Older brother Winter also has another concern to be struggled with: the younger brother’s reluctance to register as a volunteer for dangerous missions and that contempt raises with the comrades. It is undeniably both courageously, interesting and relatively unusual to see Operation Barbarossa from this perspective – when ordinary soldiers are specifically forced to realise that it is not only the SS that is expected to do things that go beyond the ordinary to shoot political commissars, for example. That all their illusions crash with reality feels very obvious and real. The year is 1941 and the time for quick victories and triumph will soon dry up. Charlotte (Stein), finally, looks forward to serving the Reich as a nurse, and she is also in love with Wilhelm. The cheerful, imagined movie star Greta (Schüttler) breaks the law and socialise with a Jewish tailor Viktor (Ludwig Trepte). The two brothers Winter will be going to war the book-freak Friedhelm (Schilling) for the first time, supervised by his already hardened big brother Wilhelm (Bruch). The five main characters are presented quickly and fairly superficially. You had to put some sort of tank around your heart, and stop thinking.”

You can only look at this mutilated body and keep shooting while he is dying. He also said: “It was gruesome when your comrade suddenly holds a shot-off arm in his hand instead of his rifle. Mothers knelt in the high snow and held out their little children, begging for mercy, which we didn’t give. We stayed in a village southwest of Moscow, it was minus 40 degrees Celsius, and the women gave us their last leftovers. Johannes Werner Günther, who back in 2013 was 92-years old and fought as a soldier of the Wehrmacht, is reported to comment about the series: In the trilogy, Wilhelm’s troupe invades a Russian village, and a SS man shoots a little girl. But there was a man, who used to not only look like the movie character Wilhelm, but also shared his fate his name was Johannes Werner Günther. One of the main characters is the Wehrmacht soldier Wilhelm Winter (played by Volker Bruch), who fights with his brother on the Eastern Front.

The series was shot in three countries, Lithuania, Latvia, and Germany.

The production cost was 14 million Euros. In the leading roles, we see Volker Bruch, Tom Schilling, Katharina Schüttler, Miriam Stein, and Ludwig Trepte.

The trilogy was written by Stefan Kolditz and directed by Philipp Kadelbach. Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Generation War) is a television three-parts mini-series from 2013, produced for the German television network ZDF.

Unsere mütter unsere vater episodes