BS: The Good Nazi

Subject: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 29 Aug 19 - 01:24 PM

This film came to my attention because Karl Plagge, the subject of the film, was a POW in Skipton during WW1. Our local paper ran a piece on it.

The Good Nazi

Not seen it yet but it's on the list!

Good to know how some stood against the Nazis from within.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Dave Hanson
Date: 29 Aug 19 - 02:48 PM

Oscar Schindler ?

Dave H

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 29 Aug 19 - 02:50 PM

Then there was Bert Trautmann, the Man City goalie of my youth... Bert was a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe until he was captured. He wouldn't return to Germany and lived a quiet life in Lancashire until he was discovered to be a superb goalkeeper. He played for City for fifteen years and slowly but surely gained a reputation as a great bloke, an Anglophile who did a huge amount towards fixing Anglo-German relations and, well, an all-round good egg. Sometimes we are branded by the place of our birth. There's still too much of that going on.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 03:34 AM

Looking into it there seems to have been quite a few such good men but I did not see Bert mentioned. Thanks for that Steve.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 07:40 AM

We watched a remarkable film on this theme last night, which slipped by us first time around
post:
SUITE FRANÇAISE
A superbly acted, exciting and extremely moving story of a young French woman's affair with a Nazi officer during the Occupation of France, based on a nearly lost novel by a Jewish woman who died in the Holoacust
Well worth looking out for
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Charmion
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 08:27 AM

German PoWs who either managed to not be sent back after the war, or returned during the great waves of post-war immigration, were critical actors in Canada’s post-war (and post-Depression) recovery.

The founder of the Kopp Labs, a chain of store-front medical laboratories in the Ottawa area, was a medical student conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1941 and captured in North Africa in 1943. He must have been a low-level resister all along, because he shows up in Canadian military intelligence records as a “white” prisoner interned at the Hull Gaol (in Hull, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa) to keep him away from hard-line Nazi types, who were held in isolated camps in the bush country of northern Ontario. Within a few weeks, he was paroled to work in the laboratory of the Ottawa Civic Hospital, where he was still employed at the end of the war.

A different group of Canadian Army records from the Home War Establishment contains lists of prisoners being repatriated to Germany in the months after V-E Day, and correspondence about parolees wanting to stay in Canada. Private Kopp turns up in those records, too. The pressure to return all the prisoners was enormous, but Kopp never went back.

I read those records in 1987 while employed at the National Archives in Ottawa.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: meself
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 11:24 AM

Many Germans who had been POWs in Canada seem to have made their way back to Canada after having been repatriated.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 01:27 PM

A piece of fiction that portrays this kind of individual is the epistolary novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 01:43 PM

"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society."
We thought about seeing this in Dublin on one of our Film pig-outs, but rejected the idea because of poor reviews
Would be interested to know if they were correct
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 02:03 PM

The novel is better. I listened to an unabridged recorded version of it.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 02:08 PM

Mrs. Backwoodsperson watched it on Amazon Movies, she said it was a great story, some good humour (humor for SRS’s benefit) ;-) and a bitter-sweet ending.

I slept in the armchair right through it.

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 02:38 PM

Thanks for that
I'll look it up on our as yet unviewed movie bundle
I have to say I still prefer the big screen even though you have to travel great distances in Ireland to see good films = probably the only thing I miss from not livig in London
Jim

Subject: RE: BS: The Good Nazi
From: Jeri
Date: 30 Aug 19 - 05:31 PM

It's on Netflix, too, FWIW.