Spaten and The Sorrow and the Pity

I've just been watching The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls' 1969 documentary about the occupation of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand in World War II.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who first heard about The Sorrow and the Pity through Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I watched the two-part film about Allen the BBC showed last week which prompted me to watch Annie Hall and then The Sorrow and the Pity again. It's a wonderful documentary with Ophuls making French collaborators squirm and talking to two left-wing brothers, ex-Resistance fighters who spent the last months of the war in Buchenwald concentration camp, on their farm in the Auvergne. One of my favourite bits is where they go in the cellar to draw a glass of wine from a barrel and Ophuls asks them "Is it red?" and one of them shoots back "Yes, like me".

The bit that jumped out at me this time though is where he's interviewing a German soldier who was stationed in Clermont-Ferrand during the war. He's in the pub having a beer and draws a map on a beermat with the Spaten logo on it (he also talks about "here in Bavaria"). I could be wrong but I think it might be Braüstüberl Zum Spaten, the brewery tap in Munich where I had half a litre of their fairly bland Helles the first night I was there a couple of years ago.

Workers and the bomb

The current ITV series in which Billy Connolly travels by motorbike across America on Route 66 is pretty formulaic stuff but the ten minutes of last night's episode I saw contained an interesting bit.

He passed through Los Alamos, New Mexico, home during the Second World War to the Manhattan Project, the US government's programme to build an atomic bomb.  An elderly guy who'd worked there as a machinist after being transferred from the Ford Motor factory in Detroit told him how him and his workmates had climbed into the mountains and watched the weapon being tested.  After seeing the power of the explosion, they started a petition against it being unleashed against civilians which hundreds of workers signed.  It reached the US Defense Secretary who refused to pass it on to the President.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that wiping cities off the face of the earth and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people wasn't a war crime and that Harry Truman by rights shouldn't have been in the dock at Nuremberg. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was supported by the majority of the US population. A major factor in that was the way anti-Japanese racism had been whipped up during the war, describing the enemy in the Pacific as sub-human for example. I doubt there would have been the same feeling about the atomic bomb if it was German or Italian cities that had been targetted.