On Location: Denmark

If Princess Diana were alive today, she would likely be on Twitter exhorting her followers to grab a ticket to the cinema to see “Land of Mine” (2015). The ex-wife of Prince Charles, who made the removal of land mines a key part of her various charitable activities, would have used director Martin Zandvliet’s post-World War II drama as an opportunity to illustrate the tragic human cost of just burying a weapon of war somewhere and leaving it to kill or maim whoever has the misfortune of treading over it.

“Land of Mine” is not merely an advertisement against the use of land mines, however. Set in Denmark in summer 1945 after the Allied victory in WWII, the film follows a group of young German prisoners of war who are tasked with removing and defusing the thousands of mines that Nazi occupiers had buried in the beaches of Denmark's west coast. Their supervisor, Danish sergeant Rasmussen (Roland Møller), is dismayed to find that most of them are only teenagers, conscripted into the army by the desperate Nazis in the dying stages of the war.

Zandvliet’s film is part of a recent wave of European films like Christian Petzold’s “Phoenix” (2014) and Lars Kraume's “The People vs. Fritz Bauer” (2015) that address Germany’s 'kollektivschuld,' or 'collective guilt,' in the aftermath of WWII. In “Land of Mine,” the youngsters, most of whom are too young to remember life under the Weimar Republic, must right their countrymen’s crime in a foreign land under great peril. As Sergeant Rasmussen comes to realize, the boys clearing the mines are in an extremely dangerous and disheartening quagmire.

Having grown up under Nazism, these boys are thrown into a war they barely understand and forced into complicity in the heinous crimes of the Holocaust, which the older German generation at worst organized and at best collectively looked the other way. Now, having lost the war, they are subject to vengeful abuse by the Danes and compelled to clean up the mess left by the older generation. At enormous personal risk, the leader of the Germans, Sebastian (Louis Hofmann), tries to rally them into completing their task honestly. Therein lies the moral dilemma at the heart of “Land of Mine”: As German soldiers, none of the boys can claim to be truly innocent. Therefore, to leave the job to someone else would be morally unjust. At the same time, they are still just scared and homesick children who have been fed an endless stream of hatred and lies and then forced, hopelessly ill-prepared, into an unwinnable war.

In the end, only four of the original 14 survive. To Zandvliet's credit, the film does not offer any definitive answers; he instead presents the entire situation as a total breakdown of humanity. The question Zandvliet chooses to pose, particularly for Sergeant Rasmussen, is how to rediscover humanity in the wake of such complete destruction.