Nixon was an Intelligence officer, so he was rarely on the front lines. Even as early as Episode 2, it shows him explaining the D-Day landing to the guys, and later telling Winters that the map Winters found was very helpful. He was skilled at planning operations.
Scottish actor Ross McCall absolutely nails the role of Joe Liebgott in this episode. I cry with him every time I re-watch him telling the prisoners the bad news.
Every time I see this episode I'm reminded of the Polish couple that lived above my apartment back in the 90s. They were both interned into the Nazi camps, in fact they met in the camps as young people and ended up getting married and moving to the USA after the war. They stayed together until their deaths in their late age. Went to both their funerals and services. They were not even Jewish, but they were Poles and the Nazis hated the Poles.
I'm 60. My mom's first cousin was in the resistance in greece. He ended the war as a prisoner in a concentration camp. On VE Day he weighed 87 lbs. Normally he was 170. He did almost kill himself by eating too much when the camp was liberated
One of the moments that hit hardest for me was seeing Bull crouched down, staring at the ground 15:48, then the expression on Spiers' face as he's approaching the gates 16:10 and then listening to Joe translating for Winters 17:52.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and many others, mostly in Eastern Europe were huge and what Winters was describing in the episode. I remember bagging groceries in high school, in 1984. There was the little old woman, who couldn't have weighed more than 100 to 110 pounds. In the summer you could see the arm tattoo the Germans gave her when she was a child in the camps. It is like she carried PTSD all her life because she looked like a ghost.
This also makes me think of the stories of camp prisoners hiding food in their house many years after the war ended, because it was vital to survive the camps.
When I was in college, I rented an apartment from an elderly Jewish couple. The husband had a tattoo on his arm from when he was taken from the Warsaw ghetto to Auschwitz. He managed to escape. They were the kindest people and were very good to us girls who rented from them. I'm sure they are gone now, may they rest in peace.
Treblinka was dismantled by the Germans in 1943, and Dachau was a “labor” camp in Germany. Winters is talking about Majdanek, which was discovered right after D-Day, and Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the first time the Soviets found survivors and the camp not completely destroyed.
There's no Holocaust survivor who didn't carry it their entire lives. Some dealt with their physical and emotional wounds. Others would not or could not. One of my father's few childhood friends dedicated her retirement to teaching about the Holocaust. My father survived a ghetto, being a child partisan, being captured, tortured, and sent to a concentration camp. I saw This episode for the first time with my father. He walked out , when it became clear that they had found a Labor (to death) camp. I felt so bad that I had exposed him to this, because I knew that my father would be up all night with a few drinks crying and apologizing to the dead and those he couldn't save. Even after my father had a stroke and was dying of dementia he carried memories. One time my mother and I were visiting him as he was recovering from surgery. He willed himself towards a woman neither my mother nor I recognized and tried to give her food. My mother turned pale when she heard what my father was saying. He was calling her grandma in Polish and trying to give her his ration. The last time my father saw his grandparents, they were giving their ration to my father and his brother right before they escaped from the ghetto into the forest. They were too sick to escape.
Well, Nixon was playing around on his wife. I'm not sure if she knew that or not. If you recall, in the Crossroads episode, when they said Winters had a 48 hour pass and was going to Paris, Nixon said something about looking up a young lady in England.
Nixon hadn’t taken part in the combat because he was mostly in the Intelligence gathering end, and administrative duties. Going back to episode two, he was involved with taking the German maps Winters recovered to an Intelligence division.
The stat that they show at the end of this episode that says 5 million ethnic minorities and 6 million Jews were murdered between the years of 1942 and 1945 is just mind-blowing to me!! If you do the math on that and figuring the entire years of '42,'43,'44 and 4 months of 1945, that works out to about 40 months!! Divide 40 into 11 million and that's the amount of monthly murders that took place within those years!! That's 275,000 per month, a little more than 9,000 per day!! So, for over 3 years, the Nazis murdered 9,000 people per day on average!!😢😢 We ABSOLUTELY must NEVER forget that this happened!!
@@chrisbolliger5717 you mean Jews or just his OWN people because Stalin just killed without REGARD so! Hell he killed some of his OWN Army when they were surrounded and cut off letting them starve!!! But you make a fair point!!
That number represents those who were killed through the death camps. From 1939-1942, even before the death camps, German and other Axis soldiers were formed into units who shot, gassed, burned and tortured millions before the system of "the final solution". Even the countries who were allied with Nazi Germany took murderous actions on their own. Romanian soldiers killed around 400,000 Jews by themselves, leading Hitler to be "impressed" by their methods. The largest numbers of organized murder victims were Poles and Russians, most who weren't Jewish. The actual number of deaths by organized murder, starvation, forced labor, exposure and other brutality is several times the 11 million mentioned, closer to 40,000,000. If you want to add in the millions of Soviet ordered mass murders and all the brutality and mass murders by the Japanese, the numbers are mind boggling.
