Interview with Adolf Burger, an Auschwitz survivor and a veteran of the largest forgery operation in history - Operation Bernhard.

I was given the opportunity to interview Adolf Burger, last week, during his visit to London. Burger survived Auschwitz before being transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1944. There, he was involved in Operation Bernhard - the top secret plan to forge millions of pounds worth of sterling and US dollars.

The 91-year old was in the capital last week to publicise the English edition of his memoir: The Devil's Workshop, and to visit the Bank of England, where he was presented with one of the very notes that he forged over 60 years ago.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5805195.ece

In my interview - which is transcribed below - I began by asking Mr Burger his reasons for writing the book:

Adolf Burger I have written quite a few books; the first one appeared in August 1945 in Prague, it was very thin, with only six photos that I had taken myself after the liberation in Ebensee. Then, later, I was working as a journalist and had collected over 200 documents and photos on this subject from across Europe, so I decided to write this book. When one reads a book, I think one must also see the images and documents from the time. Otherwise, if one reads, and one doesn’t see the pictures and documents then one does not believe that it is true.

Roger Moorhouse So was the book written, in some way, as proof of your story?

AB No. I don’t have to prove anything. I wanted to show people what the Nazis were capable of, and what the [Slovak fascist] Hlinka Guard was capable of. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I have achieved.

RM You were arrested and sent to Auschwitz in May 1942. Can you briefly describe how you came to Auschwitz, what you did there and what the conditions were like?

AB I was arrested because I was printing forged baptismal certificates for Slovak Jews. The Gestapo then arrested me, and my wife, and we were first sent to Zilina, where about 1,000 Jews were held. Then we were put into a train by the Hlinka Guard and were taken to the German border, where we were handed over to the SS. We ended our journey at Auschwitz.

RM And you had no idea, no suspicion, of what might happen to you there?

AB No, of course not. No-one knew. They didn’t even know about it in Switzerland. My brother in Israel managed to get them to send me a certificate granting me emigration to Israel, and the Swiss sent it to Birkenau! So the organisation in Switzerland didn’t even know what Auschwitz and Birkenau was. No-one did.

RM How was it then that you came to leave Birkenau?

AB Birkenau was hell. I worked on the ramp there, and had seen every day how 3,000 people would arrive by train and would disappear into the gas chambers.
But one day at roll call, they called out six names – all typographers. They had a card index of the prisoners and so they knew what we had done before arriving in the camp. So, then I had to go and see the camp commandant, an SS-Sturmbannführer. He confirmed my name and that I had been a typographer, and then told me that I would travel to Berlin as a free man and work in a library. All lies. So, the next day, they called the six names again, six printers, and we were put into quarantine for four weeks as they were so afraid of typhus. After that, six SS officers came down from Berlin, from the Sicherheitsdienst, and they accompanied us to the train – but it was not a freight car, it was a passenger train – and they took us to Berlin and then to Sachsenhausen.

RM So, from your time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, you knew full-well what was going on there. And then you were sent to Sachsenhausen. Was that not some sort of miracle for you?

AB No. I didn’t see it as a miracle at all. People were moved around the camps – transferred here and there all the time. And I didn’t believe them anyway – they said I would go as a free man, and would work in Berlin in a library; it was all lies. I arrived in Sachsenhausen and was put into blocks 18 and 19 [the forgery workshops] – all separated off with barbed wire, windows whitewashed, top secret, no-one knew what went on in there. The other 100,000 prisoners in Sachsenhausen were not allowed to even set eyes on us. When we went to the shower block on Sundays, for example, the whole camp was shut down – strict curfew, everybody confined to barracks – no prisoners, no SS-men, nobody was allowed to see us. And if anyone did see us they would be shot.

RM So, your two blocks were completely isolated within the camp, but did you nonetheless hear about what was going on elsewhere – outside in the camp itself, or the general progress of the war?

AB We had a radio in our two blocks, so we listened to the radio in the evening – the news, reports from the front and so on – but we were completely cut off from the camp, we did not even see the faces of the other prisoners, so we heard nothing from them.

RM What were conditions like for you in the camp?

