World War II Movies - Homefront Germany

German title: Der Untergang

Traudl Junge, the final secretary for Adolf Hitler, tells of the Nazi dictator's final days in his Berlin bunker at the end of WWII.

German title: Anonyma - Eine Frau in Berlin

Set in 1945 during the Red Army invasion of Berlin. Women are victims of rape and devastation; one of them is Anonyma (Nina Hoss), who had been a journalist and photographer. In her desperation, she decides to look for an officer who can protect her.

Felice is living a dangerous life: in the middle of World War II in Berlin, she is a Jew and a lesbian, and works undercover at a Nazi newspaper from which she finds information to take to the Jewish underground. One day she meets her lover, Ilse's employer Lilly, and falls in love with this bourgeois, Nazi-supporting hausfrau. Their affair is as intense as it is dangerous, with Felice in constant danger of discovery. In their own ways, each woman challenges what is expected of her.

German title: Die Unsichtbaren – Wir wollen leben

Location: Berlin

Four young Jews survive the Third Reich in the middle of Berlin by living so recklessly that they become "invisible."

German title: Zwei in einer großen Stadt

Date: 1941

A German soldier on leave in Berlin goes looking for his pen pal who he has never met called Gisela. He meets instead a woman with the same name and falls in love with her. (Filmed in Berlin during war time!)

The last two films of this five part WW2 drama are dealing with the battle for Berlin.

Film IV: The Battle of Berlin
Film V: The Last Assault

A romance between a British pilot hiding in Germany and a German nurse is shown on the background of massive allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

German title: Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben

On the Russian front in 1944 German Private Ernst Graeber receives a leave and visits his family in Germany but Germany isn't the same country he left behind.

While subjected to the horrors of WWII Germany, young Liesel finds solace by stealing books and sharing them with others, including a Jewish refugee who is being sheltered by her adoptive parents under the stairs in her home.

German title: Das große Heft

Date: 1944-45
Location: Hungary

Twin siblings enduring the harshness of WWII in a village on the Hungarian border hedge their survival on studying and learning from the evil surrounding them.

German title: Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam

Date: 1944
Locations: Hamburg, Berlin

A serial killer strikes again during WWII in Germany. The wrong man is arrested and a detective hunts down the real killer. But justice in Nazi Germany is not so easily administered.

German title: Deutschland, bleiche Mutter

Germany 1939. Hans and Lene marry the day before the war breaks out, and Hans is sent to the Eastern front. During a bombing raid their daughter Anna is born. The house is destroyed and Lene and Anna moves in with relatives in Berlin. Hans survives the war but he is not the same person as in 1939, and he and Lene find it difficult to live together again.

Date: 1936-40

Locations: Berlin, Hamburg, Atlantic Ocean, other

Wunschkonzert ("Request Concert") is a 1940 German drama propaganda film. After Die grosse Liebe (1942), it was the most popular film of wartime Germany, reaching the second highest gross.

Date: 1939

08/15 is the first part of the 08/15 film trilogy. It is also named Teil 1: In der Kaserne (Part 1: In the Barracks).

This movie isn't actually a war movie but covers the life of German conscripts in the barracks of an artillery battalion on the eve of the second world war. They are in the hands of ruthless and sadistic NCOs who are constantly trying to impose harsh measures against the men.

08/15 - in der Heimat (08/15 at Home) is the third part of the 08/15 film trilogy.

Date: Summer 1944
Location: Heereskriegsschule (military school) somewhere in Germany

The story centers on an idealistic Oberleutnant (lieutenant) who fails to convict a Nazi ensign of murder.

German title: Betrogen bis zum jüngsten Tag

Location: near the Lithuanian border
Year: June 1941 (shortly before Operation Barbarossa)

Soldiers Wagner, Paulun and Lick are three friends and the best sharpshooters in their division, that is stationed near the German-Soviet border. While on vacation, they walk near a river and spot a movement in the bush. Believing it to be a bird, they shoot in its direction and discover that they have killed Angelika, their captain's daughter...

German title: Die Brücke

Date: 1945

A group of German boys is ordered to protect a small bridge in their home village during the last months of the second world war. Truckloads of defeated, cynical Wehrmacht soldiers flee the approaching American troops, but the boys, full of enthusiasm for the "blood and honor" Nazi ideology, stay to defend the useless bridge.

German title: Ich war Neunzehn

April 1945: Gregor Hecker, 19 years of age, reaches the outskirts of Berlin as part of the Red Army's scouting team. Having fled Germany with his family when he was eight, he is confronted with the dilemma of having to fight men from the very country he was born in.

Two 17-year-olds, Werner Holt and Gilbert Wolzow, are pulled out of school and into Hitler's army. Gilbert becomes a fanatical soldier, but at the front Werner begins to understand the senselessness of war.

German title: Kinder, Mütter und ein General

As Germany's fortunes in the latter part of World War II wane, several young boys, in their enthusiasm to do something "for the fatherland", volunteer to fight with the German army in the East. Horrified at the news that their children are to be sent to the Russian front, the boys' mothers begin a desperate effort to get their sons back.

1943 - the air war of allied bombers over Germany nears its climax. A group of young students from Berlin, aged between 15 to 17 years, is deployed in the Luftwaffe to serve as Luftwaffenhelfer (anti-aircraft warfare helpers) at a heavy anti-aircraft battery near their hometown.

German title: Napola - Elite für den Führer

In 1942, Friedrich Weimer's boxing skills get him an appointment to a National Political Academy (NaPolA) - high schools that produce Nazi elite. Over his father's objections, Friedrich enrolls, seeing this as his ticket out of factory life to university and a good salary. During his year in seventh form, this innocence is altered as Friedrich encounters hazing, cruelty, death, and the Nazi code.

