I suppose pretty much everything I'm about to say could be explained away with: "Lighten up! It's just a movie!" However, I feel I ought to say it anyway.
When the Basterds brutally kill almost all the enemy soldiers they come across and carve a swastika into the forehead of every one they let live, when they set fire to a public building and machine-gun everyone who tries to escape being burned alive, what's left to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys? The fact that they were on the side which later won the war?
When Aldo Raine describes the Basterds' mission and says "We're gonna be dropped into France dressed as civilians", the typical moviegoer likely thinks to himself: "Ah, cunning -- they'll be able to blend in with the locals and move about more clandestinely." That's an understandable supposition, and it's basically correct. But the typical moviegoer fails to understand that when a soldier dresses as a civilian, that doesn't mean he gets to go around killing enemy soldiers more or less with impunity (not even real-life SOE/OSS personnel did that) because he can blend in with the local populace, it means that the enemy will hunt him down like a dog and that if the enemy captures him, he more likely than not will be executed.
An actual instance of such during the Second World War: During the
Battle of the Bulge, the Germans launched
Operation Greif (Gryphon) in which English-speaking German soldiers dressed as American soldiers infiltrated behind US lines to capture vital bridges and to sow confusion in the Allied rear areas. This was in violation of
Article 29 of the Hague Convention of 1907, of which
Otto Skorzeny (the officer leading Operation
Greif) was well aware. All eighteen of Skorzeny's men who were captured were executed as spies
whether or not they had even participated in combat. (A side effect of
Greif that many regular German soldiers who were wearing articles of American combat clothing were summarily shot as spies when captured. The German lightweight smocks and flimsy wool-rayon blend tunics were notoriously insufficient at keeping out the cold. The US soldiers' clothing was warmer and thus offered too great a temptation for many German soldiers.)
However, since (In modern war movies) the assumption is that being captured is as good as receiving a death sentence, the fate of the German operatives in the Battle of the Bulge is no worse than what the Basterds would expect, were they to be captured. It's not unreasonable to reckon that the Basterds, as US Army soldiers, were also aware of the Hague Convention's proscriptions against disguised soldiers operating behind enemy lines. Besides, real soldiers
hate guerillas, because they feel guerillas have an unfair advantage on account of their ability to blend in with the local population and to (literally, in some instances) sneak up and shoot them in the back.
But not only do the Basterds willfilly operate as guerillas with a view to killing as many enemy soldiers as possible, they multilate those they kill (by scalping them) as well as those they
don't kill (by carving swastikas into their foreheads). (The implied rationale -- as when Raine states: "And the Germans will be sickened by us, and the Germans will talk about us, and the Germans will fear us!" -- is that the fear their ruthless brutality will inspire in the Germans will give the Basterds a psychological edge. While this would be true to a certain extent, it
also would have the effect of inspiring the Germans to work all the more at hunting the Basterds down like dogs and killing them.)
The movie takes place in occupied France some time shortly before the D-Day landings at Normandy. The typical moviegoer's mental image of occupied France is likely one of the French cowering in fear of the Nazi occupiers and watching in relative helplessness as the invaders steal their food, beat up their men, rape their women, and drag any and all Jewish individuals back to Germany. Non-propagandistic accounts of German soldiers (
aside from the ones assigned to units tasked with searching out Jews in their jurisdiction) show that -- while there were instances of brutality against civilians in France, as in pretty much all occupied countries -- any given individual soldier as likely as not never did anything more cruel than being brusque to a local shopkeeper who seemed uncooperative. The justification for the Basterds' ruthlessness and brutality is based on the
assumption that any given German soldier (and therefore
every German soldier) they encounter had been a willing participant in (or at least an accessory to) torturing/killing civilians and/or slaughtering Jews and/or sowing terror among the local populace.
