Stalingrad (1993), directed by the German filmmaker Joseph Vilsmaier, follows in the tradition of the better American films about Vietnam. Like Oliver Stone’s Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Stalingrad centers the war on a group of likable everymen trapped in a hell not of their own making.

The film opens in sunny Italy. We meet Lieutenant Hans von Witzland, a proper young man from an aristocratic Prussian family, and Sergeant Manfred “Rollo” Rohleder, a veteran of the Africa Corps. At first, we are led to believe that von Witzland is a Nazi. He refuses to pin a medal on the rough-looking Rohleder when the latter refuses to button up his collar during inspection. “Heroes aren’t late,” he says to Rohleder and his friend Corporal Fritz Reiser.

But once we get to the frozen steppe along the Volga, we realize that von Witzland’s proper, “by the book” Prussian militarism actually means the opposite. He’s an old school German conservative who violently objects to Russian prisoners being abused. He hates the Nazis. Fritz Reiser, who’s played by the French actor Dominique Hororwitz, is a tough-minded realist who’s determined to survive at any cost. That Reiser is played by the very Jewish-looking Horowitz sends a clear message: von Paulus’s soldiers were not all Nazis. Like Americans in Vietnam, they were just soldiers with rotten leaders.