The 40 most popular german war movies, ranked. Click any film for ratings, reviews, trailers, and where to watch.


Kingdom of Heaven
2005 · 2h 24m
country: United States
After his wife dies, a blacksmith named Balian is thrust into royalty, political intrigue and bloody holy wars during the Crusades.


The Pianist
2002 · 2h 30m
country: France
The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.


All Quiet on the Western Front
2022 · 2h 27m
country: Germany
Paul Baumer and his friends Albert and Muller, egged on by romantic dreams of heroism, voluntarily enlist in the German army. Full of excitement and patriotic fervour, the boys enthusiastically march into a war they believe in. But once on the Western Front, they discover the soul-destroying horror of World War I.


The Tank
2025 · 1h 57m
country: Germany
A German Tiger tank crew is sent on a dangerous mission to rescue the missing officer Paul von Hardenburg from a top-secret bunker behind enemy lines. As they make their way through the lethal no-man's land, they must confront not only the enemy, but also their own fears and inner demons. Fueled by the Wehrmacht's methamphetamine, their mission increasingly becomes a journey into the heart of darkness.


She Devils of the SS
1973 · 1h 35m
country: Switzerland
In the last days of WW2, women are volunteering from all over Germany to serve in the front lines by having sex with the brave Nazi soldiers. But when they start having sex with each other, things get complicated. Especially with the increasing danger from the revengeful Soviet army!


Downfall
2004 · 2h 35m
country: Austria
In April of 1945, Germany stands at the brink of defeat with the Russian Army closing in from the east and the Allied Expeditionary Force attacking from the west. In Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler proclaims that Germany will still achieve victory and orders his generals and advisers to fight to the last man. When the end finally does come, and Hitler lies dead by his own hand, what is left of his military must find a way to end the killing that is the Battle of Berlin, and lay down their arms in surrender.


Tom Clancy's Without Remorse
2021 · 1h 50m
country: United States
An elite Navy SEAL uncovers an international conspiracy while seeking justice for the murder of his pregnant wife.


Das Boot
1981 · 2h 30m
country: Germany
A German submarine hunts allied ships during the Second World War, but it soon becomes the hunted. The crew tries to survive below the surface, while stretching both the boat and themselves to their limits.


The Tin Drum
1979 · 2h 42m
country: France
In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.


K-19: The Widowmaker
2002 · 2h 18m
country: Canada
When Russia's first nuclear submarine malfunctions on its maiden voyage, the crew must race to save the ship and prevent a nuclear disaster.


The Counterfeiters
2007 · 1h 38m
country: Germany
The story of Jewish counterfeiter Salomon Sorowitsch, who was coerced into assisting the Nazi operation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.


Persian Lessons
2020 · 2h 7m
country: Russia
Occupied France, 1942. Gilles is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany. He narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but Gilles gets assigned a life-or-death mission: to teach Farsi to Head of Camp Koch, who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. Through an ingenious trick, Gilles manages to survive by inventing words of "Farsi" every day and teaching them to Koch.


Sound of Falling
2025 · 2h 28m
country: Germany
Four adolescent girls each spend their youth in the same farmhouse over the last century. Though separated by decades, resonances between their lives emerge: their desires and distress, secrets and truths, encounters with another’s gaze and defiant gaze in return.


Stalingrad
1993 · 2h 14m
country: Germany
A German Platoon is explored through the brutal fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad. After half of their number is wiped out and they're placed under the command of a sadistic captain, the platoon lieutenant leads his men to desert. The platoon members attempt escape from the city, now surrounded by the Soviet Army.


Cross of Iron
1977 · 2h 13m
country: Germany
It is 1943, and the German army—ravaged and demoralised—is hastily retreating from the Russian front. In the midst of the madness, conflict brews between the aristocratic yet ultimately pusillanimous Captain Stransky and the courageous Corporal Steiner. Stransky is the only man who believes that the Third Reich is still vastly superior to the Russian army. However, within his pompous persona lies a quivering coward who longs for the Iron Cross so that he can return to Berlin a hero. Steiner, on the other hand is cynical, defiantly non-conformist and more concerned with the safety of his own men rather than the horde of military decorations offered to him by his superiors.


Amrum
2025 · 1h 33m
country: Germany
On Amrum Island in spring 1945, twelve-year-old Nanning hunts seals, fishes at night, and works the fields to help feed his family. When the war ends, his mother sinks into depression, and he must navigate new conflicts while struggling to find his own path.


Firebird
2021 · 1h 47m
country: Estonia
At the height of the Cold War, a troubled soldier forms a forbidden love triangle with a daring fighter pilot and his female comrade amid the dangerous surroundings of a Soviet Air Force Base.


The Red Baron
2008 · 1h 46m
country: Germany
Richthofen goes off to war like thousands of other men. As fighter pilots, they become cult heroes for the soldiers on the battlefields. Marked by sportsmanlike conduct, technical exactitude and knightly propriety, they have their own code of honour. Before long he begins to understand that his hero status is deceptive. His love for Kate, a nurse, opens his eyes to the brutality of war.


Chess Story
2021 · 1h 50m
country: Austria
1938. While the Nazi troops march into Vienna, the lawyer Josef Bartok hastily tries to escape to the USA with his wife but is arrested by the Gestapo. Bartok remains steadfast and refuses to cooperate with the Gestapo that requires confidential information from him. Thrown into solitary confinement, Bartok is psychologically tormented for months and begins to weaken. However, when he steals an old book about chess it sets him on course to overcome the mental suffering inflicted upon him, until it becomes a dangerous obsession.


