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<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="/link.php?id=31321" target="_blank">Red Baron recast as a German hero</a> (click to view)

<strong>Category:</strong> <a href="/news/topic/15-history" target="_blank">History</a>
<strong>Posted By: </strong> <a href="/modules.php?name=Your_Account&op=userinfo&username=Hyack" target="_blank">Hyack</a>
<strong>Date: </strong> 2008-03-16 09:20:44

[Mustang1]

One can respect his military prowess and understand his significant role in WWI military history, but from a subjective standpoint, his role in killing Canadians certainly doesn't cast him in the role of "hero" for me and countless others

[martin14]

true enough lily, you can watch many of the WWI and II stories in Europe.

often wondered what the Germans watching thought and felt..

most of this stuff is written in a very one sided way..

[Red_Eye]

lily lily:

Well, no, of course it doesn't. Just like I doubt the Germans think of those such as Billy Bishop as a hero.

[Mustang1]

martin14 martin14:

most of this stuff is written in a very one sided way..

Good modern scholarship isn't - historiography has addressed this.

[SigPig]

There should be nothing wrong with Germany recognizing its military heroes. Soldiers like Richtofen, Hartmann, and even Rommel were skilled military men who only fought for their country in the same way the Bishop, May, and other Canadian/allied soldiers did.

[sasquatch2]

Yes much as I have always regarded the exploits of Galland and Ruddel as heroism.
Unfortunate for us that they are not OUR heros!

[Wullu]

Re-cast as a hero? For the German people he should always have been a hero.

Hell, his enemy thought enough of him to give him an honourable burial, something rare enough for our own troops in the hell that was trench warfare.



Own of my favourite quotes is from the book "A Thousand Shall Fall" by Murray Peden. After WWII was over a reunion of flyers from the Commonwealth Air Training Scheme was being organized in Winnipeg and the organizers were aranging for Adolf Galland to attend. Someone made the comment that it was pretty extraordinary to be inviting one of Germany's top aces and the commander of all German fighters at the end of the war to a Commonwealth Air Training Scheme reunion. The committees answer to this point? I am quoting from memory here, but this is pretty close, "Well if it were not for chaps like Galland, there would not have been a Commonwealth Air Training Scheme!"

Galland attended and was a huge hit.

[ShepherdsDog]

Even the enemy can be heroic and display acts of valour. That's something that seemed to differentiate WW 1 from WW 2, our perception of the enemy. In WW 2 the Germans fought for an evil cause, no one can deny.

[Scape]

lily lily:

Recast? I thought he was always seen as a hero.

$1:

The film has been described as breaking a taboo which for decades has seen German soldiers generally portrayed as callous zealots or conscripts tormented by conscience. But there has been renewed appetite for exploring the country's wartime past since the release of Downfall in 2004, and later this year Tom Cruise plays Claus von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who tried to assassinate Hitler, in Valkyrie

The Nationalistic Nazis made war hero worship a part of their cult. When they fell, they also made the whole idea of war hero in Germany repugnant. It's good to see that Germany is once again able to reclaim its heritage with honor.

[ridenrain]

$1:

The film has been described as breaking a taboo which for decades has seen German soldiers generally portrayed as callous zealots or conscripts tormented by conscience. But there has been renewed appetite for exploring the country's wartime past since the release of Downfall in 2004, and later this year Tom Cruise plays Claus von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who tried to assassinate Hitler, in Valkyrie

I don't know what war movies they were watching but there were a great many US post war movies that showed the germans as honorable foes, usually with the same British accents that the ancient Romans usually had.
It's interesting that the Japs are almost always shown as very strange sadistic fanatics when the German regular army was shown as regular joes.
Maybe that's just my perception though.

[xerxes]

I've noticed that too so it's not just you. Despite all the horrors perpetrated by the Germans in WW2, in a lot of areas, they still are seen as being civilised and proper as opposed to the Japanese who are still rarely treated nicely in war movies both past and present.

[ridenrain]

I think that has to do with the fact that Germany was a familiar European nation that many people had direct association. Japan was still some strange foreign people. Even the horrors of the death camps were tempered because a wave of anti-semitic swept Europe and North America at the time.

[Wullu]

WRT to Germany recasting the Baron, do any of you think the fact that ol Reichs Minister Herman himself was a member of von Richtofen's Flying Circus might have tainted him in a post WWII Germany?

[ShepherdsDog]

like you guys said, the Germans were still fellow Europeans and thus were perceived as being more honourable. The Japanese saw Western soldiers in an even more negative light then we viewed them. It's interesting that when other Europeans tried to dehumanize them[Germans], they attributed Asiatic characteristics to them, hence the nickname 'the Huns'.