AB I always said I was a dead man on holiday – a dead man on holiday. We never believed that we would get out of there. But in the block we had everything – food, white sheets on the beds – each one of us had his own bed; not like in Birkenau, where six of us slept under a single lice-ridden blanket. Also, the SS guards never shouted at us, I used to play table-tennis with them.
But we knew that we were dead men on holiday. We knew that there was no way out when we knew a secret such as this – that the Nazis were printing millions in forgeries – and we were sealed away inside a concentration camp, where no-one could see us. We knew that we would not get out alive.

RM And what was your role within the forgery operation?

AB I was a printer, and I printed £132 million!

RM And what did you think about your work there?

AB I didn’t think. I was in a concentration camp and I was ordered to do it. Print the money, so I printed it. If I hadn’t done it they would have shot me. We had no “feelings”, we didn’t think about it.

RM In the film that is based on your memoir, The Counterfeiters, there are a number of scenes where there is conflict between the prisoners about the morality of forging money for the Nazis. What was the reality?

AB It’s just a film. There were no discussions of morality. We were in a concentration camp – we were scarcely in a position to sabotage anything. Sure you could sabotage, if you wanted to get killed! Jacobson [one of the prisoners] tried to delay the dollar production, but he managed for only 4 weeks, then [SS-Sturmbannführer] Kruger came and said ‘make the dollars within 3 weeks or we will have you shot’, and that was the end of it. Two weeks later, we had made the dollar. You have to understand that we were in a concentration camp – we had one foot already in the grave.

RM Can you describe some of the characters within the forger group – Smolianoff for example?

AB Smolianoff was my best friend. He was a professional forger, the only professional forger in the group, by the way. He had already been imprisoned for four years for forging. And he wanted to prove to Kruger that we could do it.

RM Can you also describe SS-Sturmbannführer Kruger, who headed the operation?

AB He was an SS officer. He wanted the job to be done, nothing else.

RM After the war, some of the forgers from your group testified for Kruger at his trial. How do you explain that?

AB Some of them. The German prisoners. The German prisoners said that he was a good man. They didn’t invite me to the court. In the two trials in which I participated, the defendants got life. If they had asked me I would have told them that he was a murderer, that he had six people shot. Of course, he let us play cards and table tennis, but that was all only in his interest, so that the printing machines would run and that the job would be done.

RM You survived both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sachsenhausen. Did you have a particular survival-strategy, or was it just pure chance?

AB No. You could not have any sort of strategy in those places. It was impossible. What saved me was that I was needed as a typographer, and then that the Nazis decided to move everything – the machinery and the personnel – to Austria at the end of the war, where I was then liberated by the Americans, who arrived so quickly that the Nazis all ran away. The thing [that saved me] was that I was a printer. If I had not been a printer then I would never have got out of Auschwitz-Birkenau and I would not have survived.

RM What would you say – as a survivor of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen – to those who still deny that the Holocaust took place?

AB They are fascists. They are Nazis. Could be an Englishman, an American, whatever, but if they say that then they are Nazis. That ideology is a Nazi ideology.

RM When you think back on that terrible time, is there one particular memory, person or image that springs to mind first of all?

AB No. Every day was the same. From the day that I was arrested, nothing was better or worse, it was always the same. Always the SS behind me, the ever-present threat of being shot, you had to work – that was my existence.

Adolf Burger's memoir The Devil's Workshop is published by Frontline Books.

http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/?product_id=1828

... and there is a Radio 4 programme about the subject, called The Counterfeiter's Tale, to the broadcast at 11.00 a.m., on 13th March, 2009.

Of White Horses and Horsesh*t...

I know I'm a bit late coming to this one, but its been bothering me a bit recently.

It seems the authorities have seen fit to commission a 50 metre statue of a white horse (as shown here) to adorn the Kent countryside and the south-eastern approaches to London. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7880889.stm

Now, I am a big fan of public art and statues in our public spaces. They can help to anchor our sense of identity, telling the world (and ourselves) who we think we are, where we think we have come from, what we think is important. In this capacity, public art can be hugely beneficial to society at large, but it can also betray our shortcomings, our misconceptions and our folly.

Sadly, this Kentish white horse falls into the latter category.

There are any number of reasons to criticise it. Firstly - like much modern art - it is spectacularly uninspiring; and seems to seek to make up for its lack of any interesting, or inspirational features merely by being gigantic - a preposterous 49 metres high.

