Since promotional images were released in February of last year, the pop-culture Internet crowd has been up in arms about “Where Hands Touch,” the newest film from director Amma Asante. The film focuses on a 15-year-old biracial black girl living in Nazi Germany, and the increasing discrimination she faces under Nazi rule. It is relatively rare to see a Holocaust movie that focuses on one of the many other victimized groups other than Jews, so to have a mainstream movie featuring former “Hunger Games” African-American star Amandla Stenberg is intriguing.
Unfortunately, at the forefront of the movie’s promotional materials is her character’s romance with a high-ranking boy in the Hitler Youth. The film (possibly unintentionally) comes off as a “Romeo and Juliet” teen romance with Nazi Germany as the backdrop. While that premise sounds so amazingly terrible that it’s like something out of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, the film is simply the culmination of dangerous trends about how Nazis are portrayed in American movies.
The American film landscape is littered with movies where villains are presented as fictionalized versions of Nazis. The “Harry Potter” movies have wizard Nazis in the form of the so-called Death Eaters, a group of violent blood purists who want to purge muggle-born wizards and maintain wizard supremacy over the other magical races. The movie adaptation takes the Nazi themes from the books and intensifies them, with Gestapo-esque costuming of minor ministry officials and by having the snatchers wear red armbands.
The “Star Wars” franchise features space Nazis, first in the form of the Empire, a large authoritarian regime that seeks control of the galaxy and are clad in slick gray and black uniforms, and then even more so in the form of the First Order, a smaller regime intent on returning to the glory of the Empire. The regimes have Stormtroopers, a fighting force literally named after the World War I German paramilitary fighters, and Darth Vader’s helmet has clear stylistic elements from a German Stormtrooper helmet. Both J.K. Rowling and George Lucas have explicitly stated that the Nazis were an influence on how they portrayed their villains.
In and of itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, from 1935 to 1945, the Nazis killed millions of people, so using their aesthetics as shorthand for evil makes sense. However the Nazi-esque portrayal of characters is often lifted flat out of the Nazi propaganda film “Triumph of the Will.” Shots of Star Wars Stormtroopers marching often mimic those of foot soldiers in “Triumph of the Will.” The shot of Pius Thicknesse, the minister of magic after Voldemort’s coup, addressing the crowd about how their blood purity will be investigated, mimics the many shots of Hitler addressing a crowd. Even the standard practice of shooting villains from an upward angle to make them appear more imposing is lifted from “Triumph of the Will.” This has the unfortunate effect of portraying the stand-in Nazi villains as cool and powerful.
Movies like “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” also tend to portray their fictionalized Nazis without any discernible ideology beyond evil and possibly some form of racism. While there were Nazis who committed evil acts simply out of a sadistic joy (such as infamous Nazi torturer Josef Mengele) the vast majority of Hitler sympathizers were ordinary people who either went along with what was happening out of fear for their safety and the safety of their loved ones or were enticed by the Nazi ideology out of xenophobic fears and a desire to return to a supposed former German greatness.
Rarely do we see anything of this sort with these fictional film Nazis. Instead, they tend to be portrayed as simple, straightforward villains. American moviegoers love villains, and the Death Eaters are almost as merchandised as any of the Hogwarts houses. Beyond that, visitors to Disney World can witness the March of the First Order, a parade of Stormtroopers through Disney’s Hollywood Studios, which according to Disney’s website is “a daunting demonstration of the First Order’s obedience and strength.”
Hollywood has created these Nazi villains who are simultaneously evil, cool, and powerful — but also cartoonish enough that they can be beloved and merchandised. Given the popularity of the handsome “Harry Potter” villain Draco Malfoy and sexy “Star Wars” antagonist Kylo Ren among teenage girls, it is honestly surprising that it took this long to get a movie in which our female protagonist reforms a Hitler Youth boy through love.
None of this is to say that “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” are now problematic franchises that no one should watch. More so, the problem is when “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” make up the majority of the collective imagination of the Nazis, we end up with Nazi romance movies — and worse yet, a culture that fails to recognize Nazis in our own time.
Prominent political commentator Dave Rubin received some flack when he tweeted “when the real far right appears, the boy will have already cried wolf one too many times,” despite having had several alt-right figures on his popular show the Rubin Report, such as white identitarian Lauren Southern. He’s also hosted the race realist and believer of “White Genocide” Stefan Molyneux.
In a similar vein, Christina Hoff Sommers was accused of being a white supremacist after her appearance on Radio 3Fourteen, a white nationalist podcast. Of course, Sommers is not actually a white supremacist, but it is interesting that what tipped her off to the political leanings of the podcast was when she learned of the Holocaust-denying past of the hosts — and not, say, when the host talked to her about the supposed epidemic of Muslim immigrants raping Swedish women or how no one wants to discuss the “science of race.” Both Rubin and Sommers are educated and politically active, so it is concerning that even they are at times unable to recognize Nazism when faced with it.
While these far-right white nationalists are a minuscule minority, their ability to be civil and not be mustache-twirling villains means people have a difficult time recognizing their rhetoric for what it is. If we want to put a stop to this culture where Nazi romance movies are getting made, our perception of Nazis must go beyond cartoon evil and instead deal with the much more terrifying reality that normal people are capable of doing terrible things.
Elsie Eigerman is a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College studying sociology and data science. In addition to being a contributor for Young Voices, she makes videos on her YouTube channel, Sappho of Lesbos.