The Captain
2018 · 1h 58m
country: Germany
Germany, 1945. Soldier Willi Herold, a deserter of the German army, stumbles into a uniform of a Nazi captain abandoned during the last and desperate weeks of the Third Reich. Newly emboldened by the allure of a suit that he has stolen only to stay warm, Willi discovers that many Germans will follow the leader, whoever he is.


Blood & Gold
2023 · 1h 40m
country: Germany
At the end of World War II, a German soldier is looking for his daughter while an SS troop is looking for a Jewish treasure.


My Führer
2007 · 1h 29m
country: Germany
Hitler no longer believes in himself, and can barely see himself as an equal to even his sheep dog. But to seize the helm of the war he would have to create one of his famous fiery speeches to mobilize the masses. Goebbels therefore brings a Jewish acting teacher Grünbaum and his family from the camps in order to train the leader in rhetoric. Grünbaum is torn, but starts Hitler in his therapy ...


Run Boy Run
2014 · 1h 48m
country: Germany
A true story of Jurek, an eight-year-old boy, who escapes from the Warsaw ghetto, then manages to survive in the woods and working as a farmhand, disguising himself as a Polish orphan.


The Bridge
1959 · 1h 43m
country: Germany
A group of German boys are ordered to protect a small bridge in their home village during the waning months of the second world war. Truckloads of defeated, cynical Wehrmacht soldiers flee the approaching American troops, but the boys, full of enthusiasm for the "blood and honor" Nazi ideology, stay to defend the useless bridge. The film is based on a West German anti-war novel of the same name, written by Gregor Dorfmeister.


Sunshine
1999 · 3h 1m
country: Austria
The fate of a Hungarian Jewish family throughout the 20th century.


Alone in Berlin
2016 · 1h 43m
country: France
Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.


Deathwatch
2002 · 1h 34m
country: Germany
In the brutal trench fighting of the First World War, a British Infantry Company is separated from their regiment after a fierce battle. Attempting to return to their lines, the British soldiers discover what appears to be a bombed out German trench, abandoned except for a few dazed German soldiers. After killing most of the Germans, and taking one prisoner, the British company fortifies to hold the trench until reinforcements can arrive. Soon, however, strange things being to happen as a sense of evil descends on the trench and the British begin turn on each other.


Shock Troop
1934 · 1h 58m
country: Germany
This powerful anti-war film statement focuses on the plight of a German unit in World War I that finds itself surrounded by British and French forces.
Marshal Forward
Marshal Forward
1932
country: Germany
No overview available


The Fox
2023 · 1h 58m
country: Austria
At the dawn of World War II, a young motorcycle courier in the Austrian army encounters a wounded fox cub and takes it with him to occupied France. The soldier and the fox develop an unlikely bond. Based on the true story of Franz Streitberger, director Adrian Goiginger’s great-grandfather.


Militiaman Bruggler
1936 · 1h 30m
country: Germany
Chronicles the Alpine war experiences of young Toni Bruggler (Ludwig Kerscher), a Tyrolean-German member of the Standschützen (militiamen), comprised of those who are too young or old to fight in the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg army.


John Rabe
2009 · 2h 14m
country: Austria
A true-story account of a German businessman who saved more than 200,000 Chinese during the Nanjing massacre in 1937-38.


Hostile Waters
1997 · 1h 34m
country: France
Based on true events, an American submarine collides into a Soviet sub of the coast of America and an ensuing standoff occurs that could lead to total annihilation.


Heldenfrühling
1991
country: Unknown
No overview available


As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me
2001 · 2h 38m
country: Germany
The German soldier Clemens Forel - determined to be reunited with his beloved family - makes a dramatic escape through bitter cold winters, desolate landscapes, and life threatening ventures from a Siberian labor camp after World War II. 8000 miles and three endless years of uncertainty later, he is finally about to reach his destination... An edge of your seat drama that celebrates the power of the human spirit and the force of will, while inspired and impowered by love.


The Ogre
1996 · 1h 53m
country: France
Frenchman Abel Tiffauges is a naive man who lives a simple life working as a mechanic. Falsely accused of being a child abuser, he is recruited as a soldier when World War II begins, but is captured soon and taken to the heart of Nazi Germany.


Triple Cross
1966 · 2h 20m
country: France
Safecracker Eddie Chapman is languishing in prison on the island of Jersey when the Nazis arrive. An adept manipulator of situations, Chapman convinces the Germans to use him to spy on the British. And when the would-be traitor arrives home, he convinces the English to use him as a double agent -- in exchange for a full pardon.


A Woman in Berlin
2008 · 2h 11m
country: Germany
A woman tries to survive the invasion of Berlin by the Soviet troops during the last days of World War II.


Lili Marleen
1981 · 2h
country: Germany
The story of a German singer named Willie, who while working in Switzerland, falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert, whose family is helping people to flee from the Nazis. Robert’s family is skeptical of Willie, thinking she could be a Nazi as she becomes famous for singing the song “Lili Marleen”.


The Conference
2022 · 1h 47m
country: Germany
On January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference takes place in Berlin, a meeting that had only one item on the agenda: The Final Solution, the organization of the systematic mass murder of eleven million European Jews.
German cinema's two great periods bookend the century: Weimar-era Expressionism, whose shadows and angles built the visual grammar of horror and noir, and the New German Cinema of the 1970s under Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders.
War films range from combat spectacle to anti-war argument, and often try to be both at once. The genre is a reliable index of how a country understands its own history.