The American director Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) is a classic mix of the revenge drama and the war film. Primarily set in 1944, the film relates the orchestrated assassination of the Nazi troops and officials in a German-occupied France. While the extermination is chiefly led by a group of Jewish American soldiers, hired by the British and American allied forces, going by the eponymous moniker of the ‘Inglourious Basterds’, it is equally facilitated by the individual efforts of a French Jewish genocide survivor named Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who machinates an arson on the antisemitic theatre attendees of an upcoming premiere of a Nazi propagandist film titled Stolz der Nation (Nation’s Pride).
Led by the U.S. Army Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the Basterds — comprising the Jewish German Sergeant Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth, also known as “The Bear Jew”), and the Austrian-born translator Corporal Wilhelm Wicki (Gedeon Burkhard) — take violent measures against “the Jew hunter” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and his other Nazi associates.
The group is infamous for scalping their enemies and carving the German swastika into their foreheads, of course when the group is not wrapped up in bashing the Nazis to death. The film climaxes with the iconic gunning down of the German dictator Adolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke) and his propagandist acolyte Paul Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) by the Basterds before the hall bursts into flames. Given that Shoshanna used the German flammable film stocks as make-shift explosives, the irony of assassinating the Nazis using their own violent cinematic weapon is hardly lost on the audience.
What makes it easy for Basterds to almost pass off as a historic drama is its engagement with many real events from the past. Besides the presence of the notorious figure of Hitler, it is true that since 1940 until its emancipation by the Allies in 1944, increasingly large areas of France came under German occupation. With an almost immediate implementation of German anti-Jewish laws and hunts, over the course of four years, France witnessed the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews.
Even the character of Goebbels maintains historical accuracy, representing the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945 who was behind exploiting the potential of films in evoking strong emotions towards propagating the Nazi cause. Basterds’s fictionality is further eclipsed by its many other direct and indirect historical references.
For example the name of Pitt’s character Aldo Raine is similar to that of the real-life war veteran Aldo Ray and the theatre in which Shoshanna works is based on the Vista Theatre in Silverlake. In fact, Tarantino even took the pains of making period-appropriate posters for the film Nation’s Pride to enhance the film’s verisimilitude.
But notwithstanding all these references, did the ‘inglourious’ crew really exist? Well, here, we’ll try to figure out just that.
Is Inglourious Basterds Based on a True Story?
With a film that depicts such an easy and heroic take-down of the Nazis by a modern-age troop that revels in say ancient scalping practices that can be dated as far back as the ninth century, the answer certainly happens to be a big ‘no’. In fact, the film’s misspelled title seems to somewhat give away its bastardization of history.
Yet one cannot completely deny certain resemblances that Basterds bears with certain historical elements. For example, James Leasor’s 1980 book The Unknown Warrior suggested the existence of a British commando force around the same time as the Basterds mainly consisting of former German Jewish exiles, variously known as the ‘X Troop’, the ‘English Troop’, the ‘Jewish Troop’, and the ‘Miscellaneous Troop’, that was put together under the leadership of the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Even if the group wasn’t involved in brutal bashings of Nazis, it certainly had a thirst for revenge. Indeed, just like Basterds portrays the British Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) trying to pass off as a German only to be betrayed by his suspicious accent and typically British hand gesture and resultantly killed, it was also imperative for the X Troop to operate under alias and learn to speak in different accents in order to hide their racial identities.
Yet another group whom the National WWII Museum in New Orleans has christened the “The REAL Inglourious Basterds” is the team of spies involved in Operation Greenup of the Allies, though their time of operation was much later in 1945. The team was mainly involved in transmitting key insights through radio messages to US intelligence officers and instrumental in protecting the Austrian city of Innsbruck. However, the real-life threat under which these commandos and spies worked was nowhere as ‘(in)glourious’ as their chimeric filmic correlates.
In fact, Tarantino never intended for Basterds to bear historical allegiance in the first place. Offering his audience a fantastical alternative history, in an interview with Ella Taylor, Tarantino even admits that his film is meant to be a conduit of the vociferous rage about the Nazi operations that in public discourse is typically surrounded by an aura of a silent unspeakability.
Irrespective of its many historical references, Basterds embodies multiple layers of fictionality. For starters, the film is a part of Tarantino’s shared universe that houses his other films like Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill (2003, 2004), Django Unchained (2012), and the more recent Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019). This is conveyed through, say, the circulation of objects like the Red Apple cigarettes that crop in in all of these films.
The made-up-ness of the film’s story also reveals itself in the fact that when he first conceived of it, Tarantino’s vision for the movie blew up so much that the project that it to be shelved for about a decade (during which he made other films like Kill Bill and Death Proof). A Tarantino-phile would know that the female assassin that figures in Kill Bill was originally conceptualized for Basterd’s Shoshanna — the malleability of her fictional character thus underwriting its seeming historical veracity.
Moreover, Tarantino admits that more than history, his inspiration for the film was the misleading Hollywood propaganda films, which like Basterds, were often tilted to the side of being entertaining and adventurous. This, he says, is because even if they tamper with historical facts, they were produced at a moment when the Nazis were a real threat, which invariably left unconscious marks on such films.
The last layer of the film’s fictionality falls off when one realizes that its title was inspired from the 1978 European war film The Inglorious Bastards by the Italian director Enzo G. Castellari. Set in 1944, this film about a group of prisoners on a secret war mission was itself inspired by an earlier 1967 American war film by Robert Aldrich titled The Dirty Dozen.
Once more set in 1944, Aldrich’s film follows the adventures of an Allied troop on a suicide mission prior to the D-Day Normady Landings marking the beginning of liberation of France from German forces. This shows that at best, the film is at least thrice removed from reality. Even if it has tentative links to history, it is certainly not based on it.