Generation War does something very un-German – bottles it

I was so looking forward to Generation War (BBC2, Saturday) — a three-part drama series covering the second world war from the perspective of five young men and women on the German side. Any nation capable of producing the ME-109, the 88mm gun and the Tiger tank, not to mention Das Boot, really ought to have no problem making one of the most authentic, searingly honest war dramas ever to hit our screens…

How wrong I was. Consider a scene from this week’s opening episode involving Friedhelm — bookish, bolshie, anti-war younger brother of the more pugnacious and efficient Leutnant Wilhelm Winter. There they are on the Eastern Front, in the depths of winter, and Friedhelm is on guard duty at night in a foxhole petulantly smoking a fag — in calculated defiance of a comrade’s plea to stub it out for fear of alerting the enemy.

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Now in the British army this would have been a serious offence but in the Wehrmacht — which executed an estimated 50,000 of its men during the war — quite possibly a capital one.