Nackt unter Wölfen

This movie is a good remake of the old one with still holding the details. The realism was just phenomal with good storyline.

This is a superbly done film but don't watch it if you're already in a downer. Or you don't have access to a stiff drink. It is grim and graphic. The violence and horror are simply stated but not exploited. It also gets beyond the Holocaust, portraying the seldom documented horrors the Nazis inflicted on non Jewish political prisoners. Nobody knows what life in the camps was like unless they had lived through it. But this may come closer than most such pictures. Dark and unrelentingly morbid, it is still a worthwhile watch but not an easy one. You will finish watching by pondering how an educated, civilized nation like Germany let this happen and by asking yourself how you might have reacted to the many moral dilemmas posed in the story. Not a film to enjoy but certainly one to watch!

I first heard about Buchenwald before I started kindergarten. My parents were talking in the living room late at night and they didn't realize I was in the hallway listening. My uncle was the Army photographer (in the Signal Corps) who accompanied the troops as they liberated Buchenwald. This film, for all of it's merits, seems like a whitewash. It didn't even scratch the surface of the horrors of Buchenwald. When the troops arrived there were human beings, still alive though just skin and bones, stacked like cordwood (i.e. layer upon layer of human beings, stacked in alternating directions). Not just one stack, there were many, many stacks lined up and prepared to be moved into the ovens. When he visited the home of the camp commander he photographed lamps with shades made from human skin, skin with tattoos. My father spoke of drums using human skin. There were other things. These images have polluted my mind from my youngest years. I barely knew what tattoos were...only because of Popeye the Sailor man, and when the drums were mentioned, I had the image of bongo drums because I heard these things in '61 or'62 and bongo drums were all the rage. I remember these things though I just heard them once. My uncle's photographs are in the Library of Congress. He never took another photograph in his life, never smiled, never visited the mountains, never visited the snow, and never spoke of what he had witnessed except once in 1961 or '62 in a special meeting with his father, his brothers, and his brother in law. The film is a good story, but the scenes of the camp and the prisoners seem like a Sunday picnic versus the reality. It felt more like history was being covered up than illuminated by this film.

Nackt Unter Wölfen (or Naked Among Wolves) is based on a true story but it's just based and that means it is not the whole truth about what really happened. I can't help having the feeling that in Buchenwald Camp life was much worse than they made it out to be. Not that it looks like a cozy camp but I have serious doubts about the priveleges some prisoners had. I read from another reviewer that the images were hard to watch, while I thought they were not hard enough to show what really happened. The acting isn't bad though, but I just have problems with the authencity of the life at Buchenwald Camp. The movie could have been much better, but that's my opinion.

Is not bad, but not a masterpiece. It's good that was made by germans. Hollywood would made it worst. Tells a truth in the end. Not all the germans were nazis and not all the nazis were bad. There are always good people ready to sacrifice themselves surrounded by wolves.