The Real Inglourious Basterds?
Kim Masters took the week off from Paula Abdul bluff-calling to recount a more immediately fascinating tale from another front altogether: World War II, where her father served on a Jewish commando squad in the British Army known as X Troop. And his surviving comrades admit they never scalped a Nazi -- nor would they have. "We killed people elegantly, without that sort of thing," said one. "Shocking! I mean--really!" said another. Quentin Tarantino's producer Lawrence Bender, meanwhile, stood firm: "Quentin's not trying to de-humanize or make less of real people that did fight. This is purely out of his imagination." Fair enough, but don't even get the Brits started about an intentionally misspelled title. [The Daily Beast]
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During the war hundred of British POWs were murdered by the SS, Hitler's order was to treat them like spies and make them disappear into "night and fog." When the Nazi empire was crumbling, and members of the SS were trying to escape, Churchill ordered the creation of elite units to hunted these Nazis down.
They didn't bring them to trial, they simply put two bullets in the back of their heads and moved on to the next one. I remember watching a documentary where this very pleasant old man told a story, with that wonderful English understatement, about how they liked to use a Czech made car, because it had a compartment that could hide a dead body.
Interestingly, most of the records of these units and about half of the covert operations in WW2 were lost in a mysterious fire in the archives of British Security Coordination at the end of the war.
I'm a bit of a WW2 covert-ops history geek, if you can't already tell. And I know that the war is literally brimming with stories that pretty much outdo Hollywood on many occasions.