Really Surprised!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

All of my family were part Die Flucht and the film captures much of their experience in a fair degree of accuracy. I managed to watch the film with my mother before she died and she felt it was true to the story though because she was in the Poznan, their escape was on train in January 1945.One of my aunts was on the roads in January 1945 with her parents and grandmother. The were caught by the Soviets. Her father, my grandfather, was shot of out of hand. She said the story was accurate in the portrayal of the events.The one thing my mother and aunt did not like in the film was the added love story between Maria Furtwangler's character and the French POW. They felt it added nothing to the film was only a pointless distraction

Die Flucht (March of The Millions) could have been a wonderful film that finally publicized the terrible genocide of nearly 2 million East Prussian civilians in 1945. History has tried to eradicate the event and very few people know the details.But this film entirely and deliberately distorts the whole event.It tells the story of an ancient landed family that has farmed their land for nearly 1000 years. The old Count lives in his shabby castle surrounded by servants and their children who have lived the feudal system for generations. Prisoners of war have replaced the young men driven off to war but very little else has changed for centuries.Only now, in the first few weeks of 1945, the Russian Army is finally taking revenge for the terrible excesses of the SS they have suffered since the German invasion of 1941. The entire population of East Prussia, some 8 million civilians, now faces annihilation unless they flee the advancing army in the midst of winter.So much for the first half which is perfectly fine. But then the film falls apart.Most of the victims of this terrible event died from Soviet barbarism. They were bombed, gunned down, raped, executed or simply left to exposure in bitterly cold conditions. Many more died from starvation and deprivation whilst thousands died on the frozen lakes when their wagons fell through the ice. More than 20% of the population were killed.And yet in the film most of the deaths occur by German hands. We see Wehrmacht soldiers executing escaping POWs and deserting soldiers by the dozen. But only one character, a butler is actually killed by the Russians. One character dies falling through the ice and one child dies of cold. In fact more characters commit suicide than actually die in the March. One would think the whole event was a walk in the park! In a 3 hour production only 20 minutes is devoted to the actual march. Whilst more than two hours spent on a pathetically unlikely romance between a German countess and a French POW. Sheer Hollywood bilge.This type of propaganda through feature film is destructive. It belittles the barbarism shown by the Russians and excuses it because the Germans were all Nazis - or so we are led to believe. Don't bother buying this film as I did - it's waste of money.

But be weary of the only review to-date.One should be skeptical of any claim that a film fails in that it references the crimes of Germans during WWII. While it is high time to openly talk about the refugees from the eastern territories, the sinking of the Gustloff, the allied air raids, the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and the tragic fates of individual Germans, (etc.), one must do everything to prevent collectivizing Germans as victims or undermining the last 40 years of dealing with the crimes. If Germans of the war generation are victims of anything collectively, it is of their own ignorance and aggression. While German suffering must be brought into official histories and representations of that era, so as to not collectivize Germany as a nation of absolute perpetrators (then and now), we cannot lose sight of the greater picture: the majority of Germans welcomed the rise of the Nazi party and Hitler; very few did anything to resist the regime, even after they were disillusioned by the horrors of war and the crimes of the Nazis; the crimes were silenced immediately after the war, as the average German sought to move on and rebuild. Increasingly since the 1970s, and some argue not adequately until the 1990s, Germans have attempted to come to terms with these immense failures. The price has been de-emphasizing their own suffering. But focusing on the suffering they caused first is not only commendable, but the real reason they have become a leader and example in the international community! (Imagine if our president publicly apologized to the leader of another country for past crimes he/she had no involvement in, and even bowed before him!!) Germans must avoid sentimentalization and reductionism when dealing with such topics. They must maintain a critical distance and account for the greater context of WWII, or they run the risk of oversimplifying, catering to nationalistic and xenophobic entities still present, and/or undermining all they have accomplished in the way of coming to terms with their very complicated past!! If this film manages to incorporate suffering into the greater context of perpetration, all the power to it! Those who criticize it for not being comparable to a sentimental Hollywood war film in which there is a clear distinction between victim and perpetrator/ hero and villain... well, read up on German history and stop and think about your own... The world isn't that simple, why should serious, seemingly historically accurate films be????

In 1933 Germany elected Adolf Hitler as Reichschancellor, and with him came the downright criminal Nazi-government. Among many other atrocities, Hitler started the most devastating war in history of mankind: his campaign against Stalin's Communist Soviet Union. The year was 1941.Inspired by genuine racism, the Germans behaved terribly in the part of the Soviet Union occupied by them. Consequently Soviet revenge was equally terrible when in January 1945 Stalin's victorious army invaded East Prussia, Germany's most Eastern province. To make things worse, Hitler stubbornly refused to evacuate East Prussia's civil population.'Die Flucht' (= German for 'the flight, the escape') is about this invasion. I am impressed by the historical correctness applied by the German filmmakers: after all, for many Germans the loss of East Prussia still is a highly emotional issue. Add to that the excellent quality of its shooting and acting, and all these ingredients make 'die Flucht' an epic and excellent film.