Band of Brothers Part 9 Reaction | "Why We Fight" | First Time Watching
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- čas přidán 3. 10. 2022
- As the Allies move into Germany in 1945, Easy Company stumbles upon a Concentration Camp abandoned by German forces. The company struggles to comprehend the true horror and scope of Hitler's Final Solution.
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The actors that played the survivors were actually chemo patients and I had a great grandfather who was at one of the camps as a photographer he said later in life that he wished he could have taken enough photos so everyone could have one at home so that no one could deny that it happened
In reality, there were only a handful prisoners found alive when the 12th Armored Division liberated the camp shown in Band of Brothers, Kaufering IV (Hurlach), on April 27, 1945.
What struck me was how it affected the tough guys. "Bull" Randleman is sitting on the ground, absolutely stunned, like a lost child. Spiers, the steely-eyed killer, looks like someone hit him between the eyes, he's just totally horrified.
Gen Patton himself broke down, totally lost it when he saw a camp.
So many powerful moments in the camp scenes. I can't explain why, but the one that got me was when Frank Perconte walked by one hut and a prisoner, with barely the strength to stand, props himself up on the door with his elbow ti give Perconte a military salute. Which he returns. That did me in.
I think theres a lot of things in life, terrible as they may be, that you can imagine people are capable of. But its hard to comprehend this kind of cruelty because its a prolonged kind, not something done in the heat of the moment. Even if you held those terrible beliefs, that there are people in this world less than you, the practicalities of seeing this suffering day in, day out, of perpetrating it? It's something different.
The liberation scenes are completely fictional and were written specifically for dramatic effect. The camp shown in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV (Hurlach) which was actually found and liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with Easy Company actually arriving on April 28. And there were only a handful of prisoners found alive along with about 500 bodies.
@@iammanofnature235 A "handful"? - which is a relative term, how many people in a handful? I'm sure it mattered to that handful that American GI's broke open the death camp they were trapped in, fed them and provided medical aid. But there WERE inmates saved, therefore the scene is NOT completely fictional and your claim is a lie. Other than that, who gives a rats ass? This is a dramatization, NOT a documentary. Does it matter that the Nazi scum managed to slaughter most of the inmates before they fled like the gutless swine they were? Does that somehow make their crimes less horrific? The troopers of the 101st helped everyone that they could- THAT cannot be challenged. Neither can it be challenged that German personnel organized these camps, ran them, slaughtered and tortured their inmates and then looted the corpses for personal profit. It cannot be challenged that the slaughter only stopped when US, English, and Russian troops stopped it by force.
Hanks and Spielberg intentionally didn't let the actors see the sets of the concentration camp ahead of shooting. They wanted their reactions to be as real as possible. Also a lot of the prisoners were played by cancer patients, some even in their last days.
the cancer patients is for sure true. it was a brilliant bit of casting.
In reality, there were only about 6 prisoners found alive when the camp shown in Band of Brothers, Kaufering IV (Hurlach), was liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with Easy company actually arriving on April 28.
What I read is that they gave the actors the choice to see the camp set before shooting
Its a fortunate thing that Dick Winters and other Easy Co. Wrote about this event. I remimber a preacher who guess preached at the little church I grew up in, told how he wittnessed death camps while serving during the war. The look on his face is imprinted on my brain. Decades later, it was like he was seeing it anew in his minds eye, and he was appalled, just to talk about it. But he always spoke of it, as he felt it was his duty. The Holocaust was so horrific, and I feel that people who either deny or down play it as well as people who sling around the name Nazi or fascist for political points are deminishing the true horror of it .
Unfortunately, the liberation scenes shown in Band of Brothers are completely fictional. In reality, it was the 12th Armored Division that found and liberated the camp shown in Band of Brothers, Kaufering IV (Hurlach), on April 27, 1945 with Easy company actually arriving on April 28, but for "dramatic" purposes Easy company is shown liberating the camp. And there were only a handful of prisoners found alive along with about 500 bodies.
