' Land Of Mine' & The Enduring Legacy of WWII

Bomb disposal experts next to the 1.8 ton HC 4000
bomb defused in Frankfurt, Germany on Sunday

The Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst (KMBD) were busy in the German city of Frankfurt on Sunday.

The KMBD is the specialized bomb disposal unit who handle the delicate and dangerous task of defusing, disarming and removing, or in some cases detonating, the approximately 2,000 tons of unexploded ordinance (including bombs, artillery shells, hand grenades and anti-tank and land mines) found scattered across parts of Germany each year.

Deadly remnants of World War II.

Last week an unexploded 1.8 ton, 2-meter long British-made bomb, dropped by Allied Forces during World War II, was discovered in a construction site on the Wisemarer Strasse in the Westend District of Frankfurt.

As the BBC reported, authorities cordoned off a one-mile area of the city and ordered the mandatory evacuation of an estimated 70,000 Frankfurt residents from their homes on Sunday while experts successfully defused the bomb - identified as an HC 4000 "high capacity" bomb, known by Germans as a "Wohnblockknacker" or blockbuster for its ability to destroy entire city blocks.

This deadly artifact dropped during an Allied air raid over Germany at least 72 years ago prompted
the largest evacuation of a German city since the Second World War.

It's also a sobering reminder that even today, the legacy of World War II is very much alive.

It's both remarkable and sad that decades after General Alfred Jodl, Chief-of-Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command, appeared at the Allied headquarters in Reims, France to officially sign the documents verifying Germany's unconditional surrender to Allied forces at 2:41am on May 7, 1945, civilians lives are still under threat from that war.

Back in April, in my blog about Anne Fontaine's haunting 2016 film The Innocents, I reflected upon the pain, anguish, humiliation, trauma and death experienced by a small group of nuns in a remote Benedictine convent in the Polish countryside at the hands of a group of depraved Russian soldiers in the winter of 1945.

As actor Keith David observed in his moving narration of director / producer Ken Burns' landmark documentary of World War II, The War (written by Geoffrey C. Ward), millions of people's lives were impacted by the devastating war which raged across the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia, and in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, between 1939 and 1945.

There are literally tens of thousands of stories that may never be told, or are little known outside those who lived through the experience.

The experiences portrayed in the 2015 film Land Of Mine offers a look into another little-known story of World War II, one that also revolves around the complex and dangerous issue of unexploded ordinance left scattered and buried across Europe.

From the opening scene, it's clear that the central theme of this film is to wrestle with complex ethical questions related lingering anger over Germany's responsibility for WWII.

The film, directed by Martin Zandvliet, is set on the western coast of Denmark in May, 1945 just after the end of the war in Europe at the conclusion of a five-year occupation of the country by German troops.

The story opens on Carl Rasmussen, an embittered and war-weary Danish Army sergeant, brilliantly played by actor Roland Møller, sitting in a jeep silently watching a long line of exhausted German POW's marching past on their way out of the country under the watchful eyes of Allied soldiers.

When Rasmussen spots one of the German soldiers carrying a folded Danish flag as a trophy, he stops and angrily confronts the man, rips the flag from him and proceeds to start physically assaulting him; punching him until his face is bloodied and slapping another German soldier who tries to intervene.

Though the German soldier is unarmed, exhausted and makes no attempt to fight back, it's clear that Sergeant Rasmussen is venting pent-up rage after five years of occupation under the Nazis.

Watching the scene, my initial reaction was that the beating seemed excessive, cruel and unfair.

Sgt. Rasmussen sizes up the teenaged German
soldiers forced to defuse mines under his command  

But looking at the German uniform of the victim and reflecting on the fact that some 3,000 Danish people died at the hands of the Germans during the occupation, part of me felt I had no right to judge Rasmussen.

The German occupation of Denmark lasted from April 9, 1940 until May 5, 1945, so one can only imagine the kinds of cruelties, and depravation the Danish people endured under German forces.

So part of me felt like Sgt. Rasmussen was justified in teeing off on a German soldier.

But very quickly, the film elevates that ethical dilemma to an even more complex level.

The pace of the film is brisk, and it's quickly revealed that Rasmussen's job is to oversee a group of fourteen teenaged German prisoners who will be forced to perform the dangerous task of locating and defusing 45,000 mines that were laid along a section of beach on the west coast of Denmark under Hitler's orders as part of coastal defenses against a possible Allied assault.

