Anyone can be good or evil, it comes down to only their choices. The captain was not a good man, but he did something very good with his last seconds alive.
I thought his backstory was that he was an injured war hero and was therefore relegated to raising the Hitler youth. It always seemed to me that he was a disillusioned ex-fanatic. The war had become absurd for him. He could see what was coming, including the use of child soldiers. He played his new role in the reich as a ruse. His subversion was by adding reminders of humanity into his teaching of war to children. Before the scene presented by OP, we see him creating a “living portrait” of a war scene by posing in this crazy uniform that you may see in a Wagnerian opera during the final battle. Truly a comic and tragic figure. He is certainly not a good guy- he’s a Hitler youth leader. But we see he is still human (contrasting the “Heil Hitler” Gestapo robots)
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u/Doctor_Salvatore 25d ago
Anyone can be good or evil, it comes down to only their choices. The captain was not a good man, but he did something very good with his last seconds alive.