Enjoyed the reaction. This episode is more complex than most catch the first time through. It’s called “Why we fight” and the first half the episode is going around and showing different soldiers and how this war has affected them personally. Each of them (justifiably) kinda feeling sorry for themselves at what they’ve had to sacrifice. Webster even yells “what the fuck are we doing here!”. Then they hit the camp and everything has changed. It’s a stark reminder on “why we fight” and why everyone made sacrifices. It’s a well done episode and every time I watch it I catch something new. Thanks for watching the series, you guys have been great to watch.
It was Nix’s third combat jump which is honestly historic not many people got 3 probably less than 100 in history but he was the S2 (intelligence officer) so he shouldn’t be shooting honestly if the S2 is firing his weapon you are overrun
It is a misconception that Nixon's helmet saved his life during the Market Garden action. Helmets were worn to protect against falling debris and some shrapnel. They were not strong enough to stand up to the direct fire of most firearms used in WW2. To highlight this point... if you noticed Nixon's helmet later in that episode... there were two holes; an entrance... and an exit. Had Nixon's head actually been between those holes, he would have been dead. The shot was a close miss.
My late father served in a medical group following around the paratroopers. He helped feed & treat the victims & saw horrors in the experimental clinics where the Nazis experimented on the captives. He had nightmares for years after the war.
There are certain moments throughout this entire series that when I see them, no matter how MANY TIMES I see them, I instantly tear up!!! Now of course this entire episode was a tear fest, but in the beginning when the veterans are speaking and one of them says that, that German soldier and I "might have been good friends under different circumstances", I instantly tear up!! Another moment like that is back in episode 4 when Webster gives the Dutch kid a chocolate bar and the kid's father says "he has never tasted chocolate before"! Instant tear fest with that one no matter how many times I see it!! I happen to believe that this is the BEST historical series based on REAL events that has ever been created!! I believe that it should be shown in schools to every child!!
@pharox9711 Some never made it to see BoB broadcast. They died before it aired. But they all volunteered once they knew what it was for. Also, the actors themselves never saw the set ahead of time. One other thing, the real veterans also couldn't/wouldn't go into detail about Lansburg. (The camp they saw) In their interviews, almost all refused to speak about it.
Hi guys, I highly recommend you to watch Masters Of The Air. Outstanding show. It's also produced by Hanks and Spielberg. But if you prefer to follow the chronological order of the shows, The Pacific is next in the line.
I think I read about that rumor of Hanks being untrue. He was the voice of the German soldier that didn't make it from the snatch operation last episode though.
It's 100% not Tom Hanks. That guy looks like Hanks looks today, not how he was 20 years ago. He has a cameo in ep5 and voices a German in ep8 and that's it. This is just some misinformation that keeps being parroted around, same as those people who claim Val Kilmer says hucklebearer in tombstone.
The extras who acted has the prisoners where actual Cancer Patients getting or awaiting treatment. When making the concentration camp scene, behind the scenes people asked many of the actors if they want to see a memorial in order to get ready for it, all of them said no because they wanted to see the concentration camp with virgin eyes like the real E Company did over 80 years ago. The shock and awe from the actors are raw and real. I cry every time when I reach to Episode 9 because has someone who has a degree in history, we can never forget the atrocistes of the Holocaust. (Side Note: Babe Heffron said that the depiction in BoB wasn't accurate - in reality it was 1000 times worse.) Many people of today especially the young who are forgetting that the Jewish people have lost so much because of one man and many of his followers did to them. That is why Mossad was created in Israel "Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations," because when Nazi Germany was losing the war, many high level Nazis escaped to other countries especially to Buenos Aires, Argentina. When Mossad agents get information on a Nazi escapee's they go and get them, send them back to Israel, put them on trial, and finally hanged. Mossad even today are still looking for any Nazis from WWII, even though many are old men and women, Mossad still will hang them for murdering their people.
