When talking about the 1985 Soviet film “Come and See”, most videos on YouTube talk about
the director, or the production of the film, the techniques used, and its reception by audiences.
But this video isn’t really about any of that. Today we’re going to assess the historical
accuracy of the events depicted in the film, and some of the moral questions raised too with regard
to the Second World War. So spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the film, go watch it first because
we’re going to be focusing on what happened towards the end of it. But, as a brief synopsis -
The film follows the story of a boy called Fliora, who joins the Soviet
partisans fighting in Belorussia in 1943. He’s young and innocent at the start of the film,
and it’s a “lost youth” or “lost innocence” kind of story, where he befriends a weird girl he falls
in love with, but then the Germans come along and wipe out their partisan camp and Fliora’s village
in an anti-partisan operation. They join up with some surviving partisans and villagers,
but the Germans come back, lock another village in a barn, and burn it to the ground.
And this part is true. The Germans did wipe out close to 700 Belarussian villages,
which the film correctly states at the end. The SS also did lock peasants in barns,
shot them, and burned the barns down - so this is all a true representation of what happened.
There are some inaccuracies though. The director himself said that the film is based off the
events of the Katyn Village Massacre - not the more famous Katyn Massacre where the Soviets
killed the Polish army officers in 1939 - but the village massacre which happened in 1943.
Well, we know which German units conducted the 1943 Katyn Village Massacre. They were
the SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger (or SS-Special Unit Dirlewanger,
which was a battalion at the time) and Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118.
And while it was the favourite tactic of Oskar Dirlewanger to get drunk,
do despicable things to the local population, lock them in barns and burn them down,
the problem is that the captured Germans at the end of the film directly state that they were
not part of these units. The captured SS soldiers say that they’re from the “15th Einsatzkommando”.
Well, there wasn’t a 15th Einsatzkommando at Katyn, so this is inaccurate. Why they didn’t just
say that they were from Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, or the Dirlewanger battalion, isn’t clear,
but I suspect the reason why is because they wanted to have the leader of the German unit get
captured so that they could then have the Germans explain their actions. This would
allow them to pose the moral questions that they did at the end of the film. And
obviously, Oskar Dirlewanger and Erich Körner (commander of Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118)
weren’t captured and killed in Belarus.
So I think they just chose a random unit number and said that it was the Einsatzkommando because
members of the audience might have heard about the Einsatzkommando and would be
able to follow the events. However, they accidentally chose a real Einsatzkommando.
Online sources say Einsatzkommando 15 went to Croatia, which isn’t Belarus.
Now, you might say “okay, but we know that it was the Dirlewanger Battalion and the Schutzmannschaft
Battalion 118 that conducted the Katyn Village Massacre, so apart from this slip-up, it’s all
good, right?” Well, no. Even if the guy had said they were from one of those two units, then the
film is still inaccurate. Why? Well, the men in the film are wearing the wrong uniforms.
The SS shown in the film have the SS logo on their collars rather than the
two crossed rifles that the Dirlewanger unit used as their logo. It’s hard to tell, but
this guy in this photo of SS prisoners in 1945 is a member of the Dirlewanger unit, and has the two
crossed rifles logo. The guys around him are other SS members and they have the standard SS
lightning bolts on their collars. Another photo of the Dirlewanger Brigade fighting at Warsaw shows
the men with the two crossed rifles too. So this confirms that the SS depicted in the film aren’t
from the Dirlewanger unit. Which means, they must have been from the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118,
except they’re not from that battalion either. Because here’s a photo of the leaders of that
battalion, and you can see very clearly that they didn’t have the SS logos on their collars. Why?
Because they were an auxiliary police unit manned by Ukrainian nationalists, not members of the SS.
So since they are SS, the only unit they could be from is the Dirlewanger Battalion, but if so
they’re not dressed accurately. And the Dirlewanger Battalion
isn’t Einsatzkommando 15. Then the German says that the guy standing next to him is
his leader who gave them their orders. Well, if this was Einsatzkommando 15,
then this would be a representation of SS-Hauptsturmführer Willi Wolter.
But Wolter was in Croatia and fought there until September 1944. So it couldn’t have been him,
or Dirlewanger or Körner, since the SS captives are killed in the film, which they weren’t. In
other words, the film isn’t accurate when it comes to the German units involved, or their commanders.