These teenagers aren't the battle-hardened veterans of the German Wehrmacht or Nazi SS divisions responsible for the Blitzkrieg warfare that rapidly overran France, Belgium, Poland, Russia and other countries in the early part of the war.

Nor are they the Gestapo and SS troops who ran the concentration camps.

Their mismatched, ill-fitting uniforms clearly mark the ragtag group assigned to Sergeant Rasmussen as former members of Germany's Volkssturm, or "peoples storm".

Hitler greets young Volkssturm recruits in Berlin
during the final days of World War II 

The Volkssturm were a hastily-assembled and poorly-trained civilian militia called into service by Hitler in the final months of the war as Allied troops began to close in on Germany in 1944 and thousands of regular German forces were killed, wounded, captured or cut off.

A brainchild of Hitler and his propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, Volkssturm were made up of thousands of civilian men between the ages of 16 and 60 drafted into service, given cursory training and pressed into combat with outdated surplus weaponry and 2nd hand uniforms.

The casting, art direction, production design and cinematography in Land Of Mine combine to do an excellent job of gradually stripping away the outer layers and assumptions many people have of German soldiers in WWII  - revealing them as frightened kids abused and scapegoated for a war they played very little role in.

When they're first revealed in the film, their faces encrusted with dirt and partially hidden under mismatched helmets and hats, it's difficult to distinguish them from regular German POWs.

But once they're roughly sized up by Sergeant Rasmussen, and we begin to learn their names, it starts to become clear how young they really are.

Housed together in an old cottage by the sea with no toilet, electricity or running water that's been hastily outfitted with wooden bunk beds piled with straw-filled mattresses and pillows, as they begin to interact away from the eyes of Rasmussen we see them for who they are.

A captured German teen uses a probe to search
for landmines in Land Of Mine

The director and script effectively walk the audience through their initial training to learn how to defuse land mines by a cold-hearted Danish officer played by Danish actor Mikkel Boe Følsgaard; who views and treats the German teenagers with an icy hatred and contempt that's dehumanizing and reminiscent of how American film audiences usually see Nazi officers portrayed onscreen.

And these kids are faced with an almost unimaginable reality.

They must find and defuse 45,000 land mines buried and placed on a stretch of beach before they will be released and allowed to return home to Germany.

The plot is not overly complex, and it doesn't have to be - the story writes itself.

It also begs the question: should Danish people or soldiers risk their lives to rid their beaches of landmines the Germans placed there? Why shouldn't the Germans do it?

The film offers no easy answer to this question.

There is an underlying and constantly building tension as the boys must cope with almost no food as they settle into their new routine of crawling along marked off areas of beach looking for, digging up and defusing the thousands of landmines that were buried there by their own troops during the German occupation of Denmark.

The locals, Danish officers and a group of particularly cruel British soldiers in one unforgettable scene abuse them verbally, emotionally and physically.

But they endure their task with purpose and determination, even as they must watch friends succumb to gruesome injuries and death when things go wrong in the minefields.

Particularly moving is the character arc of Sergeant Rasmussen, who finds himself thrust into the role of surrogate father to boys he at first despises, but reluctantly comes to respect and even care for and sympathize with.

Real German Volkssturm during WWII

The ending of Land Of Mine is not Hollywood by any stretch.

The story is taken from actual events and there's nothing "Hollywood" about it.

The script is appropriately grim, violent, laced with tension and at times heartbreaking and hard to watch - as such a film should be.

But that said the ending is meaningful and rewarding in a way that offers a reminder that compassion, humanity and hope can endure even under the horrific circumstances of war.

Though it was released theatrically in Europe in 2015, Land Of Mine was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Oscars last year.

While it didn't win, it says a lot about the quality and depth of this movie (particularly the directing and acting performances) that it was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

I think this film offers some perspective as Americans come to grips with the fact that the current White House administration and Attorney General have moved to end DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), a program initiated under President Obama in the wake of the Republican-controlled Congress' failure to pass legislation to grant legal status to the thousands of young people brought to the United States through no fault of their own.

Land Of Mine is a stark reminder that ending DACA is not the first time that political leaders have used children, teenagers and young adults as fodder for rigid ideology.

As in 1945 on the beaches of western Denmark, here in the United States today, a nation founded by immigrants, young people brought to a foreign country through no fault of their own find their lives being upended and in some cases placed at risk, in the name of a political ideology they had nothing to do with.

And while the specific circumstances and danger may be different, it's just as tragic now as it was 72 years ago on a European coastline strewn with unexploded landmines.