This is the hardest episode to watch, but historically speaking, the only thing that any of the allied leadership had heard was rumors, and those rumors were so horrific, that they did not believe them, it is doubtful that even Dwight D. Eisenhower had heard any of those rumors, going by the accounts of witnesses of how he reacted when he first saw one of the camps, Allied forces DID NOT know anything about the camps till they started stumbling across them in the final days of the war, the first one found was Auschwitz, the Russians found it about 20 days before the war in Europe came to an end, The British found one in France the following day, then the U.S. started finding them all over the place, as hard as it is for me to watch this episode every time, I can't help but to think that what they filmed here for this mini series, was probably watered down 1,000 to 1, possibly more, having seen some of the original pictures taken in 1945, which will absolutely rip your heart out, I am guessing that is WHY General Eisenhower ordered as many pictures and as much film to be used to document the horrors of what they found, he did not care how expensive it was going to be.
I was impressed you knew they needed to be careful about what they gave to the prisoners to eat. Too many complex carbs and rich foods are fatal. Great pick up. Another good observation is about how everyone in Easy and other units as well as people back home were wondering why we were fighting. Under direction from Frank Capra, The US Army Signal Corps produced a seven film series from 1942-1945 titled Why We Fight. Even with these films, soldiers may have still held doubts. This episode captured the doubt and then resolved those doubts. The opening of the Box Car with the bodies was near perfect recreation of newsreel footage from one of the camps. The sights were so horrific that even the most battle hardened soldiers had trouble with what they found. Many even vomited at the sight.
Something that just needs to be mentioned cause even i still can't wrap my head around it. But the town shown in the beginning? Virtually every settlement looked like that across the various theaters of war... Entire towns, villages , and even a few large scale cities wiped clean from the map. From super historical settlements/towns in North Africa to the all throughout Western Europe and the eastern front (especially). Full on devastation. And of course the many cities of Japan that were firebombed prior to the 2 nuclear blasts. It's a testament to humanity that we all (more or less) came together after all this and began to rebuild. Despite what lots of people seem to say... The Japanese mainland would have easily been unliveable for years after if the invasion plan took effect. The amount of causalities and destruction to the infrastructure, people, and natural land would have been beyond comprehension.. Other than the geopolitic reasons (like using the nukes to sort of warn the Soviet Union), I'm sure you guys will see why the nuclear option was chosen after watching The Pacific.
An excellent film (also directed by Spielberg) which shows the gradual transformation of Naziism in Germany, is “Schindler’s List” (1993) starring Liam Neeson.
8:57 Vat 69 was a blended malt whiskey in this era, meaning that all the whiskey came from pot stills. You can still get Vat 69, but it is a blend Scotch whiskey, meaning that a large portion of the whiskey comes from column stills.
Guys, after the last episode, please react to We stand alone together. It's a documentary that features Winters and all the guys talking you through the battles. Snippets of this are shown at the start of each episode. You won't regret it, as it puts real faces to the characters you've grown to admire.
Adding to the horror is that refeeding syndrome was not well known until the second world war when severely malnourished prisoners would die suddenly after being fed. Thousands died in this manner.
Easy company did encounter a camp that had been liberated a day or two before, but they definitely saw all the associated horrors. The episode drew inspiration from actual concentration camp liberation footage, and it was toned way down from real life. If you're up for it - and it's horribly graphic - here's actual footage of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 23rd & 24th of 1945: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-mgwWq2cp2qM.html
Easy Company arrived two days after Kaufering IV had been liberated by the 12th Armored on April 27, 1945. But contrary to what is shown in Band of Brothers there were only about 6 prisoners found alive and about 500 bodies.
The captured germans executed by the french, was not unusual, especiallyly if they were french fighting for the germans. The French doing the exicutioing was Tom Hanks. one of the Producers of the movie.
This should be required watching for anyone that thinks war cannot be justified for any reason. Why We Fight is exactly correct - evil like this should always be opposed.
They used to force Jewish musicians to play classical music as quartets outside some of the ovens as they forced others inside. The reason Nixon made the distinction that they were playing Beethoven was because he was German and Mozart was Austrian as was Hitler. They were still proud to be German but didn't want to be linked to Hitler. Over 600 Jews died from eating too much too soon. The woman whose house Nixon was in, the photo showed her husband was in the SS. She more than likely knew what was happening, hence the extra guilt she showsd later. Winters said he didn't feel the least bit bad about throwing German families out of their homes for a night or two so his men could sleep inside on real beds. Nixon was named the 2nd battalion intelligence officer just before they made the jump on D-day. It's not like he didn't see action. He made the jump on D-day. He did get shot through the helmet in the Netherlands, leaving a burn mark on his forehead. After Carentan, he got promoted up to regimental. He did get demoted back down to the 2nd battalion as operations officer due to his drinking, but he was always highly regarded for his skills for planning and operations. A lot of people are surprised how late we learned of concentration camps. Many assume that's why we fought. Don't forget, we stood by for a long time while Germany was rolling over Europe. We didn't get involved until Japan attacked us. We would have gotten. Involved eventually, but many more millions could have been killed before we did. Speaking of Japan, even though Hitler offer himself, don't forget the war is still raging in "The Pacific" which is another great miniseries to check out.