There are other things to consider too. In this case, I’m not calling
these “inaccuracies” as such, just things to take note of and bear in mind. In 1943,
the Germans were under orders not to kill the middle-aged men. The Reich needed slave labourers,
and the able-bodied men were sent to Germany to work.
In the film, a few men (about five) are shown being spared from the burnings,
but it would have been more than this. Also, if this had been the Dirlewanger unit,
then the young women would have been taken away first to be used, and then brought
back to be killed with the rest. One girl (the girl who Fliora befriends earlier on)
is shown having this happen to her, but that’s it. So the representation is there,
but if we were to be more true to life, it would have been on a larger scale.
The Germans were desperately short on fuel in 1943, yet in the film the Germans burn a
barn - not with torches - with tons of petrol bombs and flamethrowers, which
seems a bit excessive. They definitely used gasoline to burn their victims,
but I’m a little sceptical that they would use the copious amounts of fuel they did in the film
to just burn one barn and a couple of buildings. Yes, the director of the film apparently lived
through a village burning and is reported to have said that there were flames everywhere
and it was raining flames, so it could have been like this, but because the Germans didn’t
have much fuel to spare, I think this excessive amount is artistic licence.
In the same vein, the Germans are shown to have plenty of trucks and gasoline, which
often wasn’t the case. They did have trucks, but most of the Germans used horses. In fact,
the SS Dirlewanger unit was often working in cooperation with the SS Cavalry Brigades,
and the reason for that was because there wasn’t enough trucks or petrol to go around. So this may
give the false impression that the Germans were swimming in petrol, which they certainly were not.
The most intriguing part of the film for me, though, is right at the end, and the film’s
directors did this on purpose to get us thinking. The partisans capture some of the SS soldiers and
Russian or Ukrainian collaborators from the unit that burned the village. Obviously, this is all
artistic licence, since in real life the German commanders of the units involved weren’t captured
like this. But it does allow the film to pose several good questions to the audience, so we can
let it slide. Should you just kill these criminals outright? Do you spare any of them? Were the
Russian or Ukrainian collaborators forced to do what they did, like they try to claim in the film?
Nobody believes them in the film, of course, and in real life the Ukrainians
in the Schutzmannschaft Battalion were volunteers, but that’s not explained.
However, not all Ukrainians fighting for the Germans were volunteers, so that’s something to
bear in mind. One of the villagers screams: “I lost my children in that burning hell!”
So does he have the right to murder them in return? Is vigilante justice lawful?
If so, why do our modern law systems forbid it? Are these criminals not entitled to a trial?
If not, why bother having trials at all? Why not just kill every suspected criminal, guilty or not?
And if you kill these criminals, are you not stooping down to their level?
To me, this is where the film really shines. The exact same questions were being asked at the end
of the Second World War. Some just wanted to shoot all the Nazis, but the Allies tried to
take the moral high ground and have a war crimes trial. That’s then resulted in many denialists,
Nazis and others branding those trials a sham led by a kangaroo court, and so on. The Allies
and Soviets did bad things too in the Second World War, yet there were no trials for them,
and thus it was seen as “victor’s justice”. So maybe the Allies shouldn’t have bothered taking
the moral high ground and just lined the Nazis all up? And that’s where these questions that the film
asks really come in. It’s not just a fictional philosophical conundrum to get you thinking,
it’s actually based in hard reality, and it has very serious implications.
At the end of the film, Fliora finds a picture of Hitler on the ground. He shoots at it over
and over in a rage, and this is the only time Fliora actually fires his rifle. As he does this,
the film shows pictures of Hitler, and with every bullet, the footage of the war is reversed,
turning back time and all the events of the war and the National Socialist rise to power,
the Weimar republic, the first world war etc. Hitler gets younger, until it’s just a picture
of baby Hitler in his mother’s arms. And that’s when Fliora stops firing. He doesn’t shoot Baby
Hitler. Even though he’s been through so much, he can’t kill a child. The message of the film,
therefore, is that despite everything you cannot completely lose your humanity.
Or, perhaps, this is a way of saying that you cannot stop things from happening? One of the
SS explains that he wanted to kill all the children because “with the children it starts
all over again”, meaning that the conflict never ends because the children grow up and then start
the next war. So he thought that killing all the children would stop the cycle, and that’s why he
also says that “not every race has a right to exist.” But Fliora cannot kill baby Hitler,
which could be interpreted in a few ways, but to me this suggests that he cannot stop the war
from happening, and probably means that he has lost his innocence, just like Baby Hitler did.