The first camp liberated by the US Army was Ohrdruf in Germany, part of Buchenwald's network of camps. Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Dwight D Eisenhower, inspected the camp to see for himself and brought General Omar Bradley and General George Patton with him. What they saw and smelled made 'Ol Blood n Guts Patton so violently sick that he vomited against a wall, he then refused to go into another building where corpses were stacked like cordwood.
Eisenhower sent communications to every unit in range, that were not currently engaged in combat, to come see this. He also contacted Washington, the Congress, reporters etc. The practice of the US Army of having the civilians march through the camp and bury the dead began here under his orders, in fact the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife hanged themselves in their home after the tour was over. As an aside: the tour guide for the General's inspection was a supposedly a prisoner, until an actual prisoner recognized him as a guard and the prisoners beat him to death.
When the tour was over, General Eisenhower said “We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, we know what he is fighting against.”
There are several resources on the first camp the US Army liberated, the national ww2 museum website has an article called What We Fought Against.
I've watched this series dozens of times. I've watched many reactions to it here on CZcams. This episode makes me weep every time. It's horrific what humans are capable of.
This episode always gets me as well!
That woman’s husband was not SS. You can tell by uniform. He was an officer in the army. And though you missed it, the black ribbon on the photo indicates he had been killed in the war.
While there could have been other ways the townspeople could know about the camp, smoke and ash probably would not have been a clue. That’s because the usual manner of disposing of the bodies was mass graves.
As to your inability to comprehend how the genocide could occur, are you joking? How many examples, since WWII, do you need to see?
Upvoted. Actually, they Germans stopped burying bodies in mass graves because it was destroying the water table. They used ovens.
The camp was Kaufering IV, a sub camp of Dachau. It was actually liberated by a different unit, Easy Company arrived the day after.
Go back and watch Spiers and Bull... when the baddest men are stunned... hell of an acting job
Also... at the end, the closing of the violin case that resembles a coffin is masterful
Absolutely, men who have spent 2 years in combat, brought to their knees
This is the episode that everyone should see, but is so difficult to watch.
Absolutely agreed!
Yes and no. The liberation scenes are completely fictional and were written for dramatic effect. In reality, Easy company didn't arrive at Kaufering IV (Hurlach) until the day after the camp had been liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945. And there were only a handful of prisoners found alive along with about 500 bodies.
If you look closely, you can see that the French soldier that shoots the prisoners as Easy is riding by is played by Tom Hanks himself.
One of the Easy vets wrote a memoir and recalled that incident. He said the German soldiers who were shot were boys who were not old enough to shave.
@@catherinelw9365 The French definitely had a lot of anger at the Germans, but there were also a lot of French people that wound up working in Germany or serving in the German army, whether they wanted to or not. We do not know enough about the situation to properly judge the actions being depicted. It is definitely a shocking moment in the episode, and serves to provide a kind of counterpoint to the camp scenes later on...different kinds of cruelty being shown in mostly honest ways.✌✌
This is the only gunshot in the episode.
@@iKvetch558 most of young French men were deported in Germany to works for the Germans and about 2 million French men were always in pow camps since 1940, while about 200 000 thousands French people from Alsace-Moselle were forced to join the german army, many of them in the SS division. actually only 6.5k French men choose to join the German in the LVF or SS charlemagne making France the countries with the lowest military contribution to Germany of all of occupied Europe, and most of those men who joined the Germans freely died in combat or were executed by French force during the campaign in Germany
@@leosimon241 Well ... In Denmark only 6000 volunteered to the SS ... Half was killed in battle and the rest got long prison sentences for the "treason" (The Danish government at the time, made legal to enlist, but after the war, they made it ILLEGAL to enlist ... Dating the law back to 1940).
And of course the SS-soldiers from foreign countries fought to the death at the end of the war. They had a PRETTY good idea of what was to become of them after the fall of the Reich ... ;)
In the official podcast, Ross McCall mentioned that Liebgott breaking down after addressing the men at the concentration camp was not scripted. It was a genuine moment of emotion breaking through the acting.
The writer of this episode also wrote episode 2. Band of Brothers is his first writing credit. Imagine being asked by Spielberg and Hanks to write the D-Day and Holocaust scripts less than a decade after Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List!
