Hellstorm

Since Hitler - The Greatest Story Never Told filled in some major gaps in the dominant narrative of WW2 as a battle of good of evil in which strangely enough the winners, the good guys, are such champions of liberty and human rights as Stalin or Mao, which has to make one wonder about the moral of that tale, this is now a historical overview of the events during the allied invasions and the immediate post-war period. It's very hard to watch, even if one still sees the Nazi Germans as cartoonish characters bent on world domination. Nothing justifies mass raping, killing and pillaging, yet is is exactly the kind of justice the victors dispensed on traumatised civilian population. German POWs fared even worse, ending up in concentration camps in Poland and as slaves in Siberian gulags.

The world is not monochromatic, that much should be clear and it seems to be a moral imperative for every thinking person to learn the alternative views of history and then do his homework to see what historically checks or does not, but we should definitely not be taking Soviet post WW2 propaganda at face value.

Well, I almost fell from the chair when my grandmother first told me that Germans were in fact nice to them, and the real psychos were (some) soviets. Also in fact, all death camps, except those in soviet occupation zone, were proved to not to be a death camps - what proves nothing against holocaust, but it is kinda interesting. Especially whilst considering claims in USA about soviet propaganda during the cold war.

We are being told about the atrocities of Germans, and "goodness" of allies in europe, but merciless cruelty pattern against civilists of so called good guys repeats in japan, Vietnam, juhoslavia and in the middle east. It also looks like the so called dictators in arab countries are in fact very intelligent and admired by their own people, while being propagated in our TVs like pure evil savages.

About film: Although some statements in Hellstorm are hard to believe, this documentary is important puzzle in the maze of finding truth. It is relieving to see something different than monolithic point of view.

I have to say first, I come from Vietnam and back to the war, do you think the American did not rape woman or kill children? or American again are the good guys while Vietnamese communistic people were the bad one? Think about it. No side are good or bad at all in some areas. The movie was worth to spending time to watch. If you really are an open-minded person, it is interested and stunned as well. Otherwise, I swear you would vote the film 1 star as many others did. Two-side story always better than one-side. At least, I know another story beneath the victory-story demonstrated by the Allies. It is hard to see, of course, but the should be some reason why the German have to go to the war, right?

I personally never really had much of an interest in WWII as I already had a general idea of what happened, and why it happened though many of the Hollywood films I had watched in the past. Or at least that's what I thought. This documentary, however, literally sent shivers down my spine as it truly put the old saying "there are 2 sides to every story" into perspective. The documentary was very well made, and the facts were well presented.

One of the most important historical documentaries to see. With this documentary, the scape-goated victims finally get their stories told. Hard to watch, yes. Fact-based, unlike a lot of what was taught in history class or what they show in hollyweird. Those innocent men, women, and children did not deserve such barbaric and atrocious deaths, especially when their people did not commit genocide themselves.

+ May They Rest in Peace +