical events

One of the reviewers have sent me a message criticizing the fact that I put the following text in the reviews thread as I have not seen the film, neither the play although I read the scenario. He was quite right so I deleted my text and put it here.

The reason I think the way the subject risks to distort historical events in the mind of the viewers I explained in a private message.

What have been the historical events in their chronological order:

The decision not to destroy Paris by Von Choltitz took much more than a single day as seems presented in the movie as well as in the play which inspired it from what seems to appear from the reviews I read.

On August 7th 1944 following the Stauffenberg attempt to kill Hitler, the Führer nominates Von Choltitz as Governor of "Gross Paris" and gives a precise mission to the general. Among which Paris must be erased from the face of the earth, the Allies must find a heap of rumble! In his comments of his interview with Hitler the general says that he found a man which looks like a mad man and he Von Choltitz suddenly do not any more believe in the regime propaganda.

From then on especially after the intervention of the consul of Sweden Raoul Nordling, members of the resistance of General de Gaulle arrested on august the 19th are liberated the next day. The arrest followed preceding days of insurrection in the city.

On the 23rd the general receives the order to destroy Paris.

But the day before Nordling has a heart attack, he has been intensively active to liberate more than 3000 political prisoners. At the same time with his team he has progressively convinced the general not to follow the orders to come from Hitler to erase the capital.

On the 22d Nordling's brother meets the general Bradley who authorize General Leclerc to march on Paris and enter the capital. If I remember well at that moment the Allies are near le Mans, 100kms away from Paris.

On the 25th Billotte the second in command of Leclerc brings to Choltitz the surrender ultimatum which the latter accepts putting to an end to a terrible suspense and fate.

As I wrote this morning to "denizsi":

[The use of flashbacks]..." is where from my point of view reside the danger of the script and the danger is quite real because when you read the different reviews of the play as well as of the movie here in Paris, they are never mentioned and that's where the reader may think the event and the decisions were made in 24 hours or less.

Let's face facts: the events took place 60 years ago. Most of the participants to WWII are today dead. The situation in France (I will not discuss how things are done anywhere else in the world being not a specialist of teaching history there)today is a complete decay of teaching history in schools. Unless you go to university with a specialty in History , the way our High schools teaches history today make no sense and some habits of deforming history are still in practice. For example it has been stated and proved that Louis XVI was tall, the French schools continue to say he was not! The kids are not taught history in chronological order but begin with the Roman Empire then go to the 17th century and so on and so forth. That's how it was when my son and daughter were at school. The whole period of WWII and WWI are taught with huge gaps especially on the causes which lead from WWI to WWII and the arrival of the Nazi regime. Why? In this last instance, because the Allies and France in particular do not want to state clearly that it had a huge responsibility in the ascent of Hitler because of the stupidity and vengeful content of the Versailles Treaty.

We continue in France to glorify Napoleon when it is obvious that Napoleaon's wars were sowing the seeds of the 3 wars of 1870, 1914 and 1945 by the hate of the defeated countries towards France, not to mention the consequences of the decisions taken at the Vienna Congress that even Talleyrand considered to be very dangerous in the future as he states in his memoirs and is reported by one of his biographers, Jean Orieux.

As I think I wrote in my review, you never gain from humiliating an opponent ( I choose the word opponent on purpose preferring it to enemy). We were on the verge of doing the same in 1945."

We have multiple examples of deformation of historical events in movie making:

For example Sofia Coppola in her movie on Marie Antoinette asked a famous and respected specialist as adviser for her movie , Evelyne Lever. In Imdb she is mentioned in the middle of the "other crew" list! I attended a conference of Evelyne Lever at the time when the film was released in France. She explained how Sofia Coppola took no interest on Evelyn Lever remarks made concerning the way she presented facts, and with an unconceivable contempt!

In most of documentaries either shot in England or in the USA, the role of the Resistance in the preparation of D-Day is minimized if not overruled just the same is done for instance to the role of using gliders during those days. I discovered the latter recently, I did not know this very important fact and the immense courage those 6000 guys had to land without any armament to protect them of the guns of the enemy at the time. There is only one documentary on the subject relating this on youtube as far as I know. We could go on and on with such examples.

To conclude I think movie writers and directors should be very cautious when they use historical facts in their works. It is a question of ethics. But unfortunately this is a value which today is less and less put into practice and the danger is that it wide opens the gates to new horrors like the Holocaust for the future