what confused me in your post was the fact that you simply divided the protagonists onto nazis/non-nazis. (I guess that the division also goes like soldiers/officers in Stalingrad and the crew/I WO in Das Boot). Personally I wouldn't mind if Fritz and Rollo were nazis and still tried to rescue Muller. What I mean is that the whole pattern, which those films try to follow, is wrong. There is a good movie, Sophie Scholl-the final days and the character of Robert Mohr who is a gestapo interrogator. He would be someone going outside this pattern, at least for me. I asked you about private ryan bcoz there is this attack on the machine gun nest. So Tom Hanks was good because he attacked and endangered his squad or was he good coz he opposed the rest and didn't want to kill the german soldier? For me the borderline doesn't go nazis/non-nazis bcoz after all in Stalingrad they had to join the firing squad and kill that cobbler boy. Coming back to Downfall- but she wasn't a nazi neither. So for me she is still inside the pattern you mentioned. As I said before the film is based on Joachim Fest's book. As far as I know the book was based on several testimonies but mostly on Traudl Junge's- the secretary and Ernst-Gunter Schenck, the bold doctor who refuses to evacuate. However the film is shown as a reminiscence of the secretary only. If you are familiar with other writers dealing with Hitler's last days/hours you know that she was simply "fantasizing" in many aspects. Ok, I know it's only a movie but its construction, especially the beginning and ending suggest that what you deal with is not only a movie but a real story. I bet one would have a different opinion if the story was told by Schenck.

Here are some books that I can recommend, all written by ordinary grunts. Important to know is that some were written after the war and might be influenced by certain tendencies to either trivialise some crimes or are trying to euphemize their own role. However this goes for any aspecct of oral history.
I have decided only to take books into consideration who leave no aspect out. There are some books out there who are only about comradeship and fighting, but most of them are only for a quick read on the loo - and have a corresponding quality ;)


Blood Red Snow by Günter Koschorrek
He was a machine gunner for the 24th Panzerdivision. Written in diary form from the notes he took everyday. An interesting read especially the aspect of de-empathizing in constant combat situations and realizing that he is fighting a lost war on the other hand.


Sniper on the Eastern Front by Albrecht Wacker
Who would think by this title that the book is about a sniper on the EF? No glorification, no ideology, only brutal truth from a sniper with 257 confirmed kills. If you are interested in this aspect of warfare, get this book. Comes also with information about weapons and training of the german snipers..
In the first editions, the author didn't want to reveal his name, seems like he had his reasons, the book was criticized for being to exiplicit :dead:


A Stranger to Myself by Willi Peter Reese
A remarkable book that was written from the scripts that Reese, an aspiring writer, took every night on the front and which he typed off when he was home. Ideological educated by the Nazi regime, Reese first writes from the point of view of a typical young man who was raised under the swastika. The things he sees and does change him deeply. This is a real as it gets, intense and uncensored, well written with an interesting development in terms of losing his illusions. He died in June 1944 on the Eastern Front, his body was never recovered. I found this on amazon.com for only 2 bucks.


For further reading there is a list some guy made about Eastern Front memoirs, you might also find something there:
http://www.amazon.com/German-Eastern-Front-Memoirs/lm/R2UEDLHMB9KD3Y/ref=cm_lmt_srch_f_1_rsrssi0

It should be noted that we are not speaking of history being written, rather movie scripts being written. There is a difference.

That being said, much can be attributed to cultural sentiments. To Americans, America in World War II was a just nation fighting a just war. The enemy was the antithesis of this, and it makes it difficult to portray them as protagonists. This also extends to allies. The East and the West stopped talking to each other for 40 years in the aftermath of the war, so you'd be hard pressed to find a sympathetic portrayal of the Soviets in Cold War America. After all, they were the new bad guys of the day.

These attitudes tend to be slow to change, but they eventually do so. Look at the Hollywood western; for 30 years, the bad guys were always the Native Americans. They were portrayed as bloodthirsty savages that deserved the treatment they received. This image has changed drastically, and so the image of the enemy in the Second World War has begun to soften.

"Downfall"(movie) is German comedy with happy ending: the pretty girl and the young boy find a bicycle and ride into the sundown.

Robert Mohr, the gestapo interrogator in "Sophie Scholl-the final days: a very authentic nazi character. The key movie dialogues are taken from the original interrogation transcripts with literal quotes. You can't get closer to "how it really was".

Müller in "Stalingrad" on the other hand is a movie nazi.

@Penguin
Ledig's book is indeed a war "novel" like "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a war novel.
It is Ledig's war experience which he wrote down in the form of a novel. Imo a great piece of literature by a very skillful writer.

I have read the book by Willi Reese, too. He was an ambitious writer.

Other books:

Uwe Timm: "In my brother's shadow: a life and death in the SS"

Dieter Wellershoff: "Der Ernstfall. Innenansichtern eines Krieges"

and Kempowski's "book of the century": "Echolot", "a collection and collage of documents by people of any kind living in the circumstances of war. Echolot consists of thousands of personal documents, letters, newspaper reports, and unpublished autobiographies that had been collected by the author over a period of more than twenty years"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/langu...t/north5.shtml

Of course the protagonist in Sophie Scholl is a "good guy" (girl ;) ).

Hard to make ww2 German movies where the character you are supposed to identify with and root for is a nazi (or even someone who is not an ANTI-nazi)...