Superbly shot on location with thousands of extras from the Finnish Army, Unknown Soldier is the story of the Finnish “deep forest fighters” who were engaged on the eastern front’s northernmost limits. This film is the third and most recent adaption of the most famous Finnish novel of the war (not to be confused with Franco-German Guy Sajer’s classic The Forgotten Soldier which tells of a panzer grenadier’s experiences on the Eastern Front). The latter were perhaps the one nation to emerge with their honor intact: They were (largely) fighting a defensive war were lauded for their combative prowess and do not stand accused of the atrocities their allies committed. Enemy at the Gates (2001) covering the exploits of snipers in Stalingrad, boasted Jude Law’s star appeal, but was criticized for inaccuracies.Ĩ: Unknown Soldier (Finland, 2017) It was not just Germany versus the USSR: A range of European nations fought alongside the Nazis in the East: Hungarians, Italians, Rumanians, Italians, Spanish - and Finns. Sam Peckinpah’s blood-spattered Cross of Iron (1977) about a German unit retreating from the Crimea, is beloved of war-movie buffs, but is not considered a top-tier Hollywood war flick. With such a richness of closer-to-home material to draw from - D-Day, Arnhem, the bomber offensive, Pearl Harbor, Midway, etc - the Eastern Front has, perhaps understandably, been largely overlooked by Hollywood. Yet while war films are a popular genre, little of the above has been seen by Western cinema audiences. In a battle to the death between dictator and dictator, the blood price paid by the USSR was massive: 27 million Soviets are believed to have perished in four years of war. The death camps were exclusively established in Poland, and the dark forests and broad steppes of the USSR became slaughter grounds as SS units undertook “counter-insurgency” operations against partisans and civilians, and unleashed their mobile death commandos, the Einstatzgruppen against Soviet Jews. Moreover, it was in the East that the Nazis carried out their worst atrocities. And eventually, it was not the Union Flag or the Stars and Stripes that was raised over Berlin’s Reichstag, but the Red Banner.
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