I am watching the DVD of this great movie
when Brando was terrific actor.
But can some one tell me two things?
1. How did he get his German uniform after his was
shot to pieces when the motorcycle crashed?
and
2. If was POW how did he get back to Germany and the German
army?
This is from the book.
He was not a POW. In the book they crash in the middle of the desert because Diestl falls asleep. After the crash Hardenburg stopped a lone passing Italian vehicle filled with Italian high ranking officers. He lies that he needs this vehicle to help the German general who's car had supposedly broken down a few miles down the road. The officers buy it and surrender the vehicle.
The two manage to rejoin a German convoy only to be attacked by an allied air strike. This is where Hardenburg gets his face blown off and both are sent to a hospital.
After Diestl recovers he visits Hardenburg and informs him that was ordered back to France.
So Diestel gets to Germany after retreating from France. From Normandie he walks, later he manages to kill a child with a bicycle and gets away from the advancing allies on it.
Even later he meets Brant who has hidden an automobile in a nearby barn and together they drive to Paris where Brant invites Diest to go into hiding with him at his girlfriend's house.
I'm not going to tell you what happens here, read the book as this is one of the parts omitted in the film and what makes the book great.
Anyway after that he mostly walks, reaching the concentration camp starved and exhausted.
Hope it helps...
If you liked the movie, you will love the book. Read Shaw's original, you won't regret it.
Actually, after they are wounded in North Africa, they are evacuated to a hospital in Italy. Diestl is released and assigned to a combat unit in Italy, where he fights against the advancing Americans. Then he becomes ill again, from malaria (which he first contracted in Africa), and is presumably sent back to another hospital.
Upon his discharge, Diestl ends up in France again, near the coast, and has to retreat when Normandy is invaded on D-Day. He basically walks, bikes, or motors all the way across France and on into Germany, for nearly another year.
The book has him all over the map of Europe's western front during his five years in the Wermacht. Invading France, stationed in Paris, occupying a town in northern France, fighting in both North Africa and Italy, patrolling the French coast before the invasion, falling back after D-Day, and retreating east across both France and Germany.
The only place Diestl didn't end up was in Russia...but that would have probably ended with him lying quietly in an unmarked grave.
HONK if you love Jesus...
TXT if you want to meet Him...
If you notice, when the motorbike passes over what was probably a mine in the road, there is a very quick cut to 3 Afrika Korps troops that had been standing nearby. Thay duck at the sound of the explosion.
Therefore the audience figures out that Diestel and Hartenburg were almost immediately rescued and given medical treatment by their own troops and weren't captured.