225 JMEH 16 / 2018 / 2 1 Q. Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, USA 2009. The flm is based on E. G. Castellari’s Quel maledetto tre- no blindato, Italy 1978, and R. Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, USA 1967. In Quentin Tarantino’s uchronic war flm Inglourious Basterds, a special combat unit of Jewish-American soldiers sets out to kill Nazis. As a persifage of the «Macaroni Combat» B-movies of the 1970s, the flm depicts a simplistic war of good against evil. In the opening scene, SS Colonel Hans Landa – played as evil incarnate by Acad- emy Award winner Christoph Waltz – threatens to kill a French farmer and his loved ones if they do not reveal the whereabouts of a Jewish family he is hiding under his cabin. The farmer fnally breaks down, weeping, and Landa’s men shoot the Jews through the foorboards. Only one young daughter manages to escape and, three years later, together with the «Basterds», she burns down a cinema in Paris, trapping Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and other Nazi big-shots in the fames. Right at the end of the flm, First Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) pulls out a Bowie knife and carves a swastika into Landa’s forehead. 1 Although Inglourious Basterds plays with wartime stereotypes both deliberately and deliriously, from the Western perspective of a frequent watcher of movies and TV documentaries about the Second World War, it still resembles what the anti-Hit- ler coalition had already presented: on the one hand, modern democracies (such as Great Britain and the USA) led by the will of the people and respectful of human rights, and on the other, anachronistic fascist or authoritarian regimes (such as Ger- many, Italy, Romania and Japan). But it would be over-simplistic to apply such a di- chotomy when depicting the real European (and global) political landscape between 1939 and 1945. In 1940, after the defeat of France, the cradle of European democ- racy, a fascist puppet regime in Vichy began collaborating with the Third Reich. Unlike Romania, Italy (which had stood alongside the Germans until 1943 and had been ruled by a fascist elite from the early 1920s) refused to assist in implementing the Holocaust in South-Eastern Europe. In the Pacifc, US troops were engaged in a war of races against Japan from 1942 onwards, which culminated in the atomic Jochen Böhler / Jacek Andrzej Mlynarczyk Collaboration and Resistance in Wartime Poland (1939–1945) – A Case for Differentiated Occupation Studies