What Did You Do in the War, Mutti? Courageous Women ... - iSites

582 Robert G. Moeller
prisoner-of-war camps. 40 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer linked the same past
to the present when he argued for German rearmament by evoking the spectre
of ‘the women and men, deported to serve in slavery [in the Soviet Union]
... and what Soviet Russia committed against poor defenceless men and
women when it advanced into Germany’ in the spring of 1945. 41 KMG told
the same story. At the end of the film, the general sends Dornberg on one
more impossible mission, but viewers did not need Rothfels or Adenauer
to remind them that, in March 1945, delaying the Soviet advance was the
only way to ensure the evacuation of the largest possible number of
Germans. When the general hears that the ‘Russian has broken through,’
he knows what he has to do. He and Dornberg are protecting Germans,
not following orders from Berlin.
At the beginning of the film, the chaotic scene at the train station is filled
with Germans who are doing everything they can to escape, and as the
women proceed to the front, they pass signs of Germans in flight from the
Red Army—abandoned suitcases, overturned cars, the detritus of a
panicked rush westward. Some eight million citizens of the Federal Republic
had fled or been forced from their homes in eastern Europe at the war’s end
and could offer variations of this story. Most West Germans could also
recall that the end of the war in the east was accompanied by massive waves
of the rape of German women by Red Army soldiers, and in popular memories
of the war’s end, no occurrence is mentioned more frequently. 42 Thus,
Dornberg learns from the mothers, but when he returns to the front at the
end of the film, he is also off to defend their virtue. Even in the sanitized version
of the film, destined for domestic consumption, the ultimate fate of the
boys and their mothers remains uncertain. Most viewers would have agreed
with Rothfels that their survival depended on Dornberg’s continued willingness
to defend the Heimat and hold off the Red Army.
KMG communicated the reassuring message that those Germans who
took off the uniform in 1945 were not crazed Nazis. They had fought
because they had to and because they sought to protect the Heimat from
a communist invasion. KMG asked no one to question whether, ten years
later, West German men should be ready to take up arms against the same
enemy, if need be. Interviewed during the making of the film, the director
Laslo Benedek commented, ‘this is no anti-militaristic movie. But it is a
movie against war.’ 43 Nothing in the film suggests that a strong army—
headed by men who listen to mothers, who can shed tears for lost comrades,
40 Moeller, War Stories, pp. 88 122.
41 VDB, [1.] Wahlperiode, 190. Sitzung, 7 Feb. 1952, p. 8098.
42 Moeller, War Stories, pp. 65 7; Elizabeth Heineman, ‘The Hour of the Woman: Memories of
Germany’s ‘‘Crisis Years’’ and West German National Identity’, American Historical Review, 101
(1996), pp. 354 95.
43 Ernst von der Decken, ‘Benedek dreht morgen’.