The Second World War (1939-1945) was a human catastrophe of a scale so immense that its presence is felt in nearly every discussion of the history of the 20th century. It serves as both a keystone focus as well as a tangential connection to all manner of historical classes, not just political history but also the history of human movement, art, economics, and even language.
No film can be said to accurately depict the events of this war without a stark, unflinching look at the horror and human suffering of those long, bloody years. In addition, no education on this war can be of any use with assumptions of righteousness or heroism in place. This war was not a crusade or an adventure, it was sustained industrial inhumanity, where anyone who points to heroes is either lying or deluded.
The only useful way to learn about this war is to attempt to reconcile that inhumanity; to ask why it happened, how it happened, to who it happened, and to never shy away from the answers, no matter how disturbing. Films can help students do that. Consider these educational titles for your classroom syllabus for high school students or college history majors.
With that in mind, here are some of the most important and impactful depictions of the Second World War in film for both individual learning as well as for curriculum related to studying the war in a classroom setting. You can learn more about how to incorporate historical fiction films into your lesson plans as well as the benefits of including film education in your classroom.
Narratives
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Despite a few glaring 1950-isms that have aged poorly, Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is a startingly scathing indictment of the myth of martial culture and the very idea of honor in war. The film strongly questions the point of the war, depicting in detail the ignominiousness of fighting and death and the kind of damage that so-called honor can bring to human life.
Bridge on the River Kwai depicts a captured British officer’s attempt to rationalize and cope with his own defeat to Imperial Japan from his warped sense of military honor, which sees him develop an obsession with building a perfect bridge for his Japanese captors to somehow prove to the Japanese, his men, and most importantly himself, that he maintained his honor in defeat.
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The Human Condition (1959-1961)
A three-film odyssey clocking in at over nine hours in length, the Human Condition film series is perhaps not the best candidate for playing in an hour-or-less grade school setting. Still, the sheer human depths these films can impart to anyone attempting to understand not just the war but how a generation of Japanese veterans and civilians who lived through it came to reconcile its impact on them, and their impact on the world.
The series follows a good-natured Japanese youth and his harrowing experiences during the war, including brushing up against the brutal wartime mentality of Japan’s military government and the horrors of fighting in the Imperial Japanese army, dealing with how these events affected his view of the world.
Understanding the military trivia of the war is, in some ways, much less important to recongnize how the generation of people who lived through the war came to understand what was happening to them, and how a nation like Japan could be induced to commit the atrocities and the horrors their military inflicted across Asia. The Human Condition gives its director Masaki Kobayashi the opportunity to describe his own reconciliation of how he understood his country and the war he lived through with his own words and images from his mind.
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Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Though technically taking place after the war was over, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a critical companion piece to any study of the war, looking at the years before and after, not just the years of maneuver and battle, is vital to understanding how the war was allowed to happen. The film depicts the war crimes trials held by Allied courts for capturing Nazi leaders in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945.
Judgment at Nuremberg explores how the Nazi party managed to convince a nation to go along with their genocidal ideology with promises of honor and pride, and how the world would grapple with removing their pervasive grasp on the German people in the aftermath of the war.
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Come and See (1985)
Come and See (1985) is a brutal, unflinching depiction of some of the worst moments of the worst war in human history, showing in graphic detail the sustained terror and [brutality] of the millions of people subjected to Nazi occupation in Eastern Europe. Where Nazi ideology saw Britons and the French as lesser but still “honorable” people, it saw Slavs and communists as subhuman creatures befitting of neither mercy nor life outside of slavery to Germanic people.
Elem Klimov uses the perspective of a young Soviet boy as he witnesses countless atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht against the people of the Soviet Union. This film is not for the faint of heart but is vital to understanding the generational trauma Nazi occupation inflicted on hundreds of millions of people in Eastern Europe.
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Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) depicts the trauma and suffering of Japanese civilians before, during, and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film doesn’t depict the big-picture geopolitics of war, no maneuvers or campaigns or vast scale. Instead, the film depicts the effect war has on civilians who aren’t fighting in it or capable of changing its politics, but who nonetheless suffer.
Despite being animated, the film doesn’t shy away from stark, at times graphic depictions of suffering and deprivation, but like The Human Condition, it provides a unique insight into how Japanese people were still reconciling their history in a dynamic process that in many ways continues to this day.
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Downfall (2004)
Downfall (2004) has, somewhat unfortunately, become largely associated with a slate of semi-tasteless internet memes with actor Bruno Ganz’s famous fiery monologue as Adolf Hitler being replaced with other text. Despite this, Downfall is a fascinating and truly essential film for its depiction of the German Führer as human. Human, it should be noted, not as good or justified. The depiction of Hitler in this film strips away the power and the legend surrounding the man, not showing him as some unnatural monster come to wreak havoc on an otherwise innocent world. Instead, the film explores how a nation of millions of people put their faith in one flawed but absolutely self-assured man so completely that they allowed him to take their nation to hell and back and never questioned him until he was dead. In many American films depicting WWII, the war requires no reconciliation, able to serve as a setting for adventure films, heroic journeys, and even comedies. But in Germany, people have been having to reckon with their history for decades, and this film serves as an insight into how modern day Germans, including its director Oliver Hirschbiegel, understand their history with the war and the Nazi regime.
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Land of Mine (2015)
Land of Mine depicts the little-discussed effects of the war on the many German-occupied nations from smaller nations such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.
This film depicts the poison of revenge on the human mind, and how the brutalized people who suffered under Nazi occupation had to reconcile what their justified anger cost them.
Land of Mine follows a Danish officer in charge of using German prisoners of war, mostly young teenagers, to clear German-laid mines from Danish beaches, a job that killed many. The officer is forced to confront what suffering he was willing to force onto what was left of his enemies. The film questions if conscripted children with no say in the war were truly deserving of his nation’s justified anger towards the Nazi regime.
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Documentaries
The World at War (1973)
The documentary series World at War (1973) is the definitive documental depiction of World War II. Its use of archival footage from the time of the conflict as well as its use of interviews conducted with survivors of the war give it an authenticity other documentary series’ can’t compensate for. The educational documentary also possesses an astoundingly comprehensive summary of the events of the war.
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WWII In Color (2008)
Less intense, and less intimate with the material, WWII in Color is a perfect means for showing your class a summary of a specific event or set of years that is accompanied by painstakingly colorized images and the dulcet tones of Robert Powell’s narration.
At thirteen neatly segmented episodes that cover the aftermath of the Great War up until the very beginning of the Cold War, WWII in Colour can serve as a companion piece/capstone to a specific theater of the war or as a thorough educational experience in and of itself. It is the ideal combination of concise and comprehensive,
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