Note: the common soldiers had no idea the Nazis were exterminating the Jewish people. The Higher ups had an idea but no one believed it. I was 8 when I saw the real movies from the film makers documenting the war. One of the insane images I remember was the 10x10x10 foot piles of teeth that the Nazis pulled from victims because they had gold in them. The guys in the camp portraying the Jews volunteered to play these parts and were really dying from terminal illnesses they wanted to do this film series to show the barbaric policies of the Nazis and knowing they might not live to see the series and many of them didn't.
With a major political party describing human beings as being undesirable it can happen again. Vote because your life might depend on it. My dad was in the 10th Armor that oversaw the burials and this was the only episode he wouldn't watch with me.
In high school back in the early 90's we had to watch actual footage of the concentration camps. I was horrified, sick to my stomach, and deeply saddened by the black and white film footage. The quietest class I ever experienced.
During the making of this episode they hired cancer patients to work as extras in the prison camp. Many did not live long enough to see the series. During the war most of the troops did not know of the concentration camps until they found them. I cannot begin to imagin the horror they experienced.
10:19 You gyys slept on Tom Hardy cameo? Mad Max Bane Alfie Solomon could have won this war himself with all his other movie characters. Christ, one of them had a starship
Rember when easy got to enemy territory on the trucks and the French soilder shot 3 prisoners in the head. That soilder doing the shooting was Tom Hanks.
How many knew? No way to tell. But here’s what every adult in Germany knew at the time this episode took place. They knew that Mein Kampf, Hitler's book that laid out his intentions, had been around for two decades and was in practically every home. They knew when Hitler and the Nazis took power they passed the Nuremberg Race Laws, which made it almost illegal to simply be Jewish, and made it legal to do almost anything to them. They knew that three years later Kristallnacht occurred, and almost every Jewish shop, temple, and school in the country got smashed and Jews began being shipped off in large numbers. They knew that every Jewish home in almost every neighborhood was suddenly empty, until non-Jews were suddenly living there. And they knew a whole swath of the professional class was gone: their doctors, accountants, lawyers, and bankers. Even if we don’t count the soldiers coming home on leave and telling family and friends, even if we don’t count the ones at camps like this, in Germany, who would have been in that town regularly, and even if we don’t count all the civilians involved, such as railroad personnel, clerks, administrators, etc., anyone alive in Germany when this episode took place who didn’t know horrible things had been and were happening to Jews simply didn’t want to know.
First off, what is shown in Band of Brothers is fictional version of the liberation of Kaufering IV which was not liberated by Easy Company. _How many knew?_ Pretty much everyone knew. People often conflate the camps within Germany with the camps in Poland (and the camps operated by the Ustaše) which the Germans attempted to hide. It often forgotten, sometimes ignored, that most of the larger camps within Germany, such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, were operational years before the war began and there was no effort to hide their existence. The camp depicted in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV which was one of 11 labor subcamps of Dachau located in the Landsberg region of Germany known as the Kaufering Complex. The prisoners in these camps were constructing underground factories, rail lines, and infrastructure repair, and were routinely marched through the local villages and towns. Just before these camps were liberated, the Germans began to evacuate the camps; forcing those who could walk on a "death march" through the towns and villages toward Dachau and killing those who couldn't. When soldiers of the 134th Ordinance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division stumbled onto Kaufering IV while looking for a disabled tank, they found only about 6 surviving prisoners who had hidden in the muck of the latrine and about 500 dead bodies.
Still, for years every camp had railroads that brought train after train filled with thousands of people. Those trains and rail lines were built and driven by someone. Camps sometimes were hundreds of acres in size that had previously been open land. And as towns, villages and cities began to be emptied of residents (some towns wiped totally off the map), and as former homes/businesses/possessions of Jews were given to non-Jews, and as Jews began disappearing from professions in the media and other highly visible places, the changes to society must have been visible. It wasn’t as much that no one knew, but that no one dared to speak out because if you did, you and your family/friends/colleagues would be targeted and imprisoned. Certainly some people closed their eyes and ears but towards the end of the war, the disappearance of millions of people is not something a country can hide. And each camp had plenty of guards, and were planned and built partially with German labor and supplies. As the Nazis overtook other nations, they would imprison the local people and ship them to camps, so people in other countries were also “disappearing” and their homes and possessions being re-distributed, just as in Germany.
