The series has received a 60% "fresh" rating on the popular critical aggregate website
Rotten Tomatoes signifying mixed reviews.
Reception in Germany When the series aired in Germany in March 2013, each episode had some 7 million viewers. The series was awarded the
Deutscher Fernsehpreis 2013 (German Television Award) for the best multi-part television film of 2013. The
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the film would give the remaining survivors of the World War II generation an opportunity to discuss it with their families. The film had introduced a new phase in historical films on the Nazi era according to the paper. The historian
Norbert Frei praised the film for showing, for the first time on German television, an unvarnished portrait of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, including the participation of the Wehrmacht in murdering Jews, the shooting of hostages as reprisals against partisan resistance, and the looting of homes vacated by Jews. He wrote that the film did not present idealized one-dimensional figures, but people of broken character who become aware of their shared guilt. The film underwent a thorough historical analysis in the book "Der totgeglaubte Held als TV-Event - Eine Studie zum gegenwärtigen Heldenbild in der Trilogie
„Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter" (2013) by Julia Meyer. The author stressed the danger of the docu-entertainment format of movies that attempt to depict historical events with stories that are in fact purely fictional. Meyer emphasized how crucial the creation of the friends‘ characters in the trilogy was for the perception of the historical content, and criticized the movie's denial of the Holocaust through the creation of a Jewish protagonist who survived the war through switching sides and becoming a traitor to his heroic and self-sacrificing friends. Several German historians criticized the film. The historian
Ulrich Herbert wrote that the film showed Nazis as "others", different from "Our Mothers and Fathers". It showed all Germans as victims. The film showed nothing of the love and trust that Hitler inspired in German youth, or of the widespread belief that Germany deserved to rule Europe. In reality, he wrote, these "mothers and fathers" were a highly ideological and politicized generation, who wanted Nazi Germany to win victory, because that would be right. The historian Habbo Knoch said that the film failed to show how the Nazi system functioned. The film showed 20-year-old characters who became victims of war but missing were the 30- to 40-year-old Germans who built the Nazi system and supported it out of a mixture of conviction and self-interest. The film should have shown those who profited from the Nazi system. A critic in the
Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger called the film
kitschy, devoid of deeper meaning, and morally worst, full of pathetic self-pity. The film's message was "We perpetrators (of war crimes) didn't have an easy time." In the German Jewish weekly ''
, Jennifer Nathalie Pyka wrote that the achievement of the producers of Generation War'' lay in producing a film about World War II in which the troublesome question of how six million Jews were killed had been simply blanked out and omitted. The film provided an epiphany for those who had always known that not only Jews were Hitler's victims, but more important – all Germans were Hitler's victims. The Polish ambassador in Austria, Jerzy Marganski, and the Polish embassy in Germany sent a letter of complaint to the German broadcaster ZDF pointing out that the Armia Krajowa had Jewish members, and that Poles constituted one-quarter of the
Righteous Among the Nations honored at
Yad Vashem. The broadcaster issued a statement that it was regrettable that the role of Polish characters had been interpreted as unfair and hurtful: "The deeds and responsibility of the Germans should in no way be relativized." The Polish ambassador to the US,
Ryszard Schnepf, sent a written complaint to Music Box, who had bought the US rights to the series. He was supported by the director of the Polish state organisation the
Institute of National Remembrance,
Łukasz Kamiński, who said he feared that people who were unfamiliar with European history may be led to believe that Armia Krajowa members were all antisemitic. Plans to broadcast the series in the UK led to a demonstration by Polish activists in London. The Polish ambassador to the UK,
Witold Sobków, criticized the movie in
The Huffington Post.
Comments in the UK and US Commenting on its success in Germany,
The Economist wrote that some German critics suggested that "putting five sympathetic young protagonists into a harrowing story just offers the war generation a fresh bunch of excuses." Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the
Johns Hopkins University, commented that the series "does not filter the Nazi atrocities nor the reality of war. Instead, it tries to portray how the millions of people who followed Hitler into the catastrophe he created were attracted to the vision he offered, only to then be confronted with trying to survive it."
