Why Nazis?</p><p>Why now?</p><p>Why is this Oscar season jammed with movies about the Third Reich?</p><p>&#8226;This fall we got &#8220;The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,&#8221; about a German boy whose daddy runs one of Hitler&#8217;s concentration camps. Bored, he makes friends with a Jewish child on the other side of the electrified fence &#8230; with tragic results. (The film tonight ends its long run at the Leawood Theatre.)</p><p>&#8226;Opening Christmas Day was &#8220;Valkyrie,&#8221; Tom Cruise and director Bryan Singer&#8217;s re-creation of the conspiracy of German officers who in the summer of 1944 attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb. Again, tragic results.</p><p>&#8226;Coming Friday is &#8220;The Reader,&#8221; in which a teenage boy in &#8217;50s Berlin falls for an older woman (Kate Winslet), later discovering her past as a concentration camp guard. Not quite tragic, but close.</p><p>&#8226;Jan. 16 marks the arrival of &#8220;Defiance,&#8221; in which Daniel Craig (aka 007) and Liev Schreiber play real-life Jewish brothers who wage a guerrilla war against the Nazis in the forests of their native Belarus.</p><p>&#8226;Expected to open early in the new year are &#8220;Adam Resurrected,&#8221; with Jeff Goldblum playing a Holocaust survivor who escapes his unhappy reality by embracing madness, and &#8220;Good,&#8221; with Viggo Mortensen as a German academic enticed to write propaganda for the Nazi Party.</p><p>Trying to explain why Hollywood does anything is usually a waste of time. It&#8217;s a business motivated by greed, ego, bragging rights and the desperate yearning to be recognized as something other than cultural pimps.</p><p>Moreover, the movies opening now may have entered the production pipeline several years ago or just a few months back. There&#8217;s no real rhyme or reason to the process, certainly no concerted effort to have similar-themed movies land in theaters all at the same time.</p><p>Still, you have to ask why.</p><p>I&#8217;d suggest that some filmmakers are employing World War II as a setting to explore contemporary themes. Just how much of this is deliberate is hard to gauge. In art, the subconscious often comes percolating through without warning.</p><p>Consider: Movies directly addressing Iraq and the war on terror largely have tanked at the box office. Not even Tom Cruise could sell Robert Redford&#8217;s preachy &#8220;Lions for Lambs,&#8221; and even largely apolitical films like &#8220;Stop-Loss&#8221;&#8212; about the homecoming of American troops &#8212; have underperformed.</p><p>At the same time the movies always need villains, and Nazis are terribly convenient. You know where you stand with them.</p><p>But do you <em>really</em>? What&#8217;s surprising about the new crop of WWII movies is that most of these films approach the subject with ambivalence. They concentrate on how individuals react to Naziism &#8230; some with defiance, some by buying into the program.</p><p>A recurring theme is how otherwise good people can embrace a nationalistic or political agenda completely at odds with their own best impulses.</p><p>And what&#8217;s that got to do with us?</p><p>Well, for many around this globe of ours, the good old USA is viewed as the modern equivalent of Nazi Germany &#8212; a formidable war machine that invades countries, terrorizes the locals, ignores the outcry for fairness and justice and imposes its own ideas of the way things should be.</p><p>And though they would hate the comparison, fighters for the Iraq insurgency have a lot in common with the Jewish brothers of &#8220;Defiance.&#8221; Both groups resist what they view as an occupying army with bombs and ambushes.</p><p>Now before you go all DAR on me, I know this is a hugely oversimplified view. Our men in uniform aren&#8217;t Nazis &#8212; though the distinction may be lost on some poor wretch of an Afghan taxi driver who angered the local war lord, was ratted out to the Yanks as al-Qaida and is learning all about water boarding.</p><p>But the lines between good and evil, right and wrong have gotten seriously blurred. &#8220;We&#8217;re the good guys; they&#8217;re the bad guys&#8221; may be emotionally reassuring, but in practice it&#8217;s a whole lot more complicated. And strangely enough, movies about Nazis are hammering that idea home.