Insane number of nazi references in movies

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Ghouls, vampires, werewolves... let's party.
It's because the Fourth Estate and academia are congenial to communism, whereas they somehow have decided that Nazism was more evil. The strange part is that few of them understand the differences and similarities, or are they aware of the tenets of each, including their outcomes to society.
I am reminded of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, both of which features Nazis. Years later, it's the Communists in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I guess it depends on what year the movie is set in?



Forget Star Wars if you want Nazis you have to watch Star Trek


Star Trek original series 'Patterns of Force'


Star Trek: Voyager 'The Killing Game'


Star Trek: Enterprise 'Storm Front'
Trek really leaned into it because every week was a morality tale and because they were shooting on back lots.

It is odd that "Patterns of Force" in which a Federation observer re-created the 3rd Reich did so on the assertion that it was the most efficient system of government ever devised. The exchange in the episode goes as follows:

KIRK: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?

GILL: Planet fragmented. Divided. Took lesson from Earth history.

KIRK: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.

GILL: Most efficient state Earth ever knew.

SPOCK: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.

KIRK: But it was brutal, perverted, had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?

SPOCK: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.


KIRK: Why, Gill? Why?

GILL: Worked. At first it worked. Then Melakon began take over. Used the. Gave me the drug.
This is a rather baffling exchange. "Efficient" at what, exactly? Expedient, perhaps, but efficient? Spock speculating that Gill was trying to create Nazism without the sadism, as if Nazism was not inherently sadistic. And then the revelation that it was working until that darned Melakon corrupted it, as if Nazism is something that is corrupted by Hitlers and Melakons.

I've never quite made sense out of the end of this episode.

Then again, in "A Piece of the Action" Star Trek arrives at planet of the 1930s gangsters and Kirk shrugs when it turns out McCoy accidentally left behind a communicator "Maybe they'll want of a piece of our action?" -- Well, yes, the probably will, which is why you have to go back and get it back.



I wasn't talking about you personally, J.
You were responding to my post using a personal pronoun, and regardless I'm not interested in arguing on behalf of whatever strawman you thought you were responding to instead


I think we can safely bracket this question and still note that we live in a highly polarized age, filled with mutual distrust.
Perhaps such polarization is due to the insertion of hyperbolic absolutes ("Nazis are everywhere", "all Trump voters = Qanon") into your perception framing. Perhaps the distrust is caused by the denying the "really real" reality of facts. Either way, one of us is being less honest than the other here.



In regard to my earlier contention that Nazis are an “easy” villain, the other side is that Bolsheviks and Stalinists not only are less identifiable, but most people, having forgotten a lot of history or never knew it, just don’t come up to the same iconic vision of political evil, goose stepping, uniforms and mannerisms that Nazis provide. Someone could write a couple long books on this but they’re the low hanging fruit of political evil.

My short version recalls the arc of a few movie/TV Nazis -

**The Stranger (1946) - Orson Welles directs and stars in a flick about an on-the-run architect of the Holocaust, trying to take up a new life in small town New England. Edward G Robinson co-stars as a relentless Nazi hunter who tracks Welles and a lackey to the town, where he’s a teacher, married to a pretty woman. This movie was done soon after the war and features some quick clips of actual death camp footage. It was an important role for Robinson, who was Jewish, AKA Emmanuel Goldenberg. It also features a unique use for the clock on top of City Hall.

**Stalag 17 (1953) - A somewhat serious story about a group of plucky American POWs who befuddle their guards while they take on covert actions. It features a German character, Sergeant Shultz, who’s none too bright. That sounds familiar.

**Hogan’s Heroes (1965 - 1971) - An even more humorous take on POW life as a TV sitcom featuring bumbling, likable Nazis and another crew of inmate saboteurs. It’s noteworthy because most of the Nazis here were acted by Jewish actors, as well as one of the prisoners (LeBeau), who was an actual death camp survivor. I recall reading an interview with one who said that, if he allowed the Nazis to take his sense of humor, they might as well have killed him. Sergeant Schultz returns to the screen.