German title: Hitlerjunge Salomon

A boy in Nazi Germany, trying to conceal that he is Jewish, joins the Hitler Youth.

Geman tile: Blut und Ehre - Jugend unter Hitler

Mini-Series
Date: 1933-1939

Follows a German boys involvement in the Hitler Youth during the pre WWII years.

Location: Sudetenland (Germany/Czechoslovakia)
Date: 1937-45

German mill owner spends WWII trying to save his wife, daughter and Czech workers from Nazi terror, but faces his own tragic end in an unexpected way. Based on true events surrounding the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945.

This two-part TV movie focuses on the tragic events surrounding the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German passenger ship, at the end of World War II. On 30 January 1945, Captain Hellmuth Kehding was in charge of the ship, evacuating wounded soldiers and civilians trapped by the Red Army. Soon after leaving the harbor of Danzig, it was hit by three torpedoes from the Soviet submarine and sank in less than an hour...

German title: Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen

The film depicts the first month of 1945 when the Russian Red Army broke into the eastern part of Germany and forced millions of civilians to flee in the coldest of winter. While the Russians invaded Ostpreussen hundred of thousands of civilians were evacuated by ships. Gotenhafen was the last open port and ships left the town almost by the minute, overloaded by refugees. One of the last ships to leave Gotenhafen was the 'Wilhelm Gustloff'. The ship sunk without a trace and only a handful of people survived this hellish nightmare.

German title: Die Flucht

In 1944 many Germans in Eastern Prussia believed like Lena von Mahlenberg, daughter of a local aristocrat, that Hitler would surrender and spare them from being invaded by the vengeful Russian Red Army. He didn't and they had to flee.

The Pianist is an account of the true life experience of Wladyslaw Szpilman a Polish pianist during WW2, in the context of the deportation of the Jewish community to the Ghetto of Warsaw.

In Poland during World War II, Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.

German title: Aus einem deutschen Leben

The disturbing biography of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss.

Location: Auschwitz

Based on the real-life events and featuring a first-rate ensemble cast, this compelling and harrowing film chronicles a unit of Auschwitz's Sonderkommando, a special squad of Jewish prisoners, who staged the only armed revolt that would ever take place at Auschwitz.

A story seen through the innocent eyes of Bruno, the eight-year-old son of the commandant at a concentration camp, whose forbidden friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of the camp fence has startling and unexpected consequences.

camp: Bergen-Belsen (?)

A Jewish man has a wonderful romance with the help of his humour, but must use that same quality to protect his son in a Nazi death camp.

German title: Nackt unter Wölfen

camp: Buchenwald

A group of prisoners in KZ Buchenwald, mostly communists and jews, try to hide a little jewish boy.

This movie is based on the true story of Otto Weidt, owner of a workshop in Berlin for blind and deaf, who fought to protect his Jewish workers against deportation.

German title: Die Fälscher

camp: Sachsenhausen

The movie fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by Nazi Germany during the Second World War to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England pound notes. The film centres on a Jewish counterfeiter who is coerced into assisting the operation at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Year: 1943
camp: Sobibor

The historical recreation of the escape from the Nazi Death Camp Sobibor, where approximately one-quarter million Jews were executed. Approximately 600 prisoners attempted the escape in October 1943 - around 300 succeeded...

German title: Die verlorene Zeit

This movie depicts a remarkable love story that blossomed amidst the terror of a German concentration camp in 1944 Poland. This impossible passion fuels the courage of a Polish prisoner who manages to rescue his Jewish girlfriend. Against all odds, they escape the camp and try to survive a treacherous journey to freedom...

During World War II in Nazi occupied Poland, poor Jewish café owner Jakob (Robin Williams) accidentally overhears a forbidden radio news bulletin signaling Soviet military successes against German forces. To fight the incredible depression and suicide throughout the ghetto, Jakob tells fictitious news bulletins about Allied advances against the Nazis. These lies keep hope and humor alive among the ghetto inhabitants. The Germans learn of the mythical radio, however, and begin a search for the resistance hero who dares operate it.

A group of people are imprisoned in a rail car bound from Berlin to a concentration camp in 1945.

German title: Nebel im August

1944: A Jenisch boy is placed in a mental hospital and experiences the Nazi euthanasia program.

German title: Nicht alle waren Mörder

The movie deals with the everyday struggle to survive as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. As his father had died in 1940 after being released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Michael and his mother fear to be deported themselves. They manage to live in Berlin with false names and faked papers, hidden by several, often broken, people...

Based on the memories of Marga Spiegel. In her narrative, published in 1965, she describes how courageous farmers in southern Munsterland hid her, her husband Siegfried and their little daughter Karin from 1943 until 1945, thus saving them from deportation to the extermination camps in the East.. Without reservation, the farmers offer the refugees their protection risking their own lives.

SS officer Kurt Gerstein tries to inform Pope Pius XII about Jews being sent to concentration camps. Young Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana gives him a hand.

A dramatization of the 20 July 1944 assassination and political coup plot by desperate renegade German Army officers against Hitler.

German title: Stauffenberg

This is a German movie about Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

German title: Sophie Scholl - Die letzten Tage

A dramatization of the final days of Sophie Scholl, one of the most famous members of the German World War II anti-Nazi resistance movement, The White Rose.

German title: Jeder stirbt für sich allein

Years: 1940-43
Locations: Berlin (Germany), France

Berlin, 1940. Working class couple Otto and Anna Quangel receive the news that their only son has lost his life in the battlefield and decide to resist the Nazi regime in their very own way. Soon the Gestapo is hunting "the threat".