With its heavy rock soundtrack and uninhibited swearing, the BBC’s Sunday night war series SAS Rogue Heroes seems fresh and plausible. The soldiers are tough and bloodthirsty. Viewers concerned about historicity can apparently relax with their popcorn: the show’s creators “have tried, where possible, to stick to the reality of what happened”.
The Free French squadron of the SAS are betrayed by Brückner, a German fighting on their side. This is essentially accurate: the real life Brückner was a traitor and Free French soldiers did fight alongside British SAS men.
SAS Rogue Heroes features one Jewish character, fictional French soldier Halévy. Unlike the rangy, fit SAS men, he is small and portly, can’t mount a truck without help, is bullied and almost flunks a test of bravery. While his comrades seem inherently warlike, Halévy fights specifically to revenge his deported family. His graduation to bravery necessitates his own death, as he immolates the traitor Brückner, himself and others in an explosion.
Halévy first appears when, among a group of soldiers standing to attention, he sneezes and is laughed at. Halévy’s humiliation, unsoldierly reticence, moral preoccupation and self-sacrifice continue a grisly dramatic tradition of fictional Jewish soldiers being bumbling, cowardly or otherwise unfit to fight. The lucky ones die quickly.
This comic relief role for Jewish soldiers has been a constant for well over a century. In Cohen Saves The Flag (1912), two Jews at Gettysburg put romantic rivalry above the interests of the Union Army. The running joke about lascivious and cowardly Private Lipinsky in What Price Glory? (1926) is the size of his nose. And Sammy Cohen, who played Lipinsky, also played Sammy Nosenblum in Plastered in Paris (1928).
Knowledge of the Holocaust didn’t cause Hollywood to retire these tropes: Air Force (1943) contains delirious violence, but finds time for the pratfalls of simpleton Corporal Weinberg. The same year in Bataan (1943), craven Corporal Feingold’s bunions are the joke; he’s still complaining about them as he dies face-down in a puddle.
Jewish soldiers are often shady as well as laughable: Stalag 17 (1953) is a tense tale of betrayal among angry, violent POWs, within which Harry Shapiro is unreliable, vulgar and indebted — and lusts after female Russian prisoners. Private Jackie Rabin of Bethnal Green lightens the mood of A Hill in Korea (1956), complaining that he should have bribed his way out of National Service. More darkly, the spinelessness of Sergeant Nate Lewis of Men in War (1957) causes him to bolt, fatally, from a minefield.
After the revelation of the Holocaust, whether consciously on the part of screenwriters or not, Jewish characters’ deaths seem sometimes to take on meaning beyond their individual passing. Jewish deaths are now of universal significance, which is perhaps better than being irrelevant — but, it turns out, not much.
Corporal Gabby Gordon in Objective, Burma! (1945) is a standard-issue daft Jewish soldier. In the film, a Lt Jacobs is tortured by the Japanese but passes on a vital message before dying. Jews increasingly die to impart benefit to other characters or even moral instruction to viewers. In The Deep Six (1958), Frenchy Shapiro dies after rescuing his Quaker friend from Japanese soldiers. More significantly, Anzio (1968) features licentious Corporal Rabinoff who dies while drawing German fire from his non-Jewish comrades. Rabinoff’s death inspires a moral epiphany in a cynical war journalist.
Soldier of Orange (1977) features Jan Weinberg of the Dutch Resistance. His courage is established in an encounter with Dutch collaborationist police who are bullying a weedier Jew. Such an exceptional Jewish character must have a meaningful end: the Germans pipe water up Jan’s bottom then decapitate him. Presumably Jewish viewers are intended to be comforted that Jan never betrayed his non-Jewish friends.
The unseen girlfriend of Private Bienstock in Hamburger Hill (1981) ends their relationship by letter because she disagrees with the Vietnam War. Ruth Silverman’s moral outrage distinguishes Bienstock from his comrades who say the war “don’t mean nothing”, but that doesn’t save him from oblivion.