The podcast is worth a listen if you have the time and interest.
The dead German officer was not SS. He was a colonel in the Wehrmacht. As far as I could tell.
The SS would have the skull-and-bones on the cap for one thing, and an oak leaf on the left collar patch and the SS-runes on the right (that would mark him as a colonel in the SS).
That was the dynamic. Her dead, non-SS husband was a high-ranking 'Real" soldier, as opposed to this drunk A.H. who broke his picture. THEN the contrast with her at the camp provides a whiplash of their relative positions.
another great reaction. And you are right FDR was President that died very late in the war and Truman took over. Interestingly the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bombs was so top secret Truman as Vice President didn't even know about it until after FDR died. Then ultimately he was the one who had to make the call to use it.
Before Truman was VP, he was a Senator, in charge of a commitee that looked out for wartime fraud and abuse. He got wind of a project called "Manhattan" that was going through HUGE amounts of money that no one could explain. He was about to investigate it when he was paid a visit by General George C Marshall and told it was absolutely top secret, but conceivably win the war.
One thing that gets lost to many in this episode)rightly so) is Nix’s decent, survivors guilt, his wife leaving him, his problems with alcohol etc, yet in the opening scene we’re reminded that he’s an Ivy League educated man who can identify classic composers.
I've really been enjoying these BOB reactions. I'm really looking forward to the finale for you both. Thanks for what you do.
As bad as this film was it was watered down or it could not have been shown. i have seen the uncensored footage filmed by the army and it is beyond horrific. i am a very strong minded man but it broke me and once seen it can not be unseen. the biggest part of the ones that survived had lost everything no home no family no friends no where to go. as for a lot of the soldiers that liberated these camps they were never the same when they went home they had seen death on a big scale but nothing could have prepared them for what they found. i knew 2 men who were part of the army who first found these camps and for the rest of their lives they had screaming nightmares every single night untill they passed away 50 and 54 years later they never told of what they saw and if asked they would leave the room crying and visibly shaking and i understand why after seeing the real filming. I Hope all that suffered now rest in eternal peace...
I will write a boring stuff but: WW2 was not just a war - it was a struggle for a moral condition we have today. God bless those brave man who in the hour of need stood up and fought against true evil.
No matter HOW MANY times I see that concentration camp scene, it NEVER gets any easier to watch!😢
Great review. In my opinion this is the best series ever made and this espisode is the most powerful by far. I am glad your history teacher showed you at least part of it, i have said for a long tme that this should be required viewing. Its one thing to hear about it or read about, its completely different when you see it (or at least a good respresentation of it). I love your disucssion of how people deny how this happen, is mind blowing to me. I had visited the holocust museum in Washington DC about 20 years ago, and it was amazing and incredibly difficult. The thing that struck me right as you enter the musem in the front lobby on the wall is a quote from General Eisenhower, with a picture of him at one of the camps. I am paraphrasing a bit he was responding to a question as to why he felt it ws important for him to visit the camp. He said he felt tha the had too so that i the years to come when people tried to say it didnt happen he could look them in the eyes and say yes it did i say it with my own eyes.
The 101st was guarding the flank of the Free French Army. One of the units opposing them was the Charlemagne Division of the SS, made up mostly of French volunteers. Needless to say the French weren’t too kind when they got ahold of collaborators…
People often ask how in the world did they manage to round up so many people yes a lot of it was at gunpoint and towns that they raided etc but there was a lot of trickery that went on early. There's a great book written about how they did it and how awful it really was. The book is titled "How to Kill 11 Million People" written by Andy Andrews. The book goes into documents confessions interviews etc that explain how the Germans were able to corral and trick etc so many people into these camps. A lot of it was false promises for work during a time when work was scarce. Loaded them on to trains thinking that they were going to be working and getting paid sent money back to their families and then once on the train they were dropped at the concentration camps. The book goes into more detail but it is an interesting yet horrifying read but it is also an important one so that we can make sure that things like this never happen again.
