War films often run the risk of building rough scripts. They don’t even lie openly. But they itch when dealing with historical truth. This is more or less what happens with “Munich, on the Edge of War” (2021), which is showing on Netflix.
The film, directed by the German Christian Schwochow, based on the novel by the British writer Robert Harris, remains with some difficulty within the margins of the credible.
Let’s look at a subtle example, which is in the little regard that the book and the film make of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 signed an agreement with the Berlin government to recognize the rights that the Third Reich supposedly would have over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. .
Sudetenland were hills that could indiscriminately belong to Germany, the present-day Czech Republic or Poland. Adolf Hitler promised Chamberlain that he would be content with just owning these lands. However, logically, to satisfy the German thirst for ‘living space’, Polish Silesia or French Alsace would also have to be surrendered at that moment.
Hitler had an infinite hunger for territory, and this only Chamberlain did not see – not because he was naive or ignorant, but because he believed that diplomacy would preserve the peace. For him, the German dictator was guided by a rationality in the conduct of foreign policy, which would invariably impose limits on him.
Months after the Sudetenland took over, the Germans invaded Poland and World War II broke out. Winston Churchill was called upon to head the British government and five years of “blood, sweat and tears” followed, until the Allied victory in Europe in May 1945.
Look good. Churchill saw farther and risked far more. However, Chamberlain had his own logic, which could have led to an early ceasefire, which would have saved millions of lives. It’s easy to see war only through Churchill’s rearview mirror.
Another moment in which the film brings a very approximate truth. Two friends studied together at Oxford. They are now on opposing sides in the outbreak of a new conflict. The two former comrades had not seen each other for eight years. And even so, the person who works for the Germans sends the person who works for the English documents that would prove the Fure’s scoundrels.
The recommendation is not to sign the concession on the Sudetenland. The delivery of the documents exposes their author to an act of the highest treason. But would he take such a risk, in the name of an ethic to which Hitler was so indifferent? Let’s say this is pure talk to go to sleep. Chamberlain was deceived by the idea that Germany did not want war, and not because he did not believe in enemy documents that fell into his hands.
While this is not the historical focus of the film, something similar happened in Moscow on August 23, 1939, with the signing of a non-aggression pact by the heads of German diplomacy, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Viatcheslav Molotov. . It turns out that Josef Stalin had his eye on Hitler’s jugular and vice versa.
The pact not only ceased to dictate diplomatic and military behavior, it also became one of the most useless and laughable documents in history. Remember the damage done by the Nazis, much later, with the siege of Stalingrad.
Another current idea is that this type of agreement, instead of being made to be fulfilled, would be useful for allowing time to be gained. But it was not like that. In its final subtitles, the film “informs” that, with the Sudeten fuse neutralized, the Allies gained a few months to arm themselves. The truth, however, is that the time factor was only beneficial to the Germans.
They were weakened in Czechoslovakia and were able to assemble a military device that they finally used against the Czechs themselves, by taking, for example, the Skoda factories.
All the more reason to believe that the war – and above all the Second World War – is of a richness that does not always lend itself to simplified interpretations. There are constants, such as the territorial expansion of the Reich and the beginning of its agricultural asphyxia, when the Soviets reconquered the fertile plains of Ukraine.
In a way, war is, in narrative terms, a plural good. But we cannot, without impoverishing it historically, reduce it to sentimental facts or a sum of love stories. It would be to make light of the millions of corpses that the conflict left.