**The Boys From Brazil - (1978) - A very dark turn, in which Gregory Peck plays Joseph Mengele, hiding out in Brazil, hatching a plot to clone Hitler and create a bunch of new ones, trained and raised to have the same personality.

That seemed to have marked a beginning to the idea that Nazis will continue to haunt us, a continuum to recent movies where old Nazis, new ones, etc, continue to be an evil threat. Stalin is dead, the Soviet Union is gone, and Putin, as nasty as he is, is like a bureaucrat, not a raging dictator. Fortunately, so far, for the moment, hopefully the western world doesn’t have anything as iconic as Nazis to replace them.



Movie Forums Squirrel Jumper
People in real life have been making a lot more nazi references I have noticed though too. To quote Bill Maher, calling someone a nazi is the new, I don't like you.



In regard to my earlier contention that Nazis are an “easy” villain, the other side is that Bolsheviks and Stalinists not only are less identifiable, but most people, having forgotten a lot of history or never knew it, just don’t come up to the same iconic vision of political evil, goose stepping, uniforms and mannerisms that Nazis provide. Someone could write a couple long books on this but they’re the low hanging fruit of political evil.

My short version recalls the arc of a few movie/TV Nazis -

**The Stranger (1946) - Orson Welles directs and stars in a flick about an on-the-run architect of the Holocaust, trying to take up a new life in small town New England. Edward G Robinson co-stars as a relentless Nazi hunter who tracks Welles and a lackey to the town, where he’s a teacher, married to a pretty woman. This movie was done soon after the war and features some quick clips of actual death camp footage. It was an important role for Robinson, who was Jewish, AKA Emmanuel Goldenberg. It also features a unique use for the clock on top of City Hall.

**Stalag 17 (1953) - A somewhat serious story about a group of plucky American POWs who befuddle their guards while they take on covert actions. It features a German character, Sergeant Shultz, who’s none too bright. That sounds familiar.

**Hogan’s Heroes (1965 - 1971) - An even more humorous take on POW life as a TV sitcom featuring bumbling, likable Nazis and another crew of inmate saboteurs. It’s noteworthy because most of the Nazis here were acted by Jewish actors, as well as one of the prisoners (LeBeau), who was an actual death camp survivor. I recall reading an interview with one who said that, if he allowed the Nazis to take his sense of humor, they might as well have killed him. Sergeant Schultz returns to the screen.

**The Boys From Brazil - (1978) - A very dark turn, in which Gregory Peck plays Joseph Mengele, hiding out in Brazil, hatching a plot to clone Hitler and create a bunch of new ones, trained and raised to have the same personality.

That seemed to have marked a beginning to the idea that Nazis will continue to haunt us, a continuum to recent movies where old Nazis, new ones, etc, continue to be an evil threat. Stalin is dead, the Soviet Union is gone, and Putin, as nasty as he is, is like a bureaucrat, not a raging dictator. Fortunately, so far, for the moment, hopefully the western world doesn’t have anything as iconic as Nazis to replace them.

The Russians were our allies in WW2 which is a complicating wrinkle, and the Nazis are just so flagrantly iconic that they're immediately identifiable. Also, U.S. propaganda during the Cold War was that the Soviet government was bad, making their people suffer. Any one who is a Nazi is obviously bad, where Soviet-Communism was framed more as an oppressive system that a personal-attribute.



The Russians were our allies in WW2 which is a complicating wrinkle, and the Nazis are just so flagrantly iconic that they're immediately identifiable. Also, U.S. propaganda during the Cold War was that the Soviet government was bad, making their people suffer. Any one who is a Nazi is obviously bad, where Soviet-Communism was framed more as an oppressive system that a personal-attribute.
When I think about the people who ran the USSR, my picture is of a group of guys in drab suits in a room in the Kremlin, drab more than scary. Nazi imagery, however, is immediate with recognizable uniforms, goose stepping armies, massive cheering crowds and swastikas. Even the USSR missile parades that were filmed seems to be drab, dreary events with lots of spectators standing obediently more than enthusiastically. The nazis were much better at orchestrating media events. Nobody in recent centuries has been so instantly identifiable.