Ep. 10: Why We Fight- The Band of Brothers Holocaust Episode with John Orloff and Ross McCall

It’s been over 20 years since the HBO television series Band of Brothers appeared, but it continues to shape the popular understanding and conception of World War II.  The series is full of powerful episodes but one that viewers consistently single out as particularly moving is Episode 9: Why We Fight.  In this episode, the soldier of Easy Company stumble across a Nazi concentration camp.

Ever since I started this podcast, I have wanted to talk with those involved about the choices made in this episode and what it was like to be involved.  I am incredibly grateful to John Orloff who wrote the episode and Ross McCall the actor who played Jewish soldier Joe Liebgott for taking the time to chat with me about this.

For those interested in the camp depicted in the film was Kaufering IV, a subcamp of Dachau.  You can find a short film from the US National WWII Museum on the liberation of Kaufering here.  If you would like to see actual wartime photographs of the camp at liberation, you can find them here from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

John Orloff is a writer and producer.  He wrote two episodes of the Band Of Brothers series.  More recently, he is the creator, writer, and co-executive producer for Masters of the Air.

Ross McCall is an actor. Beyond playing CPL Joseph Liebgott in the Band of Brothers series, Ross has appeared in numerous feature films and television series.

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman (00:00.914)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the Holocaust History podcast. I'm your host, Whiteman Bourne. And today we have an episode that I've been wanting to do since the beginning of the podcast, because as I said, in my introduction, which most people probably haven't listened to, I like to cover the Holocaust from a variety of perspectives, not just academic, but also popular and cultural.

And so today I'm very, very excited to have on the podcast, John Orloff and Ross McCall, in this case from Band of Brothers, they're also from other things as well. And we're gonna be talking about episode nine of that particular series, which part of the episode involved the liberation of a concentration camp. And I'm just super excited to hear about both the writing for and the process of filming

that particular event because I listened, I watched it again last night. And you know, it sounds like a very sort of silly question, but I kept thinking as I'm watching it, what is it like to be walking around that particular set, doing that particular, doing that particular job? So John Ross, welcome, how you doing?

John Orloff (01:16.824)
Good, thanks. That's a Ross question. I never walked around the set.

Ross McCall (01:19.033)
I'm like John.

Waitman (01:22.394)
Oh, okay. Well, this is another question too, because one of the things that I was wondering was, you know, where does the writing stop and the directing pick up in terms of, you know, how this particular event is portrayed? But before we get, let's maybe start at the very beginning. John, can you tell us, because you actually wrote, I would argue, I mean, I'm partially biased, but two of the most important episodes, right? The...

Ross McCall (01:22.486)
This is true.

Waitman (01:51.102)
The Day of Days, which is the actual drop on Normandy and all of that, but also this one. So how did you get involved in writing these, but this next episode in particular?

John Orloff (01:56.223)
Yeah.

John Orloff (02:02.96)
Well, I got really, really lucky. In the late 90s, I had written a script on Speck about the Shakespeare authorship question of all things, who wrote the Shakespeare plays. And I bet you didn't think that would come up in this conversation. And Tom Hanks had read the script, didn't want to make it, but had me come in to meet with him about maybe writing a different...

Ross McCall (02:19.798)
I was hoping.

John Orloff (02:30.568)
movie for Tom and I had heard about Banda Brothers that he was making it and I was a huge history buff, a huge World War II buff and I just asked him point blank, hey do you need writers for Banda Brothers? If you do I'd love to throw my hat in the ring and Tom was like no we're just going to have this one guy Eric Jenderson write the whole thing but thanks for your interest and we went on talking about other stuff.

And then a couple of months go by and another meeting happens. And, um, Tom just out of the blue just says, Hey, are you still interested in, in writing for band of brothers? And I go, uh, yes. And he goes, Hey, well, you want to write the D-Day episode? And I'm like, uh, okay. And that was about, um, that was in 99, I want to say. So it was only like two or three years after saving private Ryan had made and made, which.

totally changed the face of how we understand World War II as an audience. It's hard if you're a certain age, say my age, to know the difference of how war movies, but in particular World War II movies, were portrayed before Saving Private Ryan as opposed to after Saving Private Ryan. But that D-Day sequence is just amazing. Anyway, so I wrote that episode, went in for my notes meeting.

Waitman (03:51.463)
Yeah.

John Orloff (03:56.572)
He had very, very little notes and he just said, that's great, you want to write another one? I'm like, okay. You want to write the concentration camp episode? Okay. So that's how I got it. And I went home and promptly froze. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think Tom, I'm pretty sure Tom thought I was Jewish when he asked me that, which is not a...

Waitman (04:12.571)
and is that what they did it was called the concentration episode

John Orloff (04:25.776)
a crazy thing to assume, but I'm not. So I always thought that was kind of funny. In any event, yeah, that's how I got it.

Waitman (04:34.81)
And so it comes in a particularly interesting moment in the series. One of the things I kept picking up on, right, which is, you know, I don't have to be the New York Times film critic to pick it up, but you know, that people are starting to question, you know, what are we doing? Why are we here? In a kind of much more theoretical way. I mean, because they obviously know why they're fighting, but there seems to be more of a like,

a need for a reason beyond just that the Nazis are sort of imperialistic conquerors. Right. Um, so how does this, what is the role of this episode, I guess, in the, in the overall arc of the series or what was it supposed to be?

