The film is based on a true story. Shortly before the outbreak of World War 2, Salomon Perel, born in 1925, the fourth child of a Jewish family which fled to Germany after the October Revolution, is forced to flee again together with his parents. The Perel family settle in the Polish town Lodz.
Salomon's parents send him further east when the Germans march into Poland and he lands in a Russian orphanage where the fourteen-year-old boy is trained to become a strong Komsomol. When Hitler attacks the Soviet Union as well, Salomon is picked up by German soldiers. In order to save his life, he claims to be an "ethnic German" wishing to leave the Soviet Union and return "home to the Reich". He is given a German uniform and forced to fight for the other side now.
Salomon Perel has long since assumed the name Jupp Peters and is treated as a hero following his attempted desertion which is misinterpreted by his superiors. He is sent back to the "Reich" and attends a Nazi school. Back at the front line, he crosses over to the Red Army shortly before the end of the war. Now twenty years old, he is reunited with his brother who has survived the war in a concentration camp and this saves Salomon's life once again. The real Salomon Perel emigrates to Palestine and appears in the epilogue.
No other European film became the subject of such heated debates as HITLERJUNGE SALOMON when it was released in the 1991/92 season. Renamed EUROPA EUROPA, the film was a considerable box office success in the USA. The controversy was fueled, above all, by the fact that HITLERJUNGE SALOMON was not nominated by the German board responsible for deciding the Oscar nominations. The German co-producer Arthur Brauner (CCC Filmkunst) had protested strongly against the board's decision, for which it presented a most awkward public justification based on formal criteria and claimed that the film was only a minority co-production, the lion's share being borne by the French partner. The fact that France had similarly failed to propose the film for an Oscar nomination was overlooked in the debate. The German board's decision was interpreted - particularly by the director personally - as evidence of renascent racism. The artistic objections to the film were then also forced in this direction in some cases.
Film producers are not the only people who have tried, in the last twenty years, to present national socialism in less demonic terms and contribute towards greater enlightenment instead. As far as the subjective debate was concerned, analysing the banality of evil was just as productive as determining the economic relationships behind fascism. This is precisely the point criticized by most German critics: "If we can believe Agnieszka Holland's production, then the Nazis were a bunch of crackers. We know how these inhuman people believed they could recognize a Jew; and that is precisely how the director believes she can recognize a fascist. The fascists remain comic figures in HITLERJUNGE SALOMON." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
What is really moving about this film is its story, its authenticity. However, the production as such does not devote sufficient time to this passion and concentrates on outward appearances instead. Although, of course, we cannot expect the director to differentiate and to weigh up the pros and cons in her presentation of the national socialist crimes and their perpetrators - except for the sake of the victims.
The film's biggest problem is its episodic structure engendering a feeling of haste. Many points are raised, many facts mentioned, but the director seems to be afraid to stop and consider them more closely. This would have been understandable if the film had merely told the story of a boy who becomes a breathless object trapped by events without a moment to reflect. Yet the time to reflect was there, but Agnieszka Holland uses it for erotic motifs. While still in Lodz, she allows young Salomon to engage in a pubertarian episode with a cinema cashier instead of relating the importance of his family and the murder of his younger sister. His fear that the circumcision would be discovered finally becomes the central motif of the film. The director effectively presents Salomon's efforts to conceal it, particularly in his relationship with a BDM girl. The dream scenes are particularly controversial: Hitler embracing Stalin and dancing, Hitler hiding in a wardrobe and revealing himself as a Jew. "A less monumental production, quieter and more accurate in matters of detail, more credible in its presentation, might have made the film more acceptable to a European audience. But then it would not have been so successful in America." (epd Film)
