Hey Friends! I hope Everyone is doing well. You are probably wondering why, I am putting up a Movie review, especially on a subject that a lot may find offensive. Well, I am a huge history buff and fan of anything Historical or true or based on truth.
This movie is based on true accounts that happened during World War 2 and the Holocaust, that I am sure a lot of us do not know about. But never the less it did happen.
Of course it's War/Love Story film written and directed by Amma Asante. It stars Abbie Cornish, Amandla Stenberg, George Mackay.
Plot of Movie: Germany 1944, 15yr old Leyna (Amandla Stenberg) daughter of a white German mother and a black father lives in fear due to the color of her skin. When she meets Lutz (George MacKay), the son of prominent SS officer and a member of the Hitler Youth- mandatory for all Aryan boys since 1936. The two fall helplessly in love, putting both their lives at risk. It is an original coming of age story through the eyes of a bi-racial teen as she witnesses the persecution of Jews and those deemed "non-pure."
So let me take you on what this movie is based off and the true accounts.
The terms Rhineland Children or "Rhineland Bastard" (that is what they were called.) came about in 1919 just after World War I. It was when the Entente troops, most of them were French, occupied the Rhineland. The Rhineland Children were fathered by French troops of African decent. There were also in cases where German men and African women who had children together in the former German colonies in Africa were also referred to as "Rheinlandbastarde." There were no more then 500-600 mixed race children among them.
In the movie, You will notice the Mother, played by Abbie Cornish ask her brother in law for papers for her Daughter if they had stopped her. The reason for the papers were for the purpose to show that she had been sterilized so she would not be able to produce a child of African decent. After 1933, under the Nazi policies, Afro-Germans deemed to be "Rhineland Bastard" were persecuted . They would be rounded up in a campaign of compulsory sterilization.
In the 1921 novel written by Guido Kreutzer, "The Black Shame A Novel of Disgraced Germany," Mr. Kreutzer wrote that all mixed raced children who were born in the Rhineland were born physically and morally degenerate and that they were not German at all. He had also written that these children's Mothers were not German the moment they had relations with a non-white man. They could not be part of the "People's Community" or the Volksgemeinschaft.
May of 1920 the foreign minister of the New German government, decided to lodge a protest against his French counterparts stating that "They will accept the inferior discipline of their white troops if they would only rid them and as fast as possible of this black plague."
In the Rhineland it was of very different opinion. Among the locals they thought of the soldiers were "Very courteous and often popular." This is because the French colonial soldiers harbored any feelings of less ill-willed towards the Germans then any war weary French occupiers.
In Adolf Hitlers book he wrote about the children. Describing them if they resulted from a relationship with an African occupied soldiers they would be a contamination of the white race. He was stated saying this "by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe."
His views were this " Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate." He also believed that it was the French had a plot against him because the population of France was increasingly "negrified."
So you can see how Lutz played by George MacKay felt when he fell in love with Leyna a Rhineland Child played by Amandla Stenberg, being an SS Youth soldier. And how she felt when she fell in love with Lutz and eventually ending up in a camp. Going through what she was going through, and being pregnant and finally reuniting with him. Him being a guard and her a prisoner, and finding out that he was going to become a Father. So did Leyna make it out of the camp? Did Lutz end up seeing his child? Who would end up being of African decent? I guess if you watch the movie the tale will be told of these two.
I highly recommend this movie. The reason that I do is that all of the atrocities that took place during Nazi Germany, with the Holocaust and World War II, it shows a different side of things that a lot of us probably did not know. I know I personally had never read anything about the Rhineland Children. I believe that history is very important, whether it's good or bad. It happened. Those are facts. They may be awful, disgusting, whatever you would want to call it, but nonetheless they are fact.
I hope you get to watch this movie and become as fascinated about history as I did.
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