There is a difference between a Nazi and a German.
There's no mistaking a Samuel Fuller picture for the work of anyone else. Lots of directors made war films, some even dealt with the reconstruction of Germany after Hitler's defeat, but no one else made a film quite like 1959's Verboten! Right in the opening scene, Fuller has one of his characters explain the title ("Verboten -- that means forbidden.") and over the course of the film we hear about lots of things that are forbidden, both under the Nazis and the Allied occupation.
One thing that is verboten for American servicemen is German frauleins, an edict that wounded rifleman James Best blithely ignores when the beautiful Susan Cummings nurses him back to health and hides him from the S.S. Once he fully recovers and gets his discharge, Best stays behind to work on the reconstruction efforts as a civilian and marry Cummings, which starts out as a marriage of convenience for her, but grows into something else. Complicating matters is Tom Pittman as the head of the local Werwolf, an underground organization of unrepentant Hitler youth bent on driving the American forces out of the country and starting over again.
Fuller uses a great deal of newsreel footage to establish the desperate straits many Germans found themselves in immediately after the war's end -- and he even takes in some of the Nuremburg trials to remind us why we were there in the first place. On the day that Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants have been found guilty of war crimes -- and two days before our country's mid-term elections -- it's good to be reminded that we've been down this road before. It's no easier in 2006 than it was in 1945.