Defiance, Valkyrie, Major Remer, Mark Weber and the Limits of Holocaust Denial
By Leonard Zeskind
The Zeskind Fortnight No. 10
January 24, 2009
Two big budget films currently showing in theatres re-address resistance to Hitler and the industrial-style murder of European Jews during World War Two. Both are based on true stories. In Defiance, we watch a small band of Jews escape the Nazi killers and take to the forests of Byelorussia. Led by the Bielski brothers, they mount partisan attacks, lose their lives to hunger and the winter cold, survive assaults by the German war machine, and build their own society. At the war’s end, the scroll tells us, 1,200 Jews walked out of the Bielski camp in the woods, a living testimonial to the fact that Jews did not go quietly to their deaths, and that a small but significant number did fight back.
Valkyrie attempts to tell the story of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and the German military officers who attempted the assassination of Hitler in July 1944—a year and a half after the Soviet Army turned the Germans back at the Battle of Stalingrad and six weeks after the Allied landing at Normandy. (A more complete and complex documentary film, “The Restless Conscience” by Hava Beller, covers the same territory.) In Valkyrie, Stauffenberg’s plot fails, and at that point in the movie we are introduced to Major Otto Ernst Remer. At the personal instruction of Hitler, Remer rounds up the Stauffenberg plotters and summarily executes dozens. The movie ends, but in real life Remer finished the war with the rank of General, and then under Allied occupation tried and failed to resurrect national socialist politics. He eventually sank completely into the subterranean world of Nazi “war heroes” and their sympathizers.
Remer reappeared in 1987 in Los Angeles at a conference of the Institute for Historical Review—a veritable Flat Earth Society which has spent three decades arguing that the Holocaust did not happen and that tales of it are a hoax. At Remer’s side for the occasion stood