So much for German enginering! BTW - I can see this theme repeated to a song by the Beatles, maybe something like this:

We all crap in a German sub-latrine
German sub-latrine
German sublatrine...

You should do that one Peter!!!

Clever use nof the OS, with lots of appealing and singable details!

Thanks, Doc... same goes for your medical parodies ;-)

I'm going toilet myself think for a good long while trying to come up with a pun appropriate for a comment on this parody in the meantime 455

If nationalities were reversed, the Nazis would have machine-gunned the 46 the Brits instead rescued.

Bias. There is no international obligation to rescue survivors of a vessel targeted. In fact, the main reason is that enemy forces will almost certainly fire on rescue ships of the enemy regardless of survivors. This happened with navies of Britain, Germany, the US, and Japan who left survivors die in the water or even strafed downed pilots in the water. And of course there are exceptions where captains put their careers on the line to attempt rescues at great exposed risk. The Germans themselves had to abandon Wilhelm Gustloff survivors for fear of also being torpedoed by loitering Soviet subs. Because of the Hood the RN only took limited numbers of Bismarck survivors and left hundreds more to die. Don't be so ignorant. The Allies were not saints nor Soviets who machined gunned surrendering German soldiers. The Allies ALSO raped German women in their Western sectors of Germany. Nuns and little girls included.

While there is no international obligation to rescue survivors of a vessel targeted, Hitler himself had put a very fine point on it: "Since foreign seamen cannot be taken prisoner . . . the U-boats are to surface after torpedoing and shoot up the lifeboats." However, a U-boat did rescue passengers on the targeted British Laconia. Subsequently, the U-boat was bombed. The repercussions of the Laconia incident were far-reaching. On the day after the bombing of U-156, Admiral Donitz sent a message to all U-boat commanders that became known as the Laconia Order, forbidding any attempt to help survivors of sunken ships. One might say that in shark-infested waters, machine-gunning survivors would have been merciful.

Try Cap Arcona in May 1945. The RAF pilots that attacked the ship were ordered to strafe any survivors in the water. The ship was carrying inmates from a prison camp. Most of the inmates died from the 6" rockets which caused a massive fire but those in the water were killed gleefully by the RAF pilots. Of the 600 Germans aboard, 490 lived. Such is war. What's really tragic was that the SS guards were also machine gunning survivors at the same time as per their duties. Cap Arcona played the German Titanic ship in the Reich version of that incident! The movie survived the war.

You have no idea if the RAF pilots "killed gleefully." Coming from noble, compassionate stock, they must have killed with heavy hearts. SS guards machine gunning survivors was a commonplace blood ritual for the Germans, performed with ecstatic enthusiasm. Saw the Titanic movie. The exaggerated characterization of the stiff-necked English upper class is laughable. Any German movie without Emil Jannings is worthless. He was considered to have too great a BMI for the tight quarters scenes in Titanic. FYI.

On the afternoon of May 3, 1945, British "Typhoon" fighter-bombers, striking in several attack waves, bombarded and fired on the Cap Arcona and then the Thielbek. The two ships, which had no military function or mission, were flying many large white flags. "The hoisting of white flags proved useless," notes the Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. The attacks were thus violations of international law, for which -- if Britain and not Germany had been the vanquished power -- British pilots and their commanders could have been punished and even executed as "war criminals."

Also, your knowledge of good German movies is lacking post-1920s: (in no particular order): The Lives of Others, Das Boot, Metropolis, Downfall, Wings of Desire, Nosferatu, In July, The Experiment, Run Lola Run, Goodbye Lenin, Sophie Scholll: The Final Days, Europa Europa, The Wave, The Princess and the Warrior, Stalingrad, The Baader Meinhoff Complex. FYI

No lack. I was complimenting Jannings. Saw most on your list and then some. Peter Falk made up for Jannings in Wings of Desire. Then there's M, Fitzcarraldo, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, etc., etc. The character of Nosferatu in the 1920s was clearly an anti-Semitic caricature. Most of the good old directors fled Germany for Hollywood. FYI.

Heed Frank Capra's "Here is Germany" from 1945. He's 100% right about the future.

Unfortunately, a complete photographic record of the liberation of the concentration camps was not yet available in 1945. It would have strengthened Capra's propaganda. He did a similar movie on Japan. I think of the histories of both countries as warlord-dominated, with none of the liberal philosophy which informed our Founding Fathers. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, they took a turn into an extreme form of capitalism -- one ruled undemocratically by a military-industrial complex with a charismatic dictator running the show. Remarkably, in the past 75 years the future to which you may be alluding has not been repeated, owing most likely to the MAD doctrine. Perhaps we should look to Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders. Such as Donald Drumpf?

Though Germany's UFA went under, Japan and Italy retained their directors and had an almost immediate flowering of film masterpieces after WW2. You must have seen Seven Beauties by the Italian Lina Wertmüller -- a black comedy featuring Giancarlo Giannini as an amoral Nazi prison camp survivor and Shirley Stoler as its Ilse Koch-like commandant. A close second is Wertmüller's Swept Away..., a study in socio-economic difference and sex. Drop the cartoons and pounce.

A word for Hollywood after the war: The German-born Jew William Wyler directed The Best Years of Our Lives. Film snobs dismiss it as Hollywood hokum. It is as great a movie masterpiece as anything made by Kurosawa or Ozu. The desert scene of scores of scrapped B-17s is a surreal dream. Dana Andrews, as an ex-bombadier sitting in a dusty cockpit, undergoes the definitive portrayal of PTSD, complete with dissonant music chords, before it was understood clinically. Most of the cast, including Hoagy Carmichael and double-amputee Harold Russell, is homely American, as in American Gothic by Grant Wood. It's U.S. apple pie, with the rotten parts included, thrown in the viewer's face.

Took your advice Peter on your parody suggestion. Tried to work it in today, but missed the deadline. Look for it on Monday :)

Might not be able to read it until Tuesday or Wednesday because of personal schedule etc, but I'll get to it.