Secondly, it is utterly devoid of any content or deeper significance. Various talking heads (including the sculpter no doubt) have waffled on about how central horses are to our culture and that a horse is even the symbol of Kent. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The symbol of Kent is the Invicta - a prancing horse - with all the vitality, strength and vigour that that implies. This sad supine nag, in comparison - appears to be fit for little but the glue factory.

This echoing emptyness at the heart of the project, is - I think - the main problem, and it is this that speaks volumes about modern Britain. This Kentish horse is a bizarre hybrid - the product of arrogance mated with cowardice, bombast married to fear. It is the product of a ruling liberal elite that - like an ancient potentate or megalomaniacal dictator - wants to paint its name in the sky, celebrate itself for all to see. And yet, for all its bold impulses, that same liberal elite does not know what it actually stands for, and is afraid to do anything that might be considered in any way divisive, exclusive or controversial.

So, the end result is that they choose something that is so anodyne, so utterly devoid of any meaning or significance that it cannot possibly offend anyone. Its the application of the 'lowest-common-denominator' to our public art, and its a sad indictment of where we are as a nation. it screams that we have forgotten who we are, forgotten what we stand for and forgotten what is dear to us.

Those visitors and tourists approaching London through the beautiful Kent countryside will, I reckon, not be impressed by the Horse - rather their impression of its significance will probably be similar to the vista that will greet them - a horse's arse.

"Haunted City - Nuremberg and the Nazi Past" by Neil Gregor

"Haunted City - Nuremberg and the Nazi Past" by Neil Gregor

The Third Reich hangs over Nuremberg like a bad smell. Not only did the city play host to the annual Nazi Party rallies of the 1930s, and the post-war trials of senior Nazis, it was also chosen as the venue for the publication of the ‘Nuremberg Race Laws’ of 1935; the legislation which began the persecution of German Jewry and prepared the way for the Holocaust. Even modern-day Nuremberg – a vibrant, democratic city – finds it hard to escape Hitler’s toxic embrace. Many of the old Nazi sites, for instance, remain to this day; too grandiose to be of use, too expensive to demolish.

For all its Nazi associations, however, Nuremberg’s experience of World War Two was actually rather typical for a middle-ranking German city. This combination of factors has led historian Neil Gregor to take Nuremberg as a case study to examine the complex way in which post-war German society has dealt with the fraught issues of memory, victimhood and guilt. The result, Haunted City, is a fascinating glimpse into the dark recesses of the German psyche.

Examining the period up to 1968, Gregor contends that for the first decade or so after 1945, the wounds and divisions within German society were so fresh and so raw, that only a vague, emollient culture of shared victimhood was possible. Before they could think about what they had done to others, it seems, Germans had first to tend their own wounds. As a result, German ‘memory culture’ initially had a rather self-pitying, narcissistic flavour; tending to concentrate much more on Germany’s own suffering – embracing civilian and military deaths, for instance, and bemoaning the fate of expellees, refugees and POWs, whilst marginalising all those ‘genuine’ victims of Nazism, such as Jews, communists and forced labourers.

Gregor brilliantly illustrates his point with the example of a bell-tower erected in Nuremberg in the 1950s to the memory of the city’s civilian dead of World War Two. In all the wrangling over the precise wording and design of the monument, it seems no-one saw fit to question the fact that the tower was built using stones from the city’s synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. A less sensitive approach to the public commemoration of the war would be hard to imagine.

Thankfully, matters did improve. By the early 1960s, a new memory culture was beginning to challenge the old; offering engagement and dialogue where once had been avoidance and an uneasy silence. Though by no means uncontested, this change was a result of many factors, amongst them the generational shift, the ongoing social liberalisation and the re-emergence of civil society in Germany. With the firm establishment of a mature, pluralist democracy, it seems, the opinion formers of Nuremberg were able to move on from the tactical amnesia of ‘German victimhood’ towards a more self-critical – even confrontational – attitude towards their recent past. In time, therefore, public exhibitions on the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto would take their place alongside the traditional commemorations, such as the “Day of National Mourning”.

