This film complements "The Downfall" in putting a human face on the Germans who fought during WWII and the suffering of the people of Dresden during the allied bombing, but it beat the "Downfall" by 47 years!! The problem is that Sirk is a highly underrated director because he shot mostly "melodramas" in the 1950's America, starring the likes of Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman (who was Ronald Reagan's wife at the time!!), so his German films are not even known in America. This is one of them. It's an important film that speaks for the simple people, the common people of Germany, who also suffered on the German side. And the writing credits are not bad, including Erich Maria Remarque who wrote "All Quiet on the Western Front." This film and "The Downfall" should be seen along with "The Fog of War" in which Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the Vietnam War, confesses that if the Germans and the Japanese had won the war, he and his superiors would have been tried for war crimes for ordering the fire bombing of both Dresden and Tokyo during the war. War is hell and everyone --bar none-- on all sides has committed atrocities. McNamara, at 87, has the courage to admit that: "Sometimes you have to do evil to do good," as he put it. "The victor writes history..." he added. Films like "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" and "The Downfall" add a bit of revisionary touch to the cracks in that history...
