The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
It's as true now as it was in the 1940s. I've been alive nearly fifty-five years and for most of my life I've had a keen interest in history. But even after all that time I'm still discovering new Nazi atrocities. It's become clear that an entire lifetime won't be enough to process the enormity of evil that they created - and that continues to be created by those who still adhere to their twisted world view.
The second series of World On Fire (BBC1/iPlayer, written and created by Peter Bowker, and directed by Drew Casson, Barney Cokeliss, and Meena Gaur) doesn't hold back when it comes to showing Nazi murder and rape but it also remembers, at all times, that it's not a documentary. It's a drama and it's a drama with a beating human heart that looks not at what war did to Europe (and the world) but what war does to ordinary decent people.
It destroys their lives - but it also tests their assumptions to breaking points and forces people to collaborate with others from different classes, different backgrounds, and different nations to either overcome extreme right wing menace or to simply get by. We start in Manchester. October 1940. The Blitz. Nazi bombs are falling on the city and young Polish refugee Jan (Eryk Biedunkiewicsz) is still living with frowsty Robina (Lesley Manville) and when her son Harry (Jonah Hauer-King who plays Harry like a Tim Nice But Dim character, but nice and not dim) returns from the war with his wife Kasia (Zofia Wichlacz), she ends up taking Kasia in as well.
Jan and Kasia's brother Grzegorz (Mateusz Wieclawek) is in Manchester too but Kasia's sleep is haunted by vivid nightmares of what she saw, and what she did, in Poland and the death of her mother at the hands of the Nazis. She's also frustrated. She'd come to define herself by her role in the resistance and staying at home with her mother-in-law and looking after her husband's baby (by another woman) is not enough to satisfy her.
Lois (Julia Brown), the mother of that baby - baby Vera, is equally frustrated. Her and her friend Connie (Yrsa Daley-Ward) are doing their bit by working as air raid wardens but Lois has not adapted well to motherhood and she's lost her father Douglas (his home bombed in the war) and her husband to be Vernon (during the Battle of Britain) and she wants to do more. Even if it means abandoning Vera.
Lois' brother Tom (Ewan Mitchell) is also, of course, mourning his father but at least he's distracted by continuing his active service as a sailor. In a Berlin that, at this point, has barely been touched by the war we're introduced to sixteen year old school girls Marga (Miriam Schiweck) and Gertha (Johanna Gotting). Marga and Gertha are best friends but when Marga is happily chosen to help defend the Aryan race by having a child with a Nazi soldier, that friendship is sorely tested.
Gertha thinks it, the Lebensborn programme, is a terrible idea. No less that government sanctioned mass rape. Marga disagrees and so does almost everyone else in Germany including Marga's parents (Matthias Lier and Friederike Ott) and Luftwaffe bomber brother (Carl Grubel). The only person who sees Gertha's side is teacher Herr Trutz (Beat Marti) but to take Gertha's side could lead him into mortal danger.
Marga, meanwhile, is taken to Brandenburg to join The League of German Girls (first seen carrying out acrobatics in gymslips adorned with swastikas) where she will be forced to have sex with a man not of her choosing. Surely an inspiration for Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?
The war itself has spread to North Africa and soon Harry is posted to the desert to fight alongside his old friend Sergeant Stan Raddings (Blake Harrison) and his platoon (including, again, Cel Spellman's Private Joe Broughton) and a sapper unit from the British Indian Army which is headed up by the brave and fearless (perhaps even to the point of foolhardiness) Rajib Pal (Ahad Raza Mir).
They're fighting against the Italians in the desert so that oil can still come through the Suez Canal. Without oil they lose the battle. If they lose the battle the Allies lose the war. The stakes are that high but it's not the just the Italian soldiers (and the loathed Erwin Rommel) they're facing. They're also taking on snipers. sandstorms, s-mines (also known as, for obvious reasons, debollockers), and, eugh, septic foreskins.
Things are only slightly less desperate in Paris where jazz musician Albert (Parker Sawyers) is still detained at the pleasure of the Third Reich and where Henriette (Eugenie Derouand) is still working as a nurse and still working hard to keep her Jewish identity secret. A problem that becomes exacerbated with the arrival of her well meaning and idealistic, but naive, brother Luc (Arthur Choisnet).
As with the first series of World On Fire, each and every one of these characters will have their lives turned upside down by the war, many will face the very real threat of death, and, this is hardly a spoiler, some of them won't reach the end of the series. There's racism, insubordination, subterfuge, and shoot outs. There are people in England who don't approve of refugees (that train's never late) and almost everyone, almost everywhere, is suspicious of everyone else.
That's the paranoid climate fostered and encouraged by Nazism. It's tense, it's chilling, and the hard work put in by the first series really pays off in the second. There's a fantastic debunking of the tired old canard about Italian soldiers being cowards ("Mussolini wanted to fight, not them") and there are solid supporting performances from Grace Chilton as Robina's maid Joyce, Jay Sajjid as Rajib's deputy Basu, and Gregg Sulkin as debonair RAF officer David. A man who spends as much time cracking jokes and womanising as he does flying fighter planes.
Then there's Mark Bonnar's Sir James Danemer. A civil servant who is billeted at Robina's house, Sir James is charming, influential, and endlessly self-deprecating and he may, or may not, have a dark secret and he may, or may not, be trying to woo Robina. Can we trust a man who teaches a young boy to use guile, or deceit, to win at chess and gives a baby booze?
There are a couple of minor gripes. Some characters from the first series are absent and some of those absences are never explained and the depiction of the Aussie soldiers could have been less stereotypical. I know we're in the middle of a red hot Ashes summer but portraying them as boisterous larrikins simply isn't cricket.
That aside, however, World On Fire was a fantastic, and worthy, watch. I found it all quite emotional. When Jan wanted to fight to avenge his mother's death and to rid himself of the deep sadness inside, when Lois finds it within her heart to be completely reasonable to Harry and Kasia, and when an RAF pilot plunges to his death. Most of all when a teenage girl is horrendously betrayed by her best friend and then is forced to carry out a terrible act of betrayal herself.
By the end of the final episode I was, predictably, failing to hold back the tears. "The value of a life is the value of a life is the value of a life" says Rajib Pal at one point, pondering why the Indian soldiers are always first to be sent into the line of fire and last to be rescued. Of course he's completely correct about that. Except with one small caveat. The value of a Nazi's life is not the same value of a good person's life. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
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