I would say that if you help the Nazis you are a bad person. You are an especially bad person if you help the Nazis for a selfish and stupid reason.
However, I just saw the movie The English Patient. It seemed that a big point of the movie is it is ok to help the Nazis if you are in love and need to help your lover (who is already dead). This movie was very popular and even won the Oscar for best picture. So would you help the Nazis (or al Qaeda) if you were in love and your lover needed help?
No, not really …
Hrm. I thought he helped the nazis because people who were supposed to be his allies allowed his girlfriend to die, so he did it as revenge.
No. However, if the Nazis (or Al Quada, or Ba’athist Iraq) are needed either as buffers or constraints on the Soviet Union, or otherwise serve the national security interests of the United States, then it’s quite all right to put up with any number of abuses by the party in question against their neighbors or their own people.
/realpolitik humor
To answer your question, no.
To address the entire OP, however, I feel compelled to point out that there was a LOT more going on than just “he was in love and his lover needed help.”
He had been betrayed, he was physically stretched to the limit, he was desperate, he no longer valued his life. Etcetera. Extenuating circumstances and whatnot.
I couldn’t disagree with you more. I don’t think the movie implied that it is OK at all.
Thank you. Carry on.
It is honourable to suffer for love, but not to cause others to suffer.
That is the plot? thank god i never watched it.
I’d do what I had to do.
Jesus said: Love thy enemy.
…and if Jesus had been around in the 30s or 40s, the Nazis probably would have sent him to a camp with all the other Jews they could get their hands on.
“‘What’s your point?’ ‘No point; that’s life.’”
No, that’s not the plot - not at all. and it’s a decent movie (although one I suspect may not be to your taste)
No Sir…can’t say that I would!
While servig in the US Army many years ago, I had fallen very heavily with a German woman that was not only my lover, but also my friend. The military (at that time) seemed to be comitted to harassing them constantly about that damn war (over and over and over again) and I could see that this was really taking its toll on her. In my vain attempt to defend her from being constantly being harassed about something that took place over 60 years ago in a different time, different, era, with a different generation that she was not even born in, I somehow found myself not only trying to defend her, but ultimately trying to defend the entire German race from this. (todays generation anyway).
But to answer your question, would I do the same to defend (or help) the Nazi’s , I can assure you firmly that my answer would be NO…
He gets back and tells the English troops he needs help and acts like a jerk. There was a war on they didn’t have time to help him. This doesn’t give him the right to to help the Nazis because of his already dead lover.
The Dafoe character was going to kill him. After he heard the Nazi collaborator’s story he decided not to.
The question is more difficult when put in the proper context.
Ralph Fiennes’s character is Hungarian in the movie–his country allied itself with Germany in 1940, so by helping the British, he is already a “traitor”. Moreover, before the invasion of Russia in 1941, the Holocaust hadn’t yet begun in earnest. Rommel had played out his offensive by the end of 1942 and was out of North Africa by the middle of 1943. I don’t recall exactly when the action of the movie takes place, but it’s certain probable that a desert explorer in that place and time wouldn’t have much information about the full extent of Nazi brutality. As a matter of fact, even the Allied heads of state were relatively uninformed.
From a strictly reasoned character perspective, he is not helping the same Nazis you are aware of–even if that’s undoubtedly the case of objective reality. The character study is a subjective matter, and thus his motivations must be considered given the amount of knowledge available. In his mind, he’s not helping one of the worst organizations of people ever to walk the planet; he’s merely helping something of an aggressor nation. Moreover, he will tend to justify it by considering that history is replete with aggressor nations of one sort or another. The fact that he was unjustly imprisoned by the British is not to be glossed over, either… since when was “being a jerk” (as you characterize the depiction in the movie) a reasonable grounds for denying someone their freedom? They are not reasonable grounds, of course, except perhaps in the context of war, when the British believe he poses a life-and-death threat to them as a spy. Where the irony lies is that he did not pose such a threat until they refused to listen to him and committed a more grievous wrong than simple jerkish behavior. (Such is the danger of escalation.)
Beyond all this, there is the question of where loyalties lie–devotion to the known individual and to promises made or to the mass of unknown humanity and to society’s rules. Both have their proponents, and the conflict is one of the major themes of the movie.
If I were in that same situation, believing that I could return in time to save the person I loved, I might very well enlist the aid of someone I didn’t like, but I don’t think I’d ever knowingly and willingly help an aggressor, even under such circumstances. Of course, to be honest, I don’t think I could say with absolute certainty how I’d feel or what I’d do. It’s one thing to say an action is wrong analytically; it’s another thing entirely to resist a desire to carry out that action.
[FTR, from what I can gather briefly, it seems the actual Count Alamasy worked for the Germans (and not the British) while in the Hungarian Air Force… I’m aware the rest of the movie is apparently equally fictitious.]
This link takes you to real true history of Count Almasy , you will see that he actually survived WW2 , :- http://lazarus.elte.hu/~zoltorok/almasy/almasyen.htm
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy
Das Reich der Zwei uber alles.
(God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.)
If I had to walk across the desert for 3 days while my lover was dying in a cave and you called me “Fritz”, I think I’d be a bit of a jerk too.
I wouldn’t think twice about it. They were maps, not atomic bomb secrets.