The study is brought to a close with a rather illuminating episode. In the late 1960s, the right-wing, neo-nationalist NPD was becoming a regular feature in Nuremberg politics; making deliberate, symbolic use of the city’s Nazi sites. In 1967, however, after angry demonstrations from trade unionists, students and victims of fascism, the party was denied the right to use the city’s main congress hall for a local election rally. Nuremberg, which had once been so synonymous with the Nazis, had succeeded in driving out Nazism’s ideological descendants.

In his conclusions, Gregor is admirably fair. The early narcissistic phase, he suggests – far from being malevolent or born of mean-spiritedness – was actually an important part of the healing process; providing a soothing common identity to bridge the divisions of a deeply fractured society. Similarly, he argues that the later critical engagement with the past was symptomatic of post-war German society’s recovering health.

In describing these developments, Gregor is a thoughtful and surefooted guide, relying on solid archival research, marshalling his facts well and remaining cogent in his arguments. As a respected and award-winning academic, he makes few concessions in his writing for the lay reader, yet he manages – occasional lapses notwithstanding – to present his sometimes challenging subject matter in a style that should appeal beyond his core audience.

Haunted City is not always an easy read, therefore, but it is nonetheless an important book. It investigates the difficult process of acknowledging and remembering the suffering of the past – that endured by one’s own people and that inflicted on others – and offers vital insights into the complex function of ‘public memory’, and the ways in which new narratives and new identities are forged. It should serve as a useful guide to the still-ticklish problems faced by those modern societies that are making the difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy.

"Hitler's Private Library" by Timothy Ryback

"Hitler's Private Library"
by Timothy Ryback

of books and men ...

I was most interested by this publication. So much so that I actively (and vainly) tried to secure a review for it (I usually let the lit eds suggest titles to me)...

It is a curious subject, and it is one which is based on two ideas. The first is the strange fascination that anyone conscious of history would have in reading or handling one of Adolf Hitler's own books. I have had a similar experience in the National Archives in London, where I have handled original documents signed by Winston Churchill (a scrawled and interlinked WSC, if you are interested). One gets a tremendous buzz from it, I can tell you.

In Ryback's example, he is not above milking this particular thrill. He speaks repeatedly about Hitler's marginal notes, lines and exclamation marks, and most spectacularly, he claims that in one instance, he opened one of Hitler's books and a black, inch-long mustache hair fell out into his lap. This, however, though momentarily thrilling, is a bit of a one-trick-pony - it needs something more substantial to make the book work.

He finds his second raison d'écrire in the more cerebral - and indeed more tenuous - idea that one can read something into the individual by looking at his library. There are some problems with this. For one thing, marginalia can betray alot of things, but do they make the man? I think not and would indeed be horrified if someone - decades hence - tried to draw conclusions about me by looking at the volumes and marginal notes from my library. For another, Ryback only had access to a fraction of the estimated 16,000 books that Hitler was said to have owned - his conclusions surely can only be similarly fragmentary.

Yet, those caveats aside, Ryback's book is interesting. It is clearly meticulously researched and is well written. He ranges chronologically, taking a single volume of the library on which to hang each chapter, and through which to relate each episode of Hitler's life. He makes a number of enlightening diversions, and draws conclusions that are sensible and interesting, though hardly earth-shattering.

Hitler - Ryback tells us - was a voracious reader, often consuming a book a night. Moreover, he concludes that Hitler was not someone who allowed books to influence him unduly - rather, he took from his reading those facts and arguments that served to bolster and complement his existing opinions and prejudices. A good point perhaps, but hardly revolutionary, hardly rewriting history. And, if one recalls that most teachers and social workers read The Guardian and most former Brigadiers take The Daily Telegraph, one might concede that this is actually a more common failing than many of us would care to admit.

"Hitler's Private Library" is an engaging read, therefore, but it is based on some pretty thin foundations; both philosophically and materially. Ryback has done well to spin a book out of that meagre fare, but he sadly struggles to say much of any value or insight in the process.

The Road to Hell

"And all the roads jam up with credit
But there's nothing you can do
It's all just bits of paper
Flying away from you
...
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway
Oh no, this is the road to hell"

Chris Rea called it right - way back in 1989.

Now we are told that the recession will hit the UK harder than other developed countries. I am sure Gordon and his crowd will react with concerned faces, and repeat their mantra that - under 'prudent' Gordon's guidance - we are best placed to get out of this predicament. We just need to restore consumer confidence, get everyone spending again, and all will be well.

