MovieChat Forums > The Good German (2007) Discussion > Plot holes - Emil Brandt

Plot holes - Emil Brandt

posted 18 years ago by filippobardazzi
17 replies | jump to latest

I think this movie, in spite of the great Soderbergh's experimentations (we all thank you Steve!), has here and there some mistakes and some plot holes. The biggest one is in my opinion the omission of the causes why American Intelligence (or Investigation) wants at the end to kill Emil Brandt.
Emil could be useful to them in order to get new knowledges about V2 weapons!

So, why did they decide to kill him?
What's more Lena wanted to carry him in the american sector: so why did they decide to kill him in the russian sector during the manifestation? Couldn't the wait for him to come in their area?

What do you think?

[–] birdy12 18 years ago

I think that point was well explained : he could have testified again one of the nazi they have. It was him who had new knowledge about rockets and weapons not Emil Brandt

[–] filippobardazzi 18 years ago

But the truth at the end would have however come out for sure and Bettman would be recognize and beckon as a nazi criminal...

[–] birdy12 18 years ago

but if he would have been recognized as a nazi criminal, US administration couldn't use him and his knowledge about the rocket.
This is the purpose of the film.

[–] PinstripeWillie 18 years ago

What do you mean "the truth at the end would have come out"? Many german scientists were brought to America after The War and who can say what their past was?

Bettman is, at least in my view, a representation of someone like Wernher von Braun. A scientist who developed the V-2 rockets under Operation Paperclip, which used brutal slave labor. Braun admits to going to a concentration camp a few times but never saw any deaths or beatings. After the war he began his work for America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
or see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Kammler
or see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph

Would the Owner of an Ounce of Dignity Please Contact the Mall Security?

[–] ib011f9545i 18 years ago

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Emile Brandt got killed because he was going to be the good german of the title and say that his boss knew that slave labour was used in the factory that produced the V weapons.

But we know that if you worked on the rocket programme any war crimes would be ignored becuase your contribution to America's rocket programme would be too important.
The Russians were the same,they used any nazi scum to their benefit.
So Emile's death was in vain,the story would have been hushed up anyway.
See THE PAPERCLIP CONSPIRACY by TOM BOWER and BLIND EYE TO MURDER by the same author.
There are lots of other books but these too are readable for the non expert.

It is easy to be critical of the use of these scientists but I can understand why they did it,the idea that the Russians could have got the rockets before the Americans was too much to risk.

[–] Noir-It-All 17 years ago

Don't you think these scientists chose America because it was a better place to live than the USSR, especially after the German army decimated it? The V-2 rockets hadn't landed in the US so it would have been a more attractive place to live, especially among millions of German-Americans.

"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne

[–] clmarch 17 years ago

Wow. Are you naive.

[–] Noir-It-All 17 years ago

It is the way they did it, limiting their calories, ending their lives at 3 months to be efficient.

"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne

[–] trailinghome 15 years ago

What about all those Japanese war criminals who weren't prosecuted by the US government because they handed over the results of their "experiments", the horrific torturing of prisoners in the POW camps.

Look up "Unit 731"

It's disgusting and had absolutely nothing to do with the security of the USA or any other country.

[–] lemner 13 years ago

It wasn't just that Emil's boss knew about the slave labor. His boss specifically ordered him to calculate how much food to feed the slaves so that they would live no longer than 3 months. They didn't want any of them to know too much about the project or be able to survive the building of it.

Semper Contendere Propter Amoram et Formam

[–] pinobeppe 17 years ago

True, and it makes sense too. Not a plot hole at all.

Clearly, the US would have hired Hitler himself if he was a rocket scientist (understandably, one could argue), during paperclip operation. But killing some Mr.No-one in Berlin was marginally easier to do than covering up the past of the scientist working for you.

[–] tennismenace 17 years ago

I agree with what was said on this thread. The Americans didn't care any about War Crimes against humanity, as long as you could help USA get bigger and better bombs before Russia got them.

Winning the space race is more important than fretting over dead Jews. At least that is what I got out of this movie.

- The Truth is Out There, and I found it in Christ!

[–] thomas998 17 years ago

The biggest mistake in the movie is the thought that the US would need to kill someone like Emile to cover up for another Nazi rocket scientist... In truth the US could have taken any Nazi they wanted, shipped them to the US to work for them and no one would have cared. The war crimes trial was just a showpiece that needed only a dozen or so to be sacrified for the world... If either the USSR or the US was truly going to act like the world police they would have eliminated every german citizen period, with mass bombings like Dresden it there was ample proof that the US would eliminate women and children without blinking and eye... In the end the movie fails because it tried to take modern day pacifist PC notions and blend them into a historical reality where they just don't fit.

[–] mobocracy 16 years ago

Its tempting to look at postwar Germany with today's cynical political correctness and assume that the war crimes trials were just a staged event and the US was willing to forgive genocide where it was politically and militarily expedient.

I think this is badly confused, though -- I think there were thousands of smaller war criminals who were given shorter sentences or merely banned from the government, rather than just the Nuremburg trials.

As for the Nazi rocket scientists as well as the German populace, its easy to judge their complicity unless you were there and faced conscription to the Russian front, a concentration camp or the alternative, going along with what the Nazis wanted.

The firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg were British reprisals for the Blitz and the rocket attacks late in the war. But then again, this was total war where attacks on civilian populations were considered a strategic tool, and the US had no compunction about firebombing Tokyo or the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[–] benjtsang 16 years ago

LOL, the OP completely misses the point of the movie and calls it a plot hole instead.

"Even my parents called me Mulder" -Fox Mulder

[–] jbaddock 12 years ago

It might well be true that the American and British authorities were not that concerned about the level of involvement of German rocket scientists in the use of slave labour during WW2 (although they would never have admitted that publicly), but they wouldn't have particularly welcomed someone appearing on the scene with documentary proof of how much 'Bettmann' and his colleagues knew about what went on in Camp 'Dora' - like it or not, we're talking about a war crime, and, in the wrong hands, such information would be potentially embarrassing, if nothing else. Far simpler to suppress any such information and to ensure the silence of anyone interested in revealing such evidence - like Brandt. In fact, it wouldn't have occurred to counter-intelligence agencies to do anything else, if truth be told - this is precisely the kind of situation they've been set up to prevent, after all. They certainly wouldn't have simply shrugged their shoulders and let Brandt get on with it, now, would they?

[–] 13 years ago

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