Wilm Hosenfeld, a German army officer during World War II, was a silent hero.
Once a fervent Nazi, Hosenfeld parted ways with Adolf Hitler’s fascist regime while serving in German-occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945. During this period, he kept a secret diary in which he expressed his rage toward Germany’s mistreatment of Polish Catholics and its genocidal policy toward Jews.
Toward the end of 1944, following the unsuccessful Polish uprising in Warsaw, Hosenfeld met a Polish Jewish musician named Wladyslaw Szpilman.
Szpilman was in hiding amid the ruins of Warsaw when Hosenfeld ran into him by chance. After learning that Szpilman was a professional pianist, Hosenfeld asked him to prove it. In an astonishing performance that mesmerized Hosenfeld, Szpilman played Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor. From that point onward, he supplied Szpilman with food, water and blankets, helping him to survive the Holocaust.
This remarkable episode is poignantly recreated in Roman Polanski’s moving feature film, The Pianist, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2002 and earned Adrien Brody an Oscar for best actor.
Chanoch Ze’evi’s riveting documentary, Bad Nazi, Good Nazi, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, sheds light on Hosenfeld’s life, his diary, and the efforts of a small group of people in his hometown to memorialize him as a humanitarian.
Born in the picturesque Hessian village of Thalau in 1895, Hosenfeld was a teacher and a school principal after his service in the German army in World War I.
A pious Catholic from a conservative social milieu, he joined the Nazi Party in 1935 and regarded Hitler as a genius. The film offers no explanation for his attraction to Nazism. Nor does it delve into his attitude toward Jews before the war. However, one can probably assume he was seduced by the party’s virulent platform on antisemitism.
During his service in Poland, he was stationed in Pabiance, a town near Lodz, and in Warsaw. Fulfilling a variety of roles, he interrogated Polish soldiers in a prisoner-of-war camp and Jewish fighters who had participated in the doomed 1943 Warsaw ghetto rebellion. He was also a cultural and educational officer.
Hosenfeld was captured by the Red Army and placed on trial as a war criminal. Found guilty of furthering the cause of fascism, he was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in the Soviet Union. Szpilman attempted to rescue him from captivity, but to no avail. Hosenfeld died in 1952, never having returned to Germany.
Bad Nazi, Good Nazi gets under way as Hosenfeld’s daughter, Jorinde, and Szpilman’s wife, Halina, meet in Thalau for a special outdoor screening of The Pianist. Several viewers grimace and try to hold back sobs when the movie reaches the emotionally-charged Hosenfeld/Szpilman episode.
The scene shifts to a village meeting where the topic under discussion is whether Hosenfeld should be honored with a memorial plaque. Apart from having saved Szpilman, Hosenfeld assisted scores of Polish Catholics as well as Jews.
Some villagers, particularly his former students, are keen to honor Hosenfeld, contending that his Nazi lineage should not be held against him because he turned against it. Still others want to forget the past, or believe that village funds would be better spent on different projects.
The film then segues to his adult grandchildren, the brother and sister Friedhelm and Mareicke. They leaf through his diaries and letters, learning about his transition from Nazism to anti-Nazism.
When he was conscripted into the army, he wore a Hitler-like moustache, proof of his boundless admiration for the fuhrer. He shaved it off in 1940, disgusted with Germany’s brutal occupation of Poland.
Only two months after Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, he sent his wife, Anne-Marie, a letter brimming with bitterness: “Anger, helplessness and horrendous screams burst forth from house after house inhabited by Poles. I feel like I am wearing the uniform of criminals. I’ve met with so many soldiers, railroad clerks and officers. One of them told me,’I’m ashamed to be a German.'”
In his diary, on July 23, 1942, he wrote, “We hear reliable reports from sources of all kinds that the Jews are being taken from the ghetto and murdered en masse. They say that Jews — men, women and children — are being poisoned in mobile gas vans … It is hard to believe, and I try to convince myself that it isn’t true. I do this not out of some sense of anxiety over the future of our nation, but because I cannot believe that Hitler would want something like this, and that there are Germans prepared to issue orders like that.”
In 1943, after witnessing the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, he wrote, “These animals. With the horrible mass murder of the Jews we have lost this war. We have brought an eternal curse on ourselves and will be forever covered with shame. We have no right for compassion or mercy. We all have a share in the guilt. I am ashamed to walk in the city….”
Friedhelm and Mareicke, having read excerpts from his diaries, express admiration for his courage. They do not think they would have been capable of such valor had they been in his shoes.
The pair donate his diaries and letters to the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin. Its director praisers Hosenfeld as a “silent hero.”
As the film ends, a plaque in Hosenfeld’s honor is unveiled in a simple ceremony in Thalau, and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial/museum in Jerusalem, recognizes him as a Righteous Gentile.
Ze’evi, an Israeli filmmaker, obviously admires Hosenfeld, and in this fascinating documentary he relates his odyssey from Nazi to anti-Nazi with skill and passion.