The first concentration camps were organized in the German Third Reich in 1933, i.e. before World War II. The war ended in 1945. So it is impossible that the local Germans did not know about these places and what happened there.
The actors playing the prisoners were cancer patients
beat me to it
And a lot of them passed before the show even aired. But they were adamant that they wanted to be part of it.
in the end of the episode the musician places his violin in a coffin style case
As to whether the Allied troops knew about the camps, in general the further down you go into units, the less the troops know of the big picture.
Also 'Why We Fight' was the title of a series of (Frank Capra directed) films shown troops during training to try to explain the bigger picture (although I don't believe they discussed the camps). All the Easy Company soldiers would have seen them. They are available on CZcams.
Many of the larger concentration camps located in Germany were operational before the war, such as Dachau (March 1933), Buchenwald (July 1937), and Flossenburg (May 1938) and were well known to the Allies. Less well known were the thousands of labor subcamps. The camp shown in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV (Hurlach) which was one of eleven labor subcamps of Dachau located near Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria known as the Kaufering complex which began operations in June 1944 and at its peak Kaufering IV held over 3,000 prisoner laborers. Contrary to what is shown in Band of Brothers only a handful of prisoners, those who had managed to hide, were found alive, along with about 500 bodies, when Kaufering IV was liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 with Easy company actually arriving on April 28.
and to think there are still people who deny this ever happened!!
The guys executing the Germans by the road as Easy company drove past were French. Could be revenge for the occupation
The concentration camp men were terminal patients who volunteered to be the camp victims. One was asked why they would volunteer, the man answered, "lest we forget".
The glory glory song is a cautionary grim tale about what happens if you don't prep your chute right "Blood on the risers" 101st Airborne real song. My grandmother was a German nurse who took care of holocaust victims after the war and told me what she experienced ( Hated H btw) and my grandfather was a Croatian partisan whom fought nazis in Yugoslavia. He got injured and captured and ended up in a red cross hospital where he met my gm.. A real life Florence Nightingale story 😏
Actually it was polish emissary Jan Karski who informed personally Roosevelt and other allies about concentration camps in July 1943. There was also another polish source, polish officer Witold Pilecki who volunterely let Germans to capture him as he wanted to get to Auschwitz concentration camp to infiltrate it. He spent over two years there and after a brave escape he reported all atrocities he witnessed in Auschwitz, first to polish autorities, later on to other allies.
I always look for this episode first with reactors watching it. Interesting to see people go through it, as I did. Hard to believe we’re capable of this shit as a species.
The woman in reds husband was regular army who died. That is why the black ribbon on the photo. If he were SS he would have had the Death''s Head logo on his hat and the SS lightning bolts on the collar.
I see a number of people told you that the soldiers executing the German prisoners were French soldiers, but I don't see that anyone told you the most interesting part of that scene: the man shooting the prisoners was Tom Hanks.
The executions on the side of the road were done by French troops. After the invasion of their country, they weren't too keen on taking prisoners. My German granddad was stationed in France. His tank commander heard of the invasion by (illegally) listening to allied radio. He was the only one who spoke English, so he had to translate. They immediately decided to look for Americans to surrender to because that was the only chance getting out alive.
I first saw the camp scene when I was in High School in my Holocaust Literature class.
Great discussion after a great episode. You guys have some of the best reactions to this show. More power to you. :)
I believe they were all heroes even those that didn't get off the plane
Believe it or not, those soldiers that dragged and executed the 3 surrendered nazi’s from the barn, as easy company was driving by, were not American/British soldiers, but Free French soldiers, looking to exact some French justice. It wasn’t uncommon, back in those days, to find angry French soldiers/civilians, on a judge, jury and executioner war path. Living under the nazi oppression on their knees, endured suffering and heartache for 4 years, with barely any food/water and everyday essentials, while the nation is nearly stripped of everything and they had no voice or rights, I wouldn’t blame them one bit. Those were sad times…
You don't know if they were Nazis. The Nazi Party was a political party. Calling all German soldiers Nazis is like calling all American soldiers Democrats.