Plenty of people knew, especially the ones who lived nearby. Rumors even made it back to the Jewish ghettos while they were being liquidated over time, and people moved to the camps.
@@vitoralecrim ok, I see your point. There was a huge controversy about whether the Allies should bomb what they suspected were camps and rail lines to them (based on aerial footage and intelligence sources.). However, information was not conclusive until 1944 and part of the problem was that most camps were deep within Nazi controlled areas which made air missions more difficult. Some people said it was morally wrong to kill innocent victims, while others said they were probably going to die anyway. Ultimately the Allies did not destroy camps and those decisions still haunt us. These discussions were repeated when the atomic bomb was ready, and this time, it was decided to go ahead and destroy Japanese cities, which were neither camps, nor military installations, but were places that had not undergone previous destruction (so as to better gauge he effects of the bombs) in order to destroy Japanese resolve to continue the war, despite their increasing losses. The entire situation is tragic and all we can do now, is try to learn from the past, and try to create a more humane future for everyone and use technology to improve life rather than destroy it.
@@Dej24601 False. The targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were valid military targets. Hiroshima was the headquarters of the IJA. Nagasaki was a large port and ship building hub for the IJN.
My grandparents on my mothers side were both in camps. They immigrated to America shortly after the war ended. My grandmother wont talk about it, and you had to get my grandfather really drunk for him to even talk about the war. I only got to see his old photos once when I was very little. It's horrifying what the Nazis did to all those people. It's a bit morbid of a fact, but the medicinal field made leaps and bounds because of what the Nazis did in those camps. Cutting people up while still alive, experimenting with rapid depressurization on live subjects, seeing how long prisoners would survive after having organs removed. Cold stuff. It wasn't even 100 years ago that this all happened. Similar things still happen in this world to this day.
My grandfarher was a tank driver in WW2. He was on a ship getting ready to come home and they had them come back to help with the camps. He never spoke of it ever until my cousin was doing a report on it for school.
Imagine seeing all of the horrors of War that these people have witnessed...Then being speechless seeing this. "Why We Fight" is a nod to the epic Frank Capra WW2 series that was being shown during the War back home. I really believe Spielberg intentionally has the Nazi woman in the vivid red coat as a direct reference and connection to the little Jewish girl in Schindler's List. I don't think there are coincidences in his films...The actors weren't even allowed to see the set until the day of shooting, they wanted to get a genuine reaction from them. While the prisoners were some actual cancer patients who wanted to be a part of this. What shocks me is how surprised most people are reacting to this, having no idea what they were about to see...I think we get so immersed in the characters and immediacy we lose track of the big picture and tragedy. Implore you to see "The Fallen of WW2" for perspective. Never forget.
It was not just that nobody had heard of these camps...word had gotten out to some extent. Unfortunately, propaganda on both sides were geared toward demonizing the enemy. As a result, even accurate descriptions of such horrors were somewhat dismissed by soldiers as the usual propaganda. Usually, in war, the truth about atrocities were less evil than reported. In the case of the holocaust, the opposite was actually the case.
It's not him. Kinda looks like how he looks today but he didn't look like that 20some years ago. Hanks has a cameo in ep5 as a British and provides the voice of the wounded German left on the far bank in ep8 and that's it.
@@Hiking_chefand they all say ep5 as British Officer. And ep8 as voicing German soldier. You'll not find any CREDIBLE source claiming he's in ep9. If you have one, by all means share it and I'll gladly admit you're right. Just don't give me something uncurated that any schmoe can edit themselves.
@@Hiking_chef I usually upload to imgur and then post the link here but a lot of channel mods will delete outside links in comments. But I know what you're gonna screenshot, I have the same pic of the guy's close-up face next to a pic of Hanks directing a BoB episode and I guarantee you it's not him. I'll post it tonight when I'm home.
The HBO miniseries "The Plot Against America" (based on the Philip Roth novel) explores fictionally the period in the U.S. leading up to its eventual involvement in World War II including some of the reasons for the U.S.'s reluctance to get involved. Trailer: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RwMwrft7So8.htmlsi=_km7KtAz4rl98-6M And without the bombing of Pearl Harbor, who knows what would have happened? The Pacific War, while related to World War II, had a very different history to the war in Europe. The U.S. was "late to the party (?!)" in both cases.
This is why people should read real history books instead of novels or watch fictionalized garbage. In the 1930's, disillusioned by the end of WWI and the disastrous Versailles Treaty, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts, forbidding US involvement in foreign wars. There was no "late to the party". There was NO reason for the US to get involved with another European war. As a matter of fact, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson warned that the US should never get involved with European wars as they are endless, as we see now.
