By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on May 9, 2026)

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that that nearly all Hitler era Nazis were Germans (granted, there was the odd Austrian). But it still makes people twitch when you say that not all Germans were card-carrying Nazis.

There have been films that flirt with that conundrum (Das Boot, The Good German, Schindler’s List, et. al.). Amrum is the latest film to do same. Director Fatih Akin (who also co-wrote, along with Hark Bohm) sets his story during the waning days of the war, focusing on the tenuous relationship between “mainlanders” who have fled bombed-out German cities to resettle on a resource-strained North Sea island and the resentful local residents. The narrative unfolds through the eyes of a 12 year-old boy, as he comes to grips with revelations about his family’s Nazi past.

I was reminded of John Boorman’s Hope and Glory; while that was a childhood memoir about a boy coming of age in wartime London, there is a commonality as to the effects of war on those still too young to fully grasp the concept of “borders”, much less political ideology.