A protest against the film, “The Desert Fox,” a glorification of the Nazi general Rommel, was voiced here by a group of organizations which denounced the film as “a falsification of history” and charged that it “white washes the Nazism with which Rommel was so closely identified.”
A statement issued by the organizations said that the sympathetic portrayal of Rommel and many other top Nazis “attempts to convey the idea that morally these men were on the ‘right side’, that only the lunacy of Hitler was responsible for Nazism.”
The film “humiliates the memory of hundreds of thousands of American casualties who fought against Rommel and his military colleagues,” the statement declared and “affronts the soldiers of all the Allied nations just six years after the bitterest war in our history.”
The statement warned that production of such films “in which the fundamental values for which we fought and suffered are turned inside out, merely because it might make attractive box office” contributes further to a moral breakdown here, will raise doubts among British. French and other Allies and will give support to Nazi elements in Germany.
Organizations signing the statement included the Essex County Area Council of the American Veterans Committee, the Essex County Intergroup Committee. Essex County Council, Jewish War Veterans, Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Community Council, Essex County American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League of Essex County.
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