War film “Blood & Gold” on Netflix: Nazis hunt with the manure rake

Hunting scenes from central Germany, spring 1945. A deserter in Wehrmacht overcoat is being chased by marauding SS men. He sprints down a dirt road, they follow him with a motorcycle team and a military transporter, shoot at him with machine guns and cheer “Woo-hoo!”. He escapes into a forest, but is soon surrounded. “Aryan blood in the veins, but a coward at heart,” the Obersturmbannfuhrer taunts him. The deserter replies defiantly: “We are a people of murderers”.

The SS officer has him tied to a tree, but he is supposed to wriggle as long as possible until he dies. “Now let’s get the gold!” shouts the leader, and the troop roars away. A young farmer’s wife pulls the doomed man off the rope at the last moment. The scene is accompanied by a hit from the portable gramophone: “Goodbye, don’t stay away so long.”

The opening sequence of Peter Thorwarth’s Naziploitation film “Blood & Gold” already makes it clear what the hundred minutes are about: action that is as fast-paced as possible and gags that – like in “Goodbye” as a farewell greeting to someone who is being executed – are sometimes cynical may be. After he had a Netflix hit with the horror film “Blood Red Sky”, in which vampires hijack a night flight, the director from the Ruhr area apparently got a free hand for his next project with the streaming service. Thorwarth took the opportunity and created a straight genre piece that tells of the last days of the Second World War with black humor, but never turns into clothes.

Elsa (Marie Hacke), his rescuer, hides the deserter Heinrich (Robert Maaser, ex-world champion in wheel gymnastics) in her farm, which is isolated in no man’s land. Almost an idyll, which, however, is disturbed by a handful of SS henchmen who drive up to plunder in the Opel Blitz. Heinrich watches through the cracks in the attic as the Totenkopf men try to rape Elsa in the house. The setting is strongly reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s counterfactual war film Inglourious Basterds, where SS-Standartenfuhrer Landa visits a farm while hidden Jews huddle under the floorboards.

As with Tarantino, the tension erupts in an excess of violence. Heinrich and Elsa fight the intruders with firearms, broken glass and boiling coffee. An SS man is impaled with a dung rake. And Marlene Dietrich sings: “Who’s going to cry when you part?”

The village in which “Blood & Gold” takes place is optimistically called Sonnenberg. Johannes Löwenstein, a Jewish resident, is said to have left a treasure of 31 gold bars. In the pogrom night of 1938 he was deported to a concentration camp. “It was a nice house, there was a nice fire,” say the former neighbors.

Before Obersturmbannfuhrer von Starnfeld and his men set up headquarters in the “Kronprinz Rudolf” inn, the mayor (Stephan Grossmann) had the portrait of Hitler hung on the wall again. The attitude acrobat had already expected the Allies, now he shows himself again in his pheasant-like uniform. He is just as keen on the gold as his lover, the village megare Sonja (Jördis Triebel), and the SS pack.

Alexander Scheer, who was already in “Blood Red Sky”, plays Obersturmbannfuhrer von Starnfeld with the icy coldness of an undead. Half his face, shattered by war wounds, is covered by a leather mask. To keep himself awake, he swallows Pervitin tablets, an amphetamine that induces euphoria. Scheer is an artist of understatement, he makes the diabolical recognizable by slowing down his figure’s gestures and facial expressions like a reptile.

In the stretched Goebbels style, he holds out speeches: “We’re on the ground, but we’ll get up again and fight back!” When he taps his cigarettes on the silver cigarette case before putting them in his mouth, it sounds as if death personally knock on the door. He has Elsa arrested and falls in love with her, stages an engagement party and tells of his former lover, a Jewess: “I couldn’t be with her, so I shot her.” Elsa literally kisses him dead.

In the anarchy at the end of the war, Robert Schwentke showed how an impostor could rise to become the leader of a regime of terror in Emsland in his wartime Köpenickiad “The Captain”. The brutalization of the people through their getting used to the violence is the same in “Blood & Gold”. After all, a few upright people around the village priest (Jochen Nickel) oppose the SS when a disabled person with the sign “I am unworthy of life” is about to be hanged. The showdown in this spaghetti western set in the Saxon countryside takes place in the church.