My Private War

The German army on the Russian front boasted six amateur cameramen in the ranks, whose footage comprised a fascinating blend of the ordinary and the horrendous. In place of the heel-clicking automata of war films, we see a young soldier in a swastika armband embarrassed by a visit from his mum; a Christmas tree stabbed into the frozen earth beside a machine-gun emplacement; the joy of shooting down a Russian plane with a rifle. In interview, the veterans display extreme agitation on the subject of the execution of peasants and Jews, and great pride in their old German cameras which performed so well at temperatures below zero.