John Orloff (05:07.809)
Right.

John Orloff (05:18.98)
Well, I think it was supposed to be and it is. I mean, it's literally answered by the title of the episode, Why We Fight, which is a callback to the Frank Capra movies made during the war. And it was, I mean, it was intended to be exactly what it is, sort of a tone poem about why all these men had suffered all these

dreadful things in this war and made all these sacrifices and

John Orloff (05:53.576)
And yeah, I think in some ways it's the heart of the show. In some ways, you know, I mean, the show is about so many things, but I think it's a gut punch, this episode. You know? Yeah.

Waitman (06:08.614)
Yeah, I mean, I think, and I like the way that it's, and again, this is a question, right, is when does the writing stop and the directing begin, right, but you probably wrote this as well, the way that it's, when the camp is discovered, we don't really see it. The next thing you see is, is it Briganti running, right? Running back and trying to figure out.

John Orloff (06:32.276)
Yeah, it was always, yeah. I mean, that is a mixture of decent writing and really good directing. I mean, I think we were really lucky with our director on this episode. It was like the right writer, the right director for this particular episode. He had family who had perished in the Holocaust, like close family, like uncles, I think, his father's brothers. And so...

he was really rooted to the material in a really deep way, which I think really helped. But Ross can talk more about that because I, other than a few phone calls, I was never on set. So, and my first draft was pretty close to the shooting draft of that episode. So there weren't a lot of director notes. There were a couple and,

He even tweaked a scene or two himself, which worked out really, really well, changing some dialogue. But there was not a lot of collaboration between me and the director on this episode because everybody was pretty darn happy with the first draft.

Waitman (07:44.978)
When you were writing it, what were the challenges to it? I mean, were there things that you were trying to avoid or cliches that you were trying to avoid?

John Orloff (07:53.92)
You know, you always, I mean, this was a very hard episode, I think, in terms of just the whole show, it was a different episode because...

John Orloff (08:04.504)
There wasn't a lot of information about it. Even the book Band of Brothers, there's only about a paragraph of them discovering the camp. So there weren't a lot of nuts and bolts of, well, what did you do while you were there? Who did you talk to? There was none of that. And when I called up the men, so initially when they said, do you wanna do the concentration camp episode, it's very briefly mentioned in the book.

It's very briefly mentioned in Eric Jenderson's Bible. The reason being, I soon discovered, was the men didn't wanna talk about it, to Stephen Ambrose or to me. So when I called up the guys that I had gotten to know writing episode two, particularly those guys, that were at Braycore Manor, I had a better rapport with, because I'd already interviewed them quite.

quite a bit, so Malarkey, Lipton, Compton, Winters, who else? Anyway, whatever. And so I went to those guys and said, hey, what do you remember about this camp? And basically, all of them said, I don't want to talk about it. They just literally did not even want to have a conversation about anything, except for Dick Winters, who talked to me a little bit about it.

Interestingly, their memories were very vague, very, it was very different than talking to them about Bracor Manor or when the other writers would talk to them about Bastogne or, so it was actually quite difficult. And I would say in the show, it has, it's one of the episodes that leans the most on drama over reality.

Waitman (09:57.405)
Right.

John Orloff (09:58.36)
because we don't entirely know what really happened. And what we do know actually is different than what we show in the episode. In actual fact, Easy Company did not discover this sub camp. But here's what's interesting. They thought they did in 1999. So remember in 1999, there's no internet, right? I mean, or there's just the basic, but you can't check anything on the internet. You can't go.

Waitman (10:17.877)
Hmm.

Ross McCall (10:28.13)
Ahem.

John Orloff (10:28.132)
who discovered Camp Four of, you can't do that. So all we had was the guys, right? Like, and if a guy tells you, if Lipton says, yeah, I remember when we liberated that camp, it's too hard for me to talk about, you believe him. Right? So we didn't know for years and years and years until after Band was made that Easy Company was not the first unit in.

The experience was so enormous on these guys that it felt like to them they were the first people in. Because I think in their memories, all they couldn't remember what day they were in that camp. All they could remember is they went into that camp and I guess it was the next day. So it was still incredibly fresh. And as we know, the prisoners were still in the camp. So for them, the experience was just as

though they had discovered the camp, because in their memories they did in a way.

Waitman (11:32.466)
Well, and this is also one of the really interesting things about the liberation phenomenon in general, right? Which is that, for example, Doc Howe, you have like, you know, several different units claiming they liberated it because I mean, I mean, the liberation of the main camp at Doc Howe, right? You have several different divisions claiming to be the liberators based on whether it was their reconnaissance jeep that pulled up first or whether they were there, you know, dealing with the aftermath, you know, and so this idea of who is a

John Orloff (11:43.024)
And this is part of DACA. This camp is... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Waitman (12:00.994)
in general, right, is this kind of fraught category.

