Summary
Movies about World War II fall into several categories. These films include action, adventure, period drama, and romance, and their settings and stories are equally diverse, taking place on the front line, in bunkers, foxholes, and even in castles and fortresses.
Spy thrillers are but one of many niche categories of WW2 films, and they’re also some of the best because they can take more fictional licenses than others. Most of what the public knows about spy activity is either pieced together from personal accounts or released centuries later. Movies like these take the focus off the conventional battlefield and tell the obscure and unknown stories of war through espionage.
Updated September 16th, 2024, by Kristy Ambrose:Espionageon many secretive fronts, weak links in the chain of command, and even the old ghosts of medieval politics were important factors in what happened during World War II. Anyone looking at European politics today might see a bit of history repeating. Everyone should see these new and old spy thrillers about this crucial time in history just to get an idea of where a lot of the most important fighting took place; in secret, and mostly unknown.
15Operation Mincemeat
Based On A Real Spy Operation Of The Same Name
Some decisive battles were always in the public eye and have beenthe subject of intense scrutinyfor decades, while others were kept secret and have only been uncovered recently.Operation Mincemeatis one of the latter, and even more interesting is that this story involves some real historical figures. One of them is none other than Ian Fleming, the creator of the character James Bond.
The real Operation Mincemeat was an attempt to feed the German forces false information about the Allied invasion points in Europe. The movie recreates the true story with some dramatic flair, but for the most part, the adaptation is accurate.
14The Eye of the Needle
A Chilling Psychological Thriller
The extreme isolation and persistent silence of the setting is part of what makes this movie so terrifying, never mind that the main character is a dangerous assassin and spy working for the Nazis. Storm Island is only inhabited by a few residents, and there’s only one working radio in a nearby lighthouse.
Henry Faber, also known as the Needle because of his preferred method of killing, is waiting for a U-boat to appear nearby so he can escape from behind enemy lines and deliver a recording of crucial Allied information. What stands in his way are a few of the locals, who only know him as a shipwrecked soldier who they assume is British, but his cover is blown when Lucy, one of the island’s permanent residents, overhears him speaking German on the radio.
13Valkyrie
A Real Plan To Assassinate Hitler
Tom Cruise playsColonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a real historical figure who was stationed in the Nazi stronghold of Tunisia in northern Africa during the war. Several notable figures also share the screen with the Colonel, including Himmler and Goebbels, and the former was part of the plot and issued some of the key orders.
Operation Valkyrie wasn’t the name of the plot to assassinate Hitler, but the idea that the assassins could use the Reserve Army to take control of Germany should anything happen to him. The bomb that Stauffenberg placed in Hitler’s office went off, but the target survived the attempt. Stauffenberg made it through a few checkpoints under the premise that Hitler was dead, but he was caught and sentenced to death by firing squad.
12Shining Through
A Civilian Who Became A Spy
The story ofShining Throughwas a few years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Linda Voss applies for a job with a law firm but ends up working as a translator for the form’s top lawyer instead, a dour fellow named Ed Leland. After a while, she notices some strange behavior on the part of her boss, and Ed reveals that he’s a spy.
Linda doesn’t have much of a background in espionage when she begs Ed to recruit her to help with the war effort. All she has are her language skills and a determination to seek out her lost cousins in Berlin. Aside from the family drama, her mission is to seek information on “flying bombs,” or what a modern viewer would call a missile.
11Soldier Of Orange
A Story of Resistance in Occupied Europe
Movies about the resistance forces in Europe focus on guerrilla warfare and espionage, the main tools left for an army after their country has come under occupation.Soldier Of Orangeis about the Nazi occupation of Holland, the official color of that country being orange, and it’s a story about the battlefield along with life as a spy.
Overall, the story is sad, recalling other war movies likeAll Quiet On The Western Front,which also followed a group of former school chums into the fog of war. Instead of trenches, however, our heroes have to survive fascist student organizations, absentee monarchs, and friendly traitors, and not all of them make it.
10Where Eagles Dare
A Star-Studded Spy Movie
Where Eagles Dareisn’t just a great movie about spies in WW2, it also brokea lot of technical ground. The project was filmed in difficult mountainous terrain on location in Austria and Bavaria and used anamorphic projection lenses, or Panavision, during the filming process. This is comparable to an early version of IMAX, so the setting alone blew a lot of minds.
The plot is thick with intrigue and tells the story of a daring paratrooper operation intended to rescue a person of interest held in a Nazi interrogation center, which happens to be a castle on top of a snowy mountain peak. Aside from the peril of the location itself, there are also double and even triple spies in this operation, making it even more dangerous.
9U-571
The Battle Of The Atlantic
World War 2 was a time when submarine technology was at a whole new level compared to previous conflicts, and the Battle of the Atlantic included several different vessels on both sides. The movie is named after a German U-boat that was crippled during an attack on a British merchant marine ship.
When their distress call is intercepted by the Allies, a team of American spies disguises their own sub as a German supply ship and uses this trick to board and take control of the German U-boat. The goal of the mission is to steal an Enigma machine coding device and fix a damaged U-boat and pretend to be Nazis while doing it.
8Flame & Citron
In The Original Dutch, “Flammen & Citronen”
Known asFlammen & Citronenin its native Danish, this movie is based on real events that took place within the Danish resistance during the years of Nazi occupation. Director Ole Christian Madsen worked on the story for years, partly because he had been obsessed with the story of the resistance since he was a child, and also because he thought the story had been either maligned or overlooked in previous versions.
The main characters are Bent, also known as Flammen, and Jørgen, code name Citronen, both part of the same resistance group fighting the Nazis. The movie isn’t just an espionage thriller, but also a film noir. It’s intended to be a realistic depiction of human relationships as well as wartime when the lines between good and evil aren’t so easily drawn.
7The Exception
A Tale Of Royal Intrigue
For those who also enjoyedSoldier of Orangeand might be interested in more obscure European history involving the scattered royal families, there’sThe Exception. Hardly anyone remembers the Holy Roman Empire or Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, whom the Nazis deposed when they took over the country, and this movie is a fictionalized account of an attempt on his life.
Most of the movie takes place at Huis Doorn, the Emporer’s residence near Utrecht, Netherlands, where he stayed for a few years until 1941. The main characters in the story are actually Mieke de Jong, a spy pretending to be a maid who has a secret mission to assassinate Wilhelm, and Captain Stefan Brandt, the Nazi officer who falls in love with her.
6The Imitation Game
How One Man Broke The Enigma Machine
The scientific fields of cybernetics, electronics, and artificial intelligence owe a lot to Alan Turing, and we haven’t even started on his contributions when it came to beating the Nazis in WW2. Turing’s brilliant mind was instrumental in the cracking of many Nazi codes, giving the Allies a crucial edge when it came to espionage and intelligence.
The Imitation Gameis based on the 1983 biographical novel by Andrew Hodges and includes the early triumphs of Turing during the war, along with his tragic downfall and passing that followed later. Law enforcement of the time viewed Turing’s contributions to humanity as less important than Britain’s “indecency laws,” which are just coded language for any homosexual activity, and their persecution eventually put an end to his work.
