The Ambiguity of Evil

One of the things that I so appreciated about the film "Judgment at Nuremburg" was that it totally problematized the notion that all Nazis were evil, which is so much easier to believe than that there was any complexity to the situation at all.

The film "Stalingrad" is another such film. It's a German production, and really doesn't focus on Nazism that much. It portrays the German army from the inside, with enlisted soldiers, who hardly know why they're fighting. Again, it made it much more difficult to believe that every single German soldier was pure evil. Granted, anyone in the German army during World War II pretty much was a thug, in that they contributed to the murderous and totally unnecessary German war machine.

But a lot of the soldiers in the film didn't want to fight, didn't believe in it, wanted to desert, did desert, stopped believing in any "cause" at all.

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