Beware the Roving Photo Geek!

I was poking around eBay the other day looking at photos for sale and saw this:

"Rare War Photo WW2"? Misinformation! It's a movie still, probably from Downfall. That's Alexandra Maria Lara, a Romanian-born German actress born in 1978. Maybe the seller didn't know, but now he do, because some busybody photo-geek schooled him. Me, that would be.

Never fall for what you find on the Internet! (Er, wait....)

By the way, I tried to watch Downfall but had to stop partway through. Talk about a horror film. It's a conscientious attempt to show real events, which is what makes it too horrible to contemplate. Why humans want to create Hell here on Earth is way beyond me. I got to the part where the movie started foreshadowing what was going to happen to Joseph and Magda Goebbels' little children (the two murdered six of their own children, Helga, born 1932; Hilde, 1934; Helmuth, 1935; Holde, 1937; Hedda, 1938; and Heide, 1940, during the fall of Berlin), and that was enough for Yr. Squeamish Ed. Maybe six more was just the merest cipher considering the vast number of deaths Goebbels was already responsible for instigating and condoning, but I just don't want to see that depicted. Goebbels was beyond a doubt one of the most vile and evil persons in human history.

I'm starting to suffer a little from what I call "St. Francis disease" as I get along in years...an excess of compassion. It's getting so I don't even like to kill bugs. The other day I surprised a mouse raiding the kitchen, and chased him back and forth across the countertop a number of times before I managed to trap him under a (plastic) glass. I couldn't bring myself to kill him. I took him out behind the woodpile and let him go. He was probably back in the house in less than an hour, but you know what they say: oh well. To paraphrase the immortal words of the great Popeye, we are what we are, and that's all what we are.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Steve Rosenblum: "I could not watch Schindler’s List past the first 30 minutes…."

Mike replies: I get it. If you don't already know its subtleties, look up the word "enormity." I've been reading a biography of Hitler, and I think I'm going to desist and just consider it "stipulated," as the lawyers say...I don't think I need to know the whole awful tale chapter and verse.

Comments

[Dennis Ng]

I don’t like.

But now I am in Hong Kong and seeing the real horrible act could be done and have be done ... and would be done. Just like an author who when the enemy aircraft came she would say she is anti-war. Yes we are all anti- war. But the key is not let this to happen. And if it did, you cannot be anti-war. At least one has to be on the resistant side.

I am now on the resistance side. I hope someone in Poland can remember after occupation by Soviet Union or Germany. And then just have some empathy here.

[Ramón Acosta]

I liked the movie. But the scenes inside the bunker took me out of my suspension of disbelief, because there were only bare bulbs lighting the place, but there were no shadows to be seen on anyones face.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

a recent BBC programme about Berlin in 1945 showed a clip of Goebbles remains being found and showed the bodies of the children laid out in a row. Horrific. I understood the mother did it.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Magda Goebbels was only the most horrifying instance of a whole-family suicide carried out as the Russians approached Berlin. Lee Miller I think captured another one on film within the next day or two as the Western forces arrived.

[Tex Andrews]

Yes, there's a lot of stuff that's difficult to watch. The most horrific things I have seen:

The Wannsee Conference. It's very hard to watch, because it is so boring (I think it's a verbatim film transcription with actors of the actual conference, where these ghouls cooked up the "final solution". All of the "action" takes place around a board room table.

The Chekist, in which we watch the executions of scores of people in the basement of the building that the Cheka used.

The U.S. Army documentary footage of the liberation and aftermath of the death camps. My history professors showed us this at my school---when we were in 8th grade. Horrific. Now, we have deniers.

[Mike Hazel]

Regarding Downfall, here’s a less depressing option for you: there is a roughly 4 minute segment from the movie that is used for re-subtitled parodies on YouTube. Look for Hitler Finds out that Neil Peart is not the #1 drummer of all time. Or Hitler finds out his bicycle has been stolen. There are a ton of them.

[Daniel M]

What I cannot is to respond barbarism by... the same barbarism. In my book if you kill a human been you are a killer and that can be true almost for any living thing. But yes I know that many of us are carnivore and this is may be for this reason that sometime I cannot find sleep.

[Anton Wilhelm Stolzing]

Downfall is worth a watch. I saw it in Erfurt when it was released. Quite extraordinarily, the public left the cinema in silence when it was over.
Schindler's list is also worth a watch, much better then the usual Spielberg stuff with Harrison Ford and the likes.