Now, I don't claim to understand economics - I not sure even those that claim to understand economics actually understand economics, but that's another story - but I have a problem with the logic of this 'rescue plan'. After all, wasn't it excessive credit and wanton spending that got us into this mess? So, now they are telling us that the banks should start lending again and that we should spend our way out of trouble??

If you'll forgive the rather tenuous historical link, this sounds to me a bit like Hitler's exhortations to the German to 'fight on' until the 'final victory' is secured. The thoughtful Germans amongst them might have reasoned that it was the fighting that had got them into the mess they were in - fighting on was surely NOT what was required.

Anyhow. It strikes me that it should come as no surprise that the UK will suffer more than most - after all, for the last decade or so, the two major props of the British economy have been 'financial services' and conspicuous consumer consumption. We don't really "make" anything any more, as the brutal logic of the marketplace holds that Chinese peasants and Indian child labourers can make whatever it is cheaper, so its not economically viable for us to bother. So, if those two pillars of the British economy are removed - the first hideously discredited, the second finally shown up for its utter unsustainability - then there is precious little left.

And yet - our esteemed leaders are urging us simply to carry on as if the financial world had not just imploded, and everything will be fine. "Imagine its 2007, Britons, and all will be well again."

I beg to differ. I think this should be a watershed. We need to appreciate - once and for all - that our socio-economic system cannot be predicated on some spurious notion of perpetual growth; that the 'global market' is not infallible, that the earth's resources are most-definitely finite, and that the economic model that we have lived with in Britain for the last decade at least has been thoroughly discredited. More of the same, and we really will be on the Road to Hell.

I don't know how it is to be done - but, Capitalism itself needs to be reinvented.

"Valkyrie" - A Historian's Review

"Valkyrie", Tom Cruise, History vs Entertainment...





Well, the drama surrounding the film has finally come to an end. We can stop speculating, the media can stop their petty sniping, and the talking heads can stop their carping - the film is out and we can all go and see it and make our own minds up.

I have to say it was with some trepidation that I walked into a press screening of "Valkyrie" last week. Though I dearly wanted the film to be good, I was prepared for it to be less than that.

Yet, as I watched, I kept waiting for the moment when my historian's sensibilities would be mortally offended; when I would see history being traduced for the sake of 'entertainment', when I would involuntarily 'tut', shake my head disappointedly and make for the door. Except it didn't come...

From a strict historian's point of view, at least, the film has little to complain about. The story has not been slaughtered on the altar of cinema, sacrificed to dumbed-down film-making... Whisper it quietly - but historically-speaking - "Valkyrie" is pretty good.

Sure, there are some mistakes - the SS HQ in the film was preposterous, what's wrong with Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, anyway!? - and it was Schlabrendorff who retrieved the brandy-bottle bomb, not Tresckow - and there was some inevitable straigtening of the complex narrative for the sake of simplicity - but overall, there was really nothing much for this historian to get upset about.

Surprisingly, though, the film's shortcomings lay rather in the story-telling, the characterisation and the suspense - indeed, in the very things that most people would have assumed would have been the strong suits from a team such as Tom Cruise and director Bryan Singer.

In my opinion, Stauffenberg's character was far too one-dimensional, without much explanation of the development of his 'treason' or his motives for it. His vacillating co-conspirators were much better portrayed - mostly by a cohort of British actors; Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy - but they sadly could not infect Cruise with any of their depth, nuance or characterisation.

Also, the film sagged a bit in the middle sections - not only in the run up to the attempt, but also in the rather overlong period thereafter, which was (understandably perhaps) squeezed for every bit of dramatic tension, but fundamentally failed to deliver. Stauffenberg's 'love interest', too - the exquisite Carice van Houten as Nina - was rather a cul-de-sac, a side-story tagged on perhaps to dilute the overwhelming whiff of cordite, treachery and testosterone.

On the whole, "Valkyrie" is a solid 3 stars; its worth a watch, and is good entertainment, but maybe not quite good enough to silence the critics. It is also surprising, perhaps, to conclude that history was not the primary casualty of this particular assassination attempt, rather it was the film-makers art that proved to be the weakest link ... the malfunctioning fuse ... the oak table leg...

