Revenge Recommends: "Der Panzerlied"


Although this site is mainly rock n' roll, we also have an interest in music in a wider sense, plus you can't really get more rock n' roll than the Third Reich who trashed more hotel rooms (and other things) than all the rock bands rolled into one.

Der Panzerlied (The Tank Song), reputedly Rommel's favourite song, was the soundtrack of the German blitzkrieg and in its own right – stripped off its connotations – is a stirring composition with lyrics designed to instill heroism and the altruism of self sacrifice.

It is best known from its appearance in the 1965 movie, The Battle of the Bulge, where it actually helps strengthen the impression that the German soldiers were brave and occasionally noble men.

This movie, like a lot of other movies made in the 1950s and 1960s, now strikes quite an odd note in our own age, in which the Nazis and the WWII German army are relentlessly demonized. The question has to be asked, why were Hollywood filmmakers of that era prepared to make such a movie and why would it now be impossible to make a movie about the Germans that treated them in such an impartial way?

One answer is that The Battle of the Bulge was made at the height of the Cold War when the West had every interest in promoting martial virtues in case of a war with the Soviet Union. It is telling that the song, although originating among the Nazis, was also taken up by the West German Bundeswehr (Federal Army).

Another factor was that the Holocaust Cult and the religion of Anti-Racism had yet to spread across the West. In those days the West was overwhelmingly White and only in America, with the Civil Rights movement and the Jewish intellectual ascendancy, was a challenge starting to emerge.

As our societies became increasingly multiracial through mass immigration, there was a need to create the religion of Anti-Racism in order to maintain social unity, and this religion was pivoted on the Holocaust, which was treated as an increasingly sacred idea that could not be questioned or challenged in any way. It therefore became important to demonize the Nazis and the WWII Germany in general.

The existence of Der Panzerlied in this movie, along with Tomorrow Belongs to Me in Cabaret, is testament to the less convoluted and conflicted culture that existed before the rise of the multicultural state with its religion of anti-Racism, its cult of the Holocaust, and its demonization of the Third Reich, just one of many morally ambivalent states to have existed on the face of the Earth.

Colin Liddell
Revenge of Riff Raff
6th of July, 2014
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