“Don't let's be beastly to the Germans when our victory is ultimately won,” sang Noël Coward, somewhat archly, in 1943. Yet, the critical response to the latest Hollywood films about the Second World War, from The Reader to Tom Cruise's forthcoming Valkyrie, suggests that many still prefer their Germans as morally tainted as the Nazi ideology to which they enlisted.

Love them or loathe them, it is suggested that these new releases mark a breakthrough in cinema. After decades of goose-stepping, slapping people and shouting “Schweinhund!” Germans are finally portrayed as heroes or as victims.

Those making such claims have clearly not spent enough Saturday afternoons watching war movies. Even while the war was raging, some films implied that there might be some semblance of Teutonic humanity struggling to break out of the Nazi stranglehold. After all, the studios knew of an Office of War Information survey of 1942 suggesting that almost 40 per cent of Americans believed that ordinary Germans were not willingly following their leaders.

With victory, incorporating western Germany into the coalition against Stalin became the imperative. Shots of the Luftwaffe strafing downed American pilots in the Channel were cut from the 1949 movie Twelve O'Clock High.

The real breakthrough came in 1951. Only six years after the war ended, cinemagoers flocked to see The Desert Fox in which the suave James Mason turned Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler's most formidable generals, into a model gentleman.

Some were disgusted. From Glasgow to New York, Jewish former servicemen fruitlessly picketed cinemas showing the film, condemning it as “a glorification of Rommel and a virtual whitewash of Nazism”. In Vienna it sparked three days of riots, although the spontaneity of the street battles may be questioned as several thousand protesters arrived in lorries owned by the Soviet-controlled Usia industrial organisation. A couple of Russian officers stood outside the cinema, trying to intimidate filmgoers into forgoing a glimpse of the celluloid heroism of the Afrika Korps.

The Desert Fox not only portrayed Rommel as a good German but also as a far better general than Bernard Montgomery, a heresy that prompted the critic Leonard Mosley to write that he “wished to throw hand grenades at the screen”. Undaunted, British audiences - including many former servicemen - loved the film.

For us Tommies, perhaps the war was over earlier than is sometimes imagined.

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