The Hollywood Reporter noted that the sales company in Cannes billed the series as "a German equivalent to
HBO's
Band of Brothers." When the three-part TV film saw a limited theatrical release in the United States as a four-and-a-half-hour two-part film on 15 January 2014,
The New York Times reviewer
A.O. Scott stated that by not showing the Nazi death camps,
Generation War perpetuates "the notion that ordinary Germans were duped by the Nazis and ignorant of the extent of their crimes." The review ends with the comment that of the five protagonists, "the artist, the intellectual and the Jew are all punished, for wantonness, weakness and naïveté, and pushed into extreme states of moral compromise, [while] the chaste, self-sacrificing Aryans, the lieutenant and the nurse, though they are not without guilt, are the heroes of the story, just as they would have been in a German film made in 1943." According to the
NPR review by
Ella Taylor, the film depicts how totalitarianism corrupts almost everything in its path, including individual responsibility.
The New Yorker reviewer
David Denby wrote that "
Generation War has the strengths and the weaknesses of
middlebrow art: it may be clunky, but it's never dull, and, once you start watching, you can't stop," and "the old accepted notion that the barbarians were confined to the S.S. and the Gestapo has been cast aside. The series acknowledges what scholars have established in recent years: that the Wehrmacht played a major role in committing atrocities in the occupied countries." But "while destroying one myth, the filmmakers have built up another. The movie says that young men and women were seduced and then savagely betrayed—brutalized by what the Nazis and the war itself put them through. Their complicity, in this account, is forced, never chosen. Aimed at today's Germans, who would like, perhaps, to come to a final reckoning with the war period,
Generation War is an appeal for forgiveness. But the movie sells dubious innocence in the hope of eliciting reconciliation."
The Tablet reviewer Laurence Zuckerman said that
Generation War' presented World War II Germans as tolerant and free of anti-Semitism which was "wildly out of sync" with what scholars have learned from letters, diaries, and other primary sources. In reality, "most ordinary Germans at the time held attitudes of casual racism at the very least, and a strong sense of imperial entitlement over Jews, Slavs and other races deemed racially and culturally inferior. The series tries to draw a distinction between Nazis and everyday Germans that simply did not exist in any broad way. The tagline on the movie's poster – 'What happens when the country you love betrays everything you believe?' – is demonstrably false. Most Germans believed in the Nazi agenda."
The Spectator reviewer
James Delingpole criticized the series as "semi-apologia" that "had ducked frank and fearless authenticity in favour of face-saving, intellectually dishonest, respectful
melodrama that leaves its audience feeling frustrated, cheated and rudderless". He criticized the film's portrayal of its main characters as non-zealots, spirited young people forced to confront unpleasant realities and make agonizing choices as ahistorical, with Delingpole describing Friedhelm as "a 21st-century German parachuted into a period where he wouldn't have survived more than a few seconds". According to German-British journalist
Alan Posener, "While the shows dealing with communist East Germany are realistic, the Third Reich gets off too lightly. None of the new productions directly addresses the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes. The dramas don’t even focus on the resistance to Hitler. Instead, most Germans appear as victims...The 2013 miniseries
Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (released as
Generation War in English) continued the trend".
Israeli reviews Uri Avnery's review of "Their Mothers, Their Fathers" appeared 28 February 2014 on International Policy Digest. Avnery himself fled from Germany to
Mandatory Palestine in 1933. Concerning the film's not showing Nazi death camps, Avnery writes "The Holocaust is not the center of events, but it is there all the time, not as a separate event but woven into the fabric of reality." He describes the progression of two of the protagonists: "Death is all around them, they see horrible war crimes, they are commanded to shoot prisoners, they see Jewish children butchered. In the beginning they still dare to protest feebly, then they keep their doubts to themselves, then they take part in the crimes as a matter of course." He propounds a theory of the individual in totalitarian circumstances: "It is this element of the situation that is difficult for many people to grasp. A citizen under a criminal totalitarian regime becomes a child. Propaganda becomes for him reality, the only reality he knows. It is more effective than even the terror." He sees the Jews and the Germans as two still traumatized peoples. "That's why the film is so important, not only for the Germans, but for every people, including our own." Uri Klein's review of
Generation War appeared 2 September 2014 in
Haaretz. Concerning the miniseries not showing Nazi death camps, Klein writes, "... no extermination camps are shown in the series, whose measure of brutality and blatant anti-Semitism is meted out by the Polish partisans ... and by the Russian army." This is due to the portrayal of the five main characters in a sympathetic light of "heroism and sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal, love and its price" which is detached from actual historical events. Instead of history, Klein likens the production to a typical Hollywood product of action, special effects, and a romanticized story of essentially noble individuals caught up in a war not of their choice. "The difficulties that they experience, like their personality crises, stem from the fact that, as we have learned from the movies dozens of times, war – any war – is hell." ==Score==