Sublime sacrifice

When the Boultings first wanted to make this movie, the British censors turned them down. A movie about the evils of the Nazi regime, they thought in 1938, would be international dynamite: mustn't annoy the German government. After war was declared the following year, however, suddenly it was a good idea. A superb cast was assembled and it was released in May of 1940.

Wilfred Lawson is Pastor Hall, a village parson. When the Storm Troopers show up to get the village moving according to the new dictates, he tries to maintain his gentle form of Christianity. Eventually, however, he comes to realize they are evil and is arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, subject to unspeakable -- barely filmable --bestiality.

Because this is a work of fiction, albeit based on reality, the portrait offered is not that of Niemoller. Niemoller was a fairly typical, conservative churchman, who first opposed the Nazi regime over the political issue of Church independence. His understanding, like Hall's, of the evils, came upon him gradually, and he was arrested in 1938, and spent the entire War in Belsen. After the War, seen as a martyr, he espoused various good causes, and worked to keep the memory of what had happened alive. He died in 1984 at the age of 92.

Used, as I am, to seeing Lawson in eccentric, often comic roles, it is a shock to see him here, speaking in his stage accents. His is not the only fine performance. Seymour Hicks, best remembered for playing Scrooge on stage and in two movies, is superb as a retired general, a friend of the family. Nova Pilbeam is wonderful as Lawson's daughter. Bernard Miles is excellent as a village man who becomes a Storm Trooper because he can use the job, and suffers a crisis when he recognizes Lawson in the concentration camp.

Most shocking of all is that everyone plays their roles as Germans.... as English men and women, with accents appropriate to a small English village. You could argue this was simply a matter of staging. To me it is shocking. Almost eighty years later it seems to say that this could happen in Britain.... or America. I am almost convinced that the Boultings did this deliberately, to serve as a warning. As Kevin Brownlow noted a quarter of a century later, it can happen here.

I know the term: based on a true story , and it does not say anything about the true nature of the story itself .

The real story is that Niemuller was at first an anthousiastic follower of adolf hitler and later on realized that the man was not what he pretended to be .

So niemuller became very critical and that resulted in an arrest and at first he was sent to sachsenhausen and later to dachau where he spent most of his time in the political prison building called the bunker ( cells for one person only ).

By my knowledge there was never an escape , that was nearly impossible .

This movie (minus some cruelty examples ) does not represent the life at the camp at all .

To make a movie about a prisoner at 1940 while he still is there for 5 years to come is beyond me and does not do his story any justice .

Wilfrid Lawson (Pastor Hall) plays real life German priest Martin Neimuller who was sent to a concentration camp for refusing to follow the Nazi script when it came to preaching from the pulpit. We follow his story as the Nazi party enforce their doctrine on a small German Village, with Marius Goring (Fritz) at the helm. This includes recruiting stormtroopers, bullying the Jewish race and the rape of a 14 year old girl. Can Lawson make a difference or does the regime get him…..?

This film holds the viewer's interest at it puts across the perspective from the German people living within the confines of Nationalist Socialism espoused by Hitler. It doesn't matter that all the accents are British, although Seymour Hicks did make me groan as we get a stereotypical blustery General character. Hang on, Hicks – he's meant to be German. And stop mumbling your lines! Anyway, he redeems himself at the end of the film with a moving humble performance at the village church.

This is a fine film which essentially chronicles the early takeover of Germany by the Nazi Party. It tells the true story of a German pastor who stands up to the Nazi Machine. In many ways it tells the early story of the origins of resistance movements to totalitarian and evil regimes. It also is well acted and realistically portrayed. It unfortunately is extremely rare.

This is quite a gruelling film to watch, this one. Wilfrid Lawson is the eponymous minister who lived in a small German village in the 1930s as the Nazi party started on it's inevitable route to power. A decent man, he tried to resist the increasingly anti-semitic aspirations of the Party but with the arrival of some stormtroopers under the command of the malevolent, but cunning, "Gerte" (Marius Goring) his task becomes much harder and his own safety, and that of his young daughter "Christine" (Nova Pilbeam) looks more and more precarious. It's based on a true character, and the story has an authenticity to it that papers over the cracks left by the limitations of an early wartime production with what I assume was a modest budget. Lawson is very effective in the title role, as are Goring and Pilbeam and there is an interesting contribution from Seymour Hicks as "Gen. Von Grotjahn" - a German general officer from days gone by when honour and respect meant more than any loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Eventually sent to Dachau, the history takes quite an interesting turn at an end that I found immensely satisfying on a number of fronts. The narrative does try to explain a little of just how these fascist thugs won over an otherwise benign population - fear, lies, rumour, gossip and resentment all playing a part in galvanising a population into a complicit inactivity that allowed persecution and brutality on a scale that they knew little about, but about which they cared even less. Out of sight... etc. There is a particularly harrowing storyline featuring the young "Lina" (Lina Barrie) which rather summed the whole thing up - and showed the bravery and decency of this man of not just God, but of his congregation too. Rarely seen nowadays, but thought-provoking and well worth ninety minutes if you ever come across it.