On the other hand, the fact is that the Germans killed tens of millions of innocent people in the Holocaust and in regions occupied by the German Army, so no matter how brutal and ruthless the Basterds are, their actions pale in comparison to those of the Germans. Also, there's the reasoning that as soon as the bad guys commit atrocity, the good guys have the green light to do likewise to them. But when the good guys commit atrocity too (even if it can be rationalized that to commit atrocity against atrocity-mongers is no atrocity), what is left to distinguish them from (i.e., elevate them above) the bad guys?
Lastly, this movie perpetuates most of all the falsehood that killing captured enemy personnel is okay. Sure, it's morally wrong, but more than that, it's militarily stupid. Killing POWs (even freshly captured ones) only makes the enemy more inclined to do likewise. As for the Germans -- the ultimate bad guys of WW2 -- the
assumption is that one might as well kill surrendered German soldiers, since the Germans would do likewise to any Allied troops who surrendered. This assumption is not only false (there were
many instances of German soldiers, even Waffen-SS troops, treating POWs humanely), it is stupid. Any soldier who reckoned "the only good
Kraut is a dead Kraut" and killed a surrendered German soldier didn't make things any easier (by contributing to a decrease in the enemy's numbers) for his fellow soldiers, he actually made things worse by making any Germans who found out it all the more inclined to likewise refuse to take prisoners themselves. Imagine how a surrendered GI would have felt if one of the German soldiers with their rifles levelled at him and his fellow GIs had said: "Oh, by the way, we have decided to kill you and your squadmates because we found out that a few days ago a group of American soldiers massacred one of our units that had surrendered to them."
In the scene where Donny Donowitz stands before the captured German sergeant, pokes the black-enameled cruciform medal on his tunic, and says
"You get that for killin' Jews?" and the German replies "Bravery", he speaks factually. In the German Army (including the Waffen-SS) there was no decoration awarded for killing, let alone killing members of a certain ethnicity. The black-enameled cruciform medal in question is the
Iron Cross 1st Class, which was awarded for bravery in combat. The typical moviegoer likely reckons (and the movie makes little effort to discourage this assumption) that the German refuses to inform the Basterds about the disposition of nearby German forces out of spite or hatred or some such. Soldiers in general fear letting down their comrades more than they fear death or wounding, so the German in this scene was simply acting as a veteran sergeant -- regardless of nationality -- would act when faced with the choice between being bludgeoned to death or betraying his fellow soldiers.
So, in my view, as someone who has extensively studied war (and the Second World War in particular),
Inglorious Basterds is basically a sixty-years-after-the-fact Allied propaganda film. To me, it's comparable to if the Germans had won the war and then had supported
Uwe Boll's making a film that lauded the actions of
Sonderkommando Dirlewanger and made the men thereof seem like courageous war heroes.
That said, it was almost inevitable that eventually a movie like this would be made. For one thing, the modern American moviegoing audience is much too cynical to be sufficiently entertained by good guys who act like good guys. No, these are the days of heroes who fight fire with fire, who give the bad guys a taste of their own medicine and do so "with furious anger". Long gone are the days of war movies like those featuring John Wayne. Also, the current generation needs to be reminded (as if it weren't enough that people worldwide continue to harbor suspicion that any given German is a closet anti-Semite or Nazi) that the Nazis were evil and that the Allied waging of WW2 was fully justified. Without this continually renewed justification, the lauding of "the Greatest Generation" would lose its significance. So it was effectively
necessary for
Inglorious Basterds (or a film like it) to be made, especially after last year's
Valkyrie and the critically acclaimed German-made
Das Boot. The American sense of right victory cannot afford to be diminished by the public beginning to view the Germans as worthy of anything less than total-war defeat.
As I said, though, my foregoing arguments could be answered by a mere "Relax! It's just a
movie!" A valid point; and in that respect, there's not really anything to get worked up about. But I refuse entertainment which is divorced from reality and which promotes what I don't believe in. I don't believe in 'being evil to the evildoer is no evil', and I don't believe in killing POWs, let alone also multilating them.