While there have been a number of questions about Max and the ending, there is one piece of information missing from the story that shows how ridiculous it is.
The guards at the concentration and death camps were drawn from the SS. The SS also had tattoos: their blood group was tattooed under their left arm.
That's true, but the blood group tattoos were predominently found among the Waffen-SS (the more elite fighting units), and even then, there were numerous individuals who managed to avoid getting the tattoo, Mengele among them. But the guards in the camps were not, for the most part, drawn from the Waffen-SS, and in the later years of the war there were many more who joined the SS without getting tattoos.
Here's an interesting story about a man who found out his grandfather (who did not have the tattoo) had actually been a fervent SS member:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1308241/Martin-Davidson-grandfathers-secret-past-Nazi-SS-officer.html Some message board discussions on the topic have photos and various details about the tattoos:
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83809http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=677731https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t85348/And of course, Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_blood_group_tattooSince there are known examples of SS (even Waffen-SS) members who did not have the tattoo, I don't find it a "plot hole" in the film, any more than the issue, if it is one, of Zev passing himself off as "Jewish" without, presumably, ever having been circumcised, as many assimilated Catholics of Jewish descent were swept up in the "Jewish" label under the various Nuremberg classifications.
The film doesn't go into all the minutiae, quite rightly I think. It's a thriller, not an historical drama, and a very well-done thriller IMO.
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filmflamfilm
8 years ago
While you make some interesting points, unfortunately, the German version of Wikipedia is quite different from the English. For example, on the blood tattooing, they write "Bloodtattooing was the sign of membership in the SS Provisional, the SS Death Head group and later, the largest part of the Waffen SS" (my translation) (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blutgruppent%C3%A4towierung).
Secondly, there would have been little point in the Allied prisoner camps to search for the tattoos if they were limited to the Waffen SS. And yet these searches took place.
Frankly, as the point of the tattoo was medical, I have seen no statistics on how many SS people had them, but I too have heard that not everyone had them. Nevertheless, from what I have heard, the number who didn't have them were in the vast minority as they were seen as a benefit to those who had them.
Statistically, I would assume that Zev had one. Which would have made it very strange that he was married to a Jewish woman who never noticed it.
I was not as enthusiastic as you were about the film. I thought it was quite poorly written (I don't mean the absence of the tattoos).
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El_Guapo_Caballo
8 years ago
Statistically, I would assume that Zev had one.
For better enjoyment of a movie don't make asinine assumptions. The Angel of Death himself didn't have a tattoo and lived a long life in Brazil, before drowning in a beach near São Paulo.
The Holocaust's chief henchman himself avoided detection for decades by simply burning his tattoo with a cigarette. Such tattoo had no relevance whatsoever in the Mossad's intelligentsia when it came to capturing Eichmann outside Buenos Aires.
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schall1991
7 years ago
I "lmfao" when a pseudo-intellectual argues the validity of a Wikipedia source. That completely erases any decent point you might have had. Ouch...
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