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The Fifth Day of Peace | |
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![]() English version DVD cover | |
Directed by | Giuliano Montaldo |
Written by | Andrea Barbato Lucio Battistrada Ottavio Jemma Giuliano Montaldo |
Starring | Richard Johnson Franco Nero Michael Goodliffe Bud Spencer Helmuth Schneider |
Music by | Ennio Morricone |
Production companies | |
Distributed by | USA Scotia International France Les Films Jacques Leitienne |
Release date |
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Running time | English 103 minutes Italian 110 minutes |
Countries | Italy Yugoslavia |
Languages | English French German Italian |
The Fifth day of Peace, Italian title: Gott mit uns (written in German), is an Italo-Yugoslavian war movie from 1970 about the 13 May 1945 German deserter execution in a Canadian-run POW camp in Amsterdam.
Two German deserters, Kriegsmarine Ensign Bruno Grauber and Army Corporal Reiner Schultz are captured by the Canadian Army at the end of World War II. They are interned in a Canadian-run POW camp where the senior German officer, Colonel Von Bleicher, is a career officer. Their fellow German prisoners of war, led by Von Bleicher, discover that they are deserters. They are put through a formal military court martial organised by Von Bleicher and charged with cowardice. They are sentenced to death and are to be executed on the "fifth day of peace". Von Bleicher pressures the Canadian camp commandant to allow the execution to be carried out and requests rifles and ammunition to carry out the sentence.
A Canadian general, Snow, persuades (but does not order) the Canadian camp commandant, Captain Miller, to allow the execution to be carried out for the higher purpose of preserving military discipline. He also motivates Miller with a promotion to major.
This movie is based on the true story of two Kriegsmarine sailors, leading seaman Bruno Dorfer and machinist's mate Rainer Beck, both executed for desertion on 13 May 1945, after being found guilty of cowardice by fellow POWs. The sentence was carried out by German POWs who were under Canadian command.
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The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
Island Farm, also called Camp 198, was a prisoner of war camp on the outskirts of the town of Bridgend, South Wales. It hosted a number of Axis prisoners, mainly German, and was the scene of the largest escape attempt by German POWs in Britain during World War II. Near the end of the war it was renamed Special Camp XI and used to detain many senior SS military leaders who were awaiting extradition to the Nuremberg trials.
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Nuremberg is a 2000 Canadian-American television docudrama in 2 parts, based on the book Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico, that tells the story of the Nuremberg trials. Actual footage of camps, taken from the documentary Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps (1945), was included in this miniseries.
The Leipzig war crimes trials were held in 1921 to try alleged German war criminals of the First World War before the German Reichsgericht in Leipzig, as part of the penalties imposed on the German government under the Treaty of Versailles. Twelve people were tried, and the proceedings were widely regarded at the time as a failure. In the longer term, they were seen by some as a significant step toward the introduction of a comprehensive system for the prosecution of international law violations.
The Last Blitzkrieg is a 1959 American war film directed Arthur Dreifuss and filmed at Veluwe and the Cinetone Studios in Amsterdam for a Columbia Pictures release.
Helmut Hermann Wilhelm Bischoff was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer, Gestapo officer and Nazi government official. During World War II, he was the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland and later headed the Gestapo offices in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg.
The 13 May 1945 German deserter execution occurred five days after the capitulation of Nazi Germany along with the Wehrmacht armed forces in World War II, when an illegal court martial, composed of the captured and disarmed German officers kept under Allied guard in Amsterdam, Netherlands imposed a death sentence upon two former German deserters from the Kriegsmarine, Bruno Dorfer and Rainer Beck, a half-Jewish conscript who had deserted to avoid being killed. The show trial occurred in an abandoned Ford Motor Company assembly plant outside Amsterdam, which at the time was a prisoner-of-war camp run by the Canadian Army.
From the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet policy—intended to discourage defection—advertised that any soldier who had fallen into enemy hands, or simply encircled without capture, was guilty of high treason and subject to execution, confiscation of property, and reprisal against their families. Issued in August 1941, Order No. 270 classified all commanders and political officers who surrendered as culpable deserters to be summarily executed and their families arrested. Sometimes Red Army soldiers were told that the families of defectors would be shot; although thousands were arrested, it is unknown if any such executions were carried out. As the war continued, Soviet leaders realized that most Soviet citizens had not voluntarily collaborated. In November 1944, the State Defense Committee decided that freed prisoners of war would be returned to the army while those who served in German military units or police would be handed over to the NKVD. At the Yalta Conference, the Western Allies agreed to repatriate Soviet citizens regardless of their wishes. The Soviet regime set up many NKVD filtration camps, hospitals, and recuperation centers for freed prisoners of war, where most stayed for an average of one or two months. These filtration camps were intended to separate out the minority of voluntary collaborators, but were not very effective.
Karl Peter Berg was a German camp commander, who was sentenced to death after World War II for war crimes committed during the German occupation of the Netherlands.