Enemy At The Gates (2001) features two characters based on real-life Soviet snipers: Tania, who in the film at least is Jewish; and rustic Zaitsev, a born soldier. The fictional Jewish Commissar Danilov is a scheming, unsoldierly propagandist. He tries and fails, dishonourably, to win Tania’s affections, which are shown to be up for grabs. Tania falls instead for Zaitsev. Danilov allows himself to be spotted and shot by Zaitsev’s nemesis, a prolific German sniper. Zaitsev now shoots the exposed German and reunites with Tania.
Manfred von Richthofen was a real-life German air ace. One of the pilots under his command was Friedrich Rüdenberg, a Jew who died in Haifa in 1977. Like Rüdenberg, German Jewish aces such as Willi Rosenstein and Paul Billik also survived the Great War. But while The Red Baron (2008) features a panoply of pilots known to the historical record, the filmmakers felt it necessary to ignore these men in favour of inventing a skilled Jewish pilot called Sternberg, as a close friend of the eponymous hero. Crudely reflecting the angst of contemporary Germany over Jews dying, von Richthofen breaks down when Sternberg is killed, and develops a sad cynicism towards war. Sternberg’s narrative role is to sacrifice himself for the betterment of the non-Jewish hero’s conscience.
Such depictions are not reserved for Jewish men, although major female Jewish characters in war dramas are few — and perhaps go unnoticed even when there is a surfeit of vileness. In the first series of Das Boot (2018), in very different incidents two Jewish women are raped and murdered. Major female characters too are almost always mistreated, with character variations such as a deranged instinct for revenge, sociopathy, or attraction for their persecutors: the eponymous Judean heroine of Judith of Bethulia (1912) is perhaps the first female Jewish lead in a war film and sets the tone by seducing and decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes. The film is loyal to the Biblical text, but… why choose that text?
German-Jewish exile Esther in Morituri (1965) embroils herself in a mutiny plot aboard a German merchant ship. Esther has been forced to sleep with her brother and been mass-raped; she submits to sex with a large group of American prisoners in order to encourage the mutiny; and after the mutiny fails, she is shot to death, which we see in close-up.
In Lacombe, Lucien (1974), it is implied that the peasant collaborator of the title rapes the Jewish girl “France”, who mysteriously appears to fall in love with him. In Black Book (2006), Rachel Stein is a Jewish woman who is oddly dry-eyed when she sees her family murdered by Germans. Joining the Resistance, Rachel becomes the lover of Müntze, a “good German” who manfully ignores her Jewishness. Stein finally breaks down when Müntze is killed. She survives only after a vat of ordure is poured over her head, as a collaborator.
Another warped product of the Dutch film industry, Esther in Soldier of Orange is the promiscuous Jewish girlfriend of a collaborator. Again we have a Jewish woman who has consorted with Germans or their proxies, again punished by Dutchmen; this time by having her hair shorn. The Exception (2016) shows us another “good German” irresistible to a Jewish woman. Heroic Dutch-Jewish spy Mieke finishes the film triumphantly alive and happily carrying her German lover’s baby.
Returning to SAS Rogue Heroes, a Jewish soldier really was involved: but unlike Halévy, Maurice Tiefenbrunner survived the war. And neither he nor the men betrayed in 1942 by Brückner were French; they were members of the mostly-Palestinian Jewish “Special Interrogation Group”, a unit which goes unmentioned in the TV series.
In Halévy the screenwriters have employed a well-worn plot device: a Jewish soldier who is unmartial, weak and inherently funny, but redeemable by death.
(If you haven’t heard of the Special Interrogation Group, you might watch the film Tobruk (1967) in which George “Hannibal” Peppard plays a German Jew and says “Shalom,” as he sacrifices his men’s lives to save non-Jewish comrades. You might; but you really shouldn’t after this.)
