Yesterday on TCM I came into the middle of a movie where I immediately recognized one of my favorite actors, Dana Andrews, and recognized the unmistakable voice of Walter Brennan even when his face was covered with the beard of a Slavic Patriarch. Looking them both up along with IMDb on my cell phone internet connection led me to North Star (1943). I followed the movie to its conclusion and discovered that although I found it to be a likely bit of war propaganda, that such rah-rah-whatever-side-the-USA-happens-to-support-at-the-time films probably resonate with me, even when they're sort of corny and propagandistic. Some of the charges made in the movie against the Wehrmacht were so seemingly outrageous that I decided to do further research, and eventually came to your website again and read Varlaam's review and more thoroughly looked at the credits and so forth and discovered that the scriptwriter was - uh oh - Lillian Hellman.
Varlaam was correct to point out that when the Germans invaded Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, they were greeted as liberators, indeed I have personally seen film footage of Ukrainian women throwing roses in the paths of German soldiers. This was because the Ukrainians were starving (over 7 million of them by that point), which fact was caused by Soviet Collective Farming. Malcolm Muggeridge of course exposed the Ukrainian starvation, while the New York Times' Walter Duranty covered it up. This then begs the question: why WOULD Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, etc. lend their names to a film of this sort? Moreover, who would write it? The answer is that Lillian Hellman wrote it. Lillian Hellman was such an unrepentant Communist that she actually praised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The really sad part is that an important feature of the movie, the use of Russian children by the Wehrmacht as human blood banks, appears potentially to be true. Yet there were only two hits on the first page of google hits that are NOT false positives when you type in Nazis used children as blood banks, and only one of those two (the top two) was a serious historical journal article, the other merely a chat board discussion. It's mentioned in the historical article that the Soviets mentioned this charge at Nuremburg, and it's the one charge that got dropped. Is it possible that, given Hellman's reputation, that she was seen as a biased boy crying wolf? Who knows? I'd be curious to know if there are others who, like me, tend to like the really mushy "mainstream of American 'thought'" (or perhaps I should say, 'feelings') movies of the 1940s (perhaps the influence of my parents) but who, having become older and wiser, wonder how much of what they "know" about reality is influenced by films with a fairly biased perspective. The sad part of Hellman's movie is that the most shocking part of her movie may be true, but unfortunately has largely gone into the dustbin of history due to the fact that her perhaps justified charge against the Wehrmacht has been thrown out with the bathwater of her Communist ideology.
Varlaam was correct to point out that when the Germans invaded Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, they were greeted as liberators, indeed I have personally seen film footage of Ukrainian women throwing roses in the paths of German soldiers. This was because the Ukrainians were starving (over 7 million of them by that point), which fact was caused by Soviet Collective Farming. Malcolm Muggeridge of course exposed the Ukrainian starvation, while the New York Times' Walter Duranty covered it up. This then begs the question: why WOULD Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, etc. lend their names to a film of this sort? Moreover, who would write it? The answer is that Lillian Hellman wrote it. Lillian Hellman was such an unrepentant Communist that she actually praised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The really sad part is that an important feature of the movie, the use of Russian children by the Wehrmacht as human blood banks, appears potentially to be true. Yet there were only two hits on the first page of google hits that are NOT false positives when you type in Nazis used children as blood banks, and only one of those two (the top two) was a serious historical journal article, the other merely a chat board discussion. It's mentioned in the historical article that the Soviets mentioned this charge at Nuremburg, and it's the one charge that got dropped. Is it possible that, given Hellman's reputation, that she was seen as a biased boy crying wolf? Who knows? I'd be curious to know if there are others who, like me, tend to like the really mushy "mainstream of American 'thought'" (or perhaps I should say, 'feelings') movies of the 1940s (perhaps the influence of my parents) but who, having become older and wiser, wonder how much of what they "know" about reality is influenced by films with a fairly biased perspective. The sad part of Hellman's movie is that the most shocking part of her movie may be true, but unfortunately has largely gone into the dustbin of history due to the fact that her perhaps justified charge against the Wehrmacht has been thrown out with the bathwater of her Communist ideology.