7:50 Those were French troops, as far as I could tell, shooting German prisoners. The French had many scores to settle . . . .
you're correct but unfortunately many German soldiers were not Nazi's and were wrongly executed for crimes they didn't commit.
think about this for a minute, WWII claimed an estimated total of 80 million lives, more than 11 million were murdered in the camps, that is about 1 in 8 deaths were the genocidal slaughter in the camps,
Still brings tears to my eyes after 2 decades. This episode could be used in psychological testing. If a person doesn't show a sorrowful emotion during this scene they might need counselling. Interesting fact is that Liebgott wasn't of the Jewish faith. The men of Easy CO. just assumed he was, because of his name and accent, and he never corrected them.
also if you haven't seen it the video "The Fallen of World War 2" on youtube , it would be worth doing a reaction too. also just an FYI- even though all the org E co Troopers have made their final jump, their family members & Friends are continuing the tradition of the unit Reunion at Fort Benning this month.
One Of The Best Movies set ever made, This one will be the hardest
You guys need to watch "The US and the Holocaust" by Ken Burns. It just came out last month.
Looting was allowed in while in an Enemy country, even Winters took a good amount of items (several guns too) 4:01 mark Nixon made the Varsity Jump into Germany with the 17th Airborne , i just got my hands on an org 1940 Vat69 bottle w/ the newer made Vat69 Gold & Honestly it's NOT that great of a Whisky LOL last weekend we did a Route too the Rhine a 1945 convoy with WW2 vehicle's through CT (160 miles) everyone wanted a photo op with the bottle and we were passing it around in the back of the "FUN TRUCK" just like you see at the 6:40 mark we were in the same model truck lol.
At one time, Vat 69 was the 10th best selling Scotch in the world. This was before single malts were advertised and exported. Vat 69 is a blended whiskey.
Next time you guys do your route to the Rhine stop and pick me up in PA (IM DEAD SERIOUS BTW)
It was interesting that the German woman that Nixon encountered in her home and then saw later at the camp, wore a red coat. Like the little Polish girl in 'Schindler's List'.
this is why I never buy into the "they weren't all bad" narrative. Most of the German soldiers probably didn't know, but the civilians living near the camps were complicit through inaction at best. You can't keep something like this secret for years, and they weren't in the middle of nowhere, they were just outside towns and villages.
first: the camps weren't near towns. All media was regulated and controlled by the Nazi Regime. Asking questions would get you deported into one of the camps. And most camps were built in occupied territory under control, again, of the Nazi Regime.
What was that for? They were French troops settling a few scores.
We didn't know till the Russian and Americans moved closer into German territory
luck they found one prisoner who seemed lucid enough to explain. what the camp really was
And today there are far too many people denying that these camps existed, or that it's all exaggerated. This episode should be mandatory viewing in any history course. As the survivors and liberators die out, the woke brigade and deniers grow more powerful. They are in the position of planning education, running museums etc. Teach each generation so it doesn't happen again. Even in the Baltic war in the nineties there were concentration camps being run. History is already repeating itself.
good luck with 4k subscriptions! this episode always gets me, just shows how f*cked up humans can really be, then you have the japanese lol....good luck with your channel!
The German officer in the woman's photo, wasn't SS. He was Wehrmacht (Regular Army). The Wehrmacht weren't angels by any stretch of the imagination - some pretty horrific actions were taken by some of them - and some of them were more "honorable" - like any other nations soldiers, but they weren't SS. The SS was evil on a whole higher level. Also, the black ribbon on the corner of the photo indicated that he was dead.
Ah, thanks for the insight!
That was a French soldier executing the three Germans.
They used patients from cancer hospital as actors because they could not make actors that thin.
And the prisoners of those work/concentration camps were in even worse physical condition..
Ride bears and eat moose.
not SS just Wehrmacht most likely a Colonel
They hired cancer patients for that scene. not joking.
To answer your question of "how did they film this?" they used terminally ill patients from nearby hospitals to play the concentration camp survivors. Most did not live to see the release.
You need to see at the least 3 more Denzel films Man on Fire, The Equalizer and The Book of Eli!
WAR IS HELL