By the way - if you want some further reading on this subject, I would suggest, my book, "Killing Hitler" -





http://www.amazon.co.uk/Killing-Hitler-Third-Against-Fuhrer/dp/1844133222/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226484998&sr=1-1






And the new book by my friend and colleague, Nigel Jones, "Countdown to Valkyrie" -



http://pen-and-sword.co.uk/?product_id=1674

"Defiance" - a historian's review

"Defiance" - "Our revenge is to live"

I had the honour of attending the European Premiere of "Defiance" last night in London's Leicester Square.

Daniel Craig's new film casts him as a fugitive Jew in 1941-42 in the forests of Byelorussia - the eldest of the famed Bielski brothers.

Alongside Tuvia Bielski (Craig), are the sullen and combative Jus (Liev Schreiber), the wide-eyed Asoel (Jamie Bell) and the young Aron (George MacKay). The four brothers leave their village after their family farm is ransacked and their parents are murdered by Byelorussian auxiliaries of the Nazis. Fleeing to the nearby forest, they embark on an odyssey in which many hundreds of Jews would be saved from the grim fate that Hitler had in store for them. It is, quite simply, one of the most remarkable stories of the Holocaust.

Hollywood has an uneasy relationship with history. Of course, historical dramas such as this make up much of its primary material, and the magic words "based on a true story", bestow instant kudos on many a film. Yet, the needs of the film-maker - clear moral messages, simple narratives, defined heroes and villains - are not always congruent with the complex and often messy and confusing realities of history.

One of my most common gripes with Hollywood representations of history, therefore, is that many film-makers feel that they need to dumb down to reach their audience, what you might call "lowest-common denominator film making". In the process, complex narratives are simplified beyond all recognition, characters are rendered two-dimensional, and foreign accents and (worst of all) subtitles are avoided like the plague. In such examples History - far from being the inspiration and the guiding light - becomes a whore to be used, abused and discarded when inconvenient.

I am delighted to say that "Defiance" does NOT fall into this category.

Though I have seen online that the film has come in for some occasionally vicious criticism - primarily from the afficionados of "whizz-Bang" film-making - for its supposed lack of 'action', I thought the film supremely well made. It was well-paced, well-told, and well-acted. Daniel Craig, sure, is a bit of a brooding one-trick-pony, but he played the lead tolerably well. Liev Schreiber, on the other hand, was a revelation, bringing just the right amount of menace and cussedness to his role as the bloodthirsty Jus.

Also, the predicament of the Bielskis was well drawn. Stuck between the horror of the Nazis and the equally repugnant (and anti-Semitic) forces of the Soviet partisan movement, the Bielskis were truly stuck between a murderous rock and an at best indifferent hard place.

In this regard, there is a whiff of historical controversy about the film - surrounding the alleged complicity of the Bielskis in the massacre of Polish peasants at Naliboki. This subject, naturally, is not dealt with in the film. Moreover, one criticism would be that the whole issue of the difficult relationship between the Bielskis and the local peasantry was rather skated over, being dealt with in one scene and not revisited. In fact, the Bielskis were almost entirely dependant on the local peasants for their food, and did not stop short of terrorising them - and even murdering them - into compliance.

Beyond that complaint - the film ticked all the necessary boxes. The cinematography, for example, was excellent. The opening scene where the grainy contemporary footage segued into grainy movie footage, and then into colour was inspired. And the later segment where the Jewish wedding of Asael was juxtaposed with Jus's attack on a German patrol was brilliantly handled.

Most of all however, I applaud the 'feel' of the film. I doesn't manipulate emotions with too much soaring score, and most importantly it does not baby the viewer. Germans speak German, Poles speak Polish, Russians speak Russian. That is how it was - there are subtitles - get over it. Moreover, though Craig's linguistic abilities were a little suspect, those of the remainder of the cast were excellent - especially Schreiber - and one has to consider that the two leads were required to speak Polish and Russian in many scenes. When one bears this in mind, the speech coaches employed on the movie deserve Oscars of their own.

All in all - 4 stars out of 5 - and the best WW2 film that I have seen since "The Pianist". If the forthcoming "Valkyrie" is anywhere near as good, I shall be delighted and a little surprised.