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Bridging the two worlds is the boys' commandant, a Danish sergeant who carries out his orders, but with degrees of compassion. It depicts the vengeful Allies as little better than the enemy, when they are subjecting the boys to inhuman labour, starvation, beatings and humiliation. Its point is simple: this is no way to treat children regardless of how Hitler's Germany used them, or what they did in the war. There is no mention of Helge Hagemann's Under Tvang ("Under Duress") in the film credits, but the film's Danish title ( Under Sandet, or "Under the Sand") seems to point that way.Knowing that the key elements in this film will consist of German teenager POWs being forced to clear landmines, the brutal consequences are inevitable and there can be no mystery about what awful scenes it must contain. To allow a war crime, in fact, which was the central accusation of a book from 1998 that may have inspired the movie.
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These boys barely saw a shot fired but the war has so profoundly enraged the Danes they are prepared to cast them to the wolves, both for vengeance and practicality. The film is immensely gripping, but its biggest asset is its sophisticated humanity. Sgt Rasmussen has to steal food from the nearby army camp to keep them going – the first sign his animosity might be cracking. She's paid to provide food, but the boys are starving. The woman who runs the farm laughs when she realises the boys have all become sick from eating food she put out for the pigs. Land of Mine pulls no punches in its depiction of the depth of Danish hatred for the Germans at war's end. When they have completed a designated area, before it is declared mine-free, he makes them line up in close formation and tramp across the cleared area. By day, they inch across the sand on their bellies using steel rods to feel for mines. Rasmussen herds them into a makeshift farm shed by a beach, locking them in at night. In fact, they are boys, aged 15 to 19, most of them pressed into the ranks in the last months of the war. When they arrive, he is unmoved by their youth: they are Nazis and he will make them pay. This is Sergeant Rasmussen (Roland Moller), who will take charge of one of the first groups of de-miners. An opening scene shows a Danish officer stopping his jeep beside a ragged column of German soldiers, laying into one of them with unadorned hatred. In Martin Zandvliet's gripping, disturbing film, the fact that it was a British decision is not mentioned. About 2,600 Germans were set to work in May 1945, although most were not engineers.
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The British invented their own logic: these were not POWs but "voluntarily surrendered enemy personnel".Īnd since the German engineers knew how to defuse the different types better than allied soldiers, they could do the work.
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No one bothered to mention that it was against the Geneva Convention to put prisoners of war to dangerous work.