Fighting The Fatherland

It’s 1942. Hitler and his evil minions have taken hold of Germany, suppressing dissent, demanding blind loyalty, stealing citizens off the street and sending them to God-knows-where.

Four teenage boys are racing on bikes through the forests of Hamburg, making haste to a railroad trestle that sits high above a river.

For the moment, they are carefree and eager to make the most of a lazy afternoon. One by one, they line up at the trestle’s edge and dare each other to be the first to take the plunge. The bravest is Helmuth, just 16, who tumbles ahead of the others into the murky water and who will emerge later as the hero of the story.

They are a tight little group and almost fearless, which can be a liability in a city where trouble hides easily in the shadows and “Papers, please” is a constant threat.

One of the group, Salomon Schwarz, breaks curfew and is confronted by two Nazi enforcers who demand he hand over his papers. In that moment, he’s discovered as half-Jewish (on his mother’s side).
Under those circumstances, he’s a marked man.

It isn’t too long before there’s a loud knock at his door. Two thugs break in and savagely beat Salomon.

And it isn’t a surprise that he disappears, another Jew among millions, who presumably end up in a concentration camp. Helmuth meanwhile visits Salomon’s tidy apartment and finds a chair on its side and blood stains on the floor.

Helmuth then channels his anger and disgust into a dangerous plan. He will print and distribute flyers condemning the Reich and its charismatic leader.

Thanks to his acceptance into a clerical job with the local Nazi administration, he has access to a trove of red paper markers that he uses to spread the truth about the Reich that he hears on a discarded radio.

He accomplishes his task by borrowing a typewriter from the local bishop, who has no knowledge of Helmuth’s treasonous activities. Helmuth tells his friends he’s determined to avenge Salomon’s kidnapping. And at 16, he naively assumes that his self-righteous campaign will prevail over the Nazi war machine.

The subterfuge works for a while, but hot on his trail is a determined investigator who gathers up some of the leaflets and orders a roundup of every typewriter in the vicinity. That’s because the one machine used to compose Helmuth’s anti-Nazi evangelism, his truth, has a noticeable flaw with one of its keys.

To say any more would enter into spoiler territory.

All I can say at this point is that the film moves at a brisk pace, features often stunning acting, especially from the young man who plays Helmuth, and exposes the soft underbelly of facism that doesn’t trade on the usual tropes of tanks and guns.

And long after I left the theater I marveled at the fact that what I witnessed wasn’t the fever dream of a screenwriter but the true story of a young man whose self-styled mission should be celebrated and remembered, not as treason but as a gift to humanity.