I'd seen clips. Everyone my age has seen a Hitler in the bunker meme, and someone posted the Hitler Youth clip where they're shooting an anti-tank gun, which is what got me to pull the trigger and check out the full movie. Well that and watching the situation unfold in Ukraine, with weapons handed out to civilians in the center of Kiev.
Crazy shit man, just total indifference to death. Early on Hitler says something like "if the war is lost then there's no point trying to save any of our people," and they just keep throwing people at the RED ARMY BABAAAAAYYYYY. Arming kids, shooting old men labeled as "deserters", kids shooting each other(?!?! is that historically accurate??) rather than be captured, and I hardly need to go into detail about the callousness, paralysis, contradiction, and ass-kissing at the command level, especially at that stage of the war where they had nothing left to use.
Actually fuck that, I do want to go into a bit of detail on the contradiction because I'm watching it again now, and because I saw the same shit happen in Ukraine (on ASB Military it came out that Ukrainian civilians armed by their government were mistaken for Russian saboteurs and killed. People are calling this propaganda, of course)
An SS man watches through binoculars as Volkssturm run right into his line of fire. He is told they are under the command of Goebbels. He appeals to Goebbels that these people aren't armed or trained well enough to fight. Goebbels says that their belief in the final victory makes up for that. He restates "without weapons these men can't fight. their deaths are pointless." and Goebbels responds "I don't pity them. The people called this upon themselves. We didn't force them, they gave us a mandate, and now they're paying for it."
Excellent movie. I remember watching a lot of meme videos with scenes from it like 10 years ago, but I eventually learned German so it became impossible to not understand sentences like "DER ANGRIFF STEINERS WAR BEFEHL!", making memey subtitles ineffective.
Anyway, shitty and in retrospective probably yikes meme formats from a decade ago aside, it's really interesting how we are now seeing the very same delusional "We are not losing, just this one offensive and the war turns around" scenes play out in real time with figures like Zelensky, should the Saddam Hussein-esque military humiliation of the Ukrainian Army be accurate information.
I want to say the depiction of the werewolf brigades was accurate, I believe. Good movie though.
In the later months of the war, they equipped the Volkssturm (militia) with bicycles and Panzerfausts (short-range bazookas) and sent them against the Red Army. It did not go well for them.
https://www.campfirecycling.com/blog/2016/11/30/geef-me-min-fiets-give-me-my-bike-the-bikes-of-world-war-ii (at the bottom of the page)
