Punching Nazis:  An Investigation of the Continued Assault on WWII History and the Holocaust in Action-Adventure Films

Abrahamsson, Leah

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

Punching Nazis: An Investigation of the Continued Assault on WWII History and the Holocaust in Action-Adventure Films Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/f7623f58f

Abstract

This paper examines the implications of action-adventure films that use Nazis as the
ultimate villain. These films use Nazis either without explaining the historical context or by
simply fictionalizing parts of the Holocaust and WWII. This reduces Nazis to caricatures and
minimizes WWII and the Holocaust. This thesis will first examine the historical roots of Nazi
stereotypes drawing from the work of Sabine Hake and Susan Sontag, demonstrating how Nazi
iconography and anti-Nazi films of the 1930s-1940s built the archetype for Nazis in later films.
Next, this thesis establishes the connection between fictionalized historical events in movies and
society’s collective memory. These ideas will come together by examining the Indiana Jones
franchise’s use of Nazis, their reference to occultism, and their recycling of 1940s stereotypes.
Next, I argue that films like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (Guy Ritchie 2024) depict
Nazi villains as buffoons in a way that mocks the Holocaust and World War II. Finally, I look at
how the excessive exaggeration of violence to establish “representational history” creates a
similar problem to ignoring history altogether, using Hunters (David Weil 2020) as a case study.
A strong throughline in this thesis is Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” argument from
Eichman in Jerusalem which states that evil is not a characteristic that explains Nazi atrocities,
as it is more ordinary evils like indifference and social climbing that creates the avenue for these
acts to occur. These examples work together to solidify the assertion that American
action-adventure films diminish and insult the true, deeply tragic events of WWII and the
Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi party.

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