At the Imperial War Museum in London, they have a vast, stark-white miniature model of a Jewish concentration camp, complete with train and masses of people herded out of boxcars and into buildings. When I recently visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., I saw a similar white miniature. In this one, however, we are graphically shown the four-step process of the extermination: Jews ushered into buildings, forced to strip, gassed to death, and the bodies finally shoved into ovens.

As emotional exhausting as the rest of the museum is, this piece got to me most. Perhaps it was because it was three dimensional, and brought forth a reality that even graphic B&W photos could not. Perhaps it was seeing the artist's depiction of the Jews in their death throes, crammed in the underground "showers", their faces twisted into Munch-esque screams, and climbing over each other for some non-existent means of escape. Perhaps it was, in the format of the sculpture itself, how the museum showed the killing of millions as a "process", mechanical in it's execution, as the Nazi's themselves must have viewed it. I think it was all of these and even more that I simply cannot convey in words.

So, what in the hell does this have to do with The Dirty Dozen?

Well, in the miniature, the Jews being gassed is shown in a cutaway. Above ground, we see a Nazi soldier placing the gas container into a vent that will dispense it to the underground chamber. This tiny detail jogged something in my memory. As those of you who have seen the film might recall, the ultimate mission of the Dozen is to blow up a French chateau used by the German high command and their wives for R&R. Something goes wrong and the Germans, for their safety, lock themselves into an underground bomb shelter. The remaining of the Dozen barricade the door and toss explosives into all the squat air vents of the shelter. We see those in the bunkers fruitlessly pawing at the vent gratings where the explosives sit and we know they will be unable to do anything to prevent their imminent death.