The Crude Historical Distortion at the Heart of BBC’s WWII Drama ‘SS-GB’

‘The new BBC television drama, “SS-GB,” tells the fictional story of the Nazi occupation of Britain during the Second World War. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Len Deighton, the story ponders the dilemma faced by British police detective, Douglas Archer (played by Sam Riley), in working for his country’s fascist occupiers.
This is all fine as far as it goes. The problem comes with the drama’s depiction of a wartime alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Such an alliance is established in the opening scene of the first episode in the context of a “German-Soviet friendship week” ceremony in London, involving the Nazis presenting a visiting Soviet delegation with a British spitfire fighter aircraft as a gift. Then, later, plumbing the depths of crudity, we see a large poster of Karl Marx hanging between two giant Swastika flags on a building in Nazi-occupied central London.’

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