The film poses other questions. The German commander claims he’s an old and sick man
who didn’t do any harm to anyone, which brings up the whole “I was just following orders” debate,
and the “I just gave the orders, but didn’t actually kill anyone myself” excuses. In other
words, no one wants to take responsibility for their actions. These were genuine excuses made
by the Germans at the end of the war to get themselves off the hook. And you still get
people trying to defend the Germans to this day with the same excuses. The commander also says:
“But this is war time, and it’s nobody’s fault.” Well, “all’s fair in love and war”, right? So do
our morals go out the window when it’s war time? Can we all just become mass murders just because
we’re fighting someone else? Again, these are questions the film asks, and they’re right there
in line with what the Allies had to deal with during and at the end of the war.
Now, the fanatical German doesn’t accept the excuses and calls his commander a swine and a dog,
and more names including “A typical German!” And the film depicts the difference between a “normal”
German who was supposedly “just following orders” verses one of the SS fanatics. This was actually a
real defence used by many Germans in the aftermath of the war. Many German generals, for example,
tried to claim that they weren’t members of the SS, and thus, didn’t commit war crimes. Any
that they did commit were all ‘Madman Hitler’s’ fault, and they were “just following orders”.
Of course, the “normal” Germans did commit crimes alongside the SS, and the myth of the “clean
Wehrmacht” has since been debunked (although many still believe the lie),
but the film does well to bring up this issue.
However, it also slips up a little. For one member of the SS to call another member of the
SS “A typical German!” is silly, especially since it was the commander who was there
and made the village massacre happen. It’s clear from the historical sources that the
commanders of the units involved in massacres like this were as fanatical as anyone else. So,
the film brings up the issue, but in a very awkward way that doesn’t make much sense. It
would have been better if they’d had captured a SS commander and a regular German army commander,
and then had this sequence play out. But then, that would have been inaccurate since no regular
German army units took part in the Katyn Village Massacre, so it would lead to more inaccuracies.
In other words, they tried to shoehorn the “just following orders” excuse into the film,
but it comes off clumsily and doesn’t make sense the more you think about it.
Also, the fanatical German is called a “fascist” by another German,
which is also inaccurate because they weren’t “fascists” - they were Nazis,
or National Socialists. The Soviets and the Communists, and many other people to this day
get this wrong, but there’s actually a major difference between a
fascist and a National Socialist. And a German soldier in the Second World War
wouldn’t have called his fanatical comrade a “fascist” for this reason, so this is a slip up.
The Russian or Ukrainian collaborators try to say that they’re not guilty, that they should
let them go and just kill the Germans. One says “They made us do it!” Nonetheless, they’re all
killed. And in the comments of my Operation Keelhaul videos, or the ones on the Ukrainians,
I got a lot of Russian viewers arguing that Nazi Ukrainian collaborators should
all be killed, even those who didn’t collaborate, or didn’t fight in the war,
or were women and children. Well, this film is asking the question: but is this really the case?
Were they forced into fighting for the Germans? Now, we know that for Schutzmannschaft
Battalion 118, they were Ukrainian nationalist volunteers, so there’s no excuse for those guys.
But you have to remember that the Germans were murdering, pillaging and stealing all the food and
women from the Ukrainians, the Belarussians, and more, forcing many to choose between collaboration
or starvation. So some were genuinely forced into helping the Germans, or working with them
to some extent. Should they all be shot as well? And again, these are genuine questions
that played out in the Second World War, which is something the film does well in bringing up.
For the most part, the Soviet authorities had little mercy for collaborators, even those who had
been sent to the slave labour camps of the Reich. But were they right? Let me know in the comments.
The fanatical German says: “You’ve got no right to be. Not every race has a right to exist. Inferior
races spread the contagion of communism…” This is all an accurate depiction of how the SS thought,
but there was more to it than that. I’ve been over this in other videos, so I’d recommend you
check out my videos on Hitler’s Socialism if you want to get a better understanding of the ideology
behind the SS and what they were trying to do in the Soviet Union. And overall, despite the
odd clumsy mistake, Come and See is a faithful representation of events that
took place in the war. Not 100% accurate - it’s not a documentary - but I’d still
recommend watching it though if you haven’t seen it already. So thanks for watching, bye for now.