André de Toth directs Alexander Knox, Marsha Hunt and Henry Travers in this wartime drama imagining a German WWI veteran’s rise to Nazism and his orchestrating of the persecution of the Jews and a small Polish town. 

Propoganda that inadvertently, and suprisingly successfully, became the first Holocaust movie. It is all but forgotten now (less than 400 people have rated it on IMDB while Baby Driver released just this weekend already has 22000 votes). It is a convincing drama following one man’s desolate corruption into becoming a high ranking SS stooge. Unflinching in its bleak portrayal of rape, murder, anti Semitism and fascism. Given when it was made it is a very adult work with no easy solutions or rote optimistic conclusions. Its only real flaw is it does often suggest one man’s personal gripes are responsible for the brutality inflicted on the innocent, rather than Nazism as a national epidemic. But as a treatise on how “Only following orders” will not be seen as a valid excuse come peacetime, it is a stirring indictment.

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