Ross McCall (12:02.798)
Well I think you have to lean in a little bit to what John was saying there too. The men back at that time, regardless, would have walked into that first hand experience not knowing what this thing was. Not knowing who was in there, what it was about. So to them at that particular time, it is the first time they're ever seeing it, the first time it's ever getting talked about. So yeah, I mean I, you know, I go to Dachau maybe three times a year and each time you do go there, there are different stories.

John Orloff (12:29.069)
Wow.

Ross McCall (12:31.842)
But the truth is, everybody had their liberation story. You know, everybody had that moment of walking in and going, what the hell is this?

Waitman (12:39.05)
well it bears mentioning in it probably and you guys probably know but for the listeners you know that only very rarely if ever were american units tasked with liberating camps and so they they've really ever got orders you know advance this location and look so they just came across whatever happened to be in their sector as they were going and so yes so they had you know literally no idea that we've been going to come across a camp much less

John Orloff (12:39.284)
Right.

John Orloff (12:51.088)
Mm-hmm.

Ross McCall (12:58.126)
Absolutely.

John Orloff (12:58.56)
Right.

Waitman (13:08.315)
or like within it, right?

Ross McCall (13:09.774)
But also you also have to remember the amount of camps that were being found as well were hundreds to thousands. I mean these things were popping up left, right and centre. Landsberg, which we talk about in the show, that was a sub camp of I think there were five different versions of the Landsberg borough I guess. So it was like this just insane amount, but again pre-technology you would have no way of knowing that that's happening down here and that's happening here until after you've

John Orloff (13:09.845)
Right. And so.

Waitman (13:39.562)
I mean, yeah, this is the this is the worm's eye view of war, right? I mean, like I always tell people, you know, like if you want to know what happened in the Iraq war, don't ask me. I was a civil student leader. Like I have I have no idea beyond my very small part of the world, you know, what happened. And probably, you know, it's some order interview me many years from now. There's lots of things I've incorporated into my memory that I places I was that I may not have been the same time or whatever. But, you know, it's. It's.

John Orloff (13:52.673)
Right.

Ross McCall (13:52.951)
Bye.

John Orloff (14:04.256)
Yeah, that happens a lot in band too, you know, talking to the guys and, you know, here the story becomes more real than the reality.

Waitman (14:17.294)
Yeah. But then again, sometimes there's, you know, Tim O'Brien, the famous author of Vietnam, you know, said that sort of he was writing about, you know, when is a war story true? And his idea of truth can also be fiction in a certain sense. You know, there is there is an there is an historical truth that's factual, but then there's also an historical truth with the kids these days would call vibes, you know, like sort of like the feeling and the, you know, the

John Orloff (14:27.661)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Waitman (14:44.67)
the way that something appears and it was interesting because you mentioned there with the interviews with this the uh... veterans because when i was watching again last night in the beginning of the epos usually write the beginning of the so it's kind of a teaser of like what you're gonna be seeing in the episode but in the beginning of this episode and i don't know if you chose the interviews are not but they were all basically it was really seem to me as somebody that wrote a book about

Waitman (15:15.262)
that the interview at the beginning was basically, well, these guys are just like us. And we sort of felt a kinship in a certain way with the Germans.

John Orloff (15:24.908)
Well, that is obviously true, you know? And that was, those interviews were picked way later after the show was edited and not by me, I think by Tom, quite frankly. He was really involved with the interviews. And anyway, A, they didn't talk about Landsberg in those interviews really, if at all. And B, it-

Waitman (15:27.165)
Yeah.

Waitman (15:32.957)
Okay.

John Orloff (15:54.232)
The thematic, what was interesting about this episode is it gave me an opportunity as a writer to open things up thematically, to have a larger tableau of issues to talk about. And so for me, what you just brought up was really interesting, right? Like we went into Germany after being in England and France and the Netherlands and the guys.

were actually not that comfortable in England, France, or the Netherlands. It was Europe. These guys were farm boys from Pennsylvania. And at that point in particular, Europe was really Europe. And the cultures were very, very different. They hadn't been Americanized by us. And so they were really uncomfortable in England and France in terms of just dealing with the regular people. The culture was so different. They get to Germany.

And man, it is a middle-class society, very similar to America in a lot of ways. And they were really comforted by that, you know? And they had those feelings of, yeah, I could go hunting with that guy, you know? I could, and then they discover something that makes them understand, no, this society is very, very different. But...

It is also a lens into, well, Nazis don't always look like Nazis. Bad people don't always look like bad people. And the universality of the banality of evil is sort of one of the things that I think the episode touches upon, with the baker and the housewife and...

Waitman (17:43.538)
this is a question that i want to add and i promise we're gonna get really get to roscoe's everyone but i want to hear about you know what it was like on the set and but one of things that i picked up on and again is decided criminality in the episode and at the very beginning you know until we get to the camp were witnessing lots of different kinds of criminality right we have spears we have at nixon you know just throw it breaking in we also have the french uh... soldiers

Ross McCall (17:48.782)
No, I'm fascinated by this. Carry on.

John Orloff (17:57.184)
Yep, absolutely. Well, well read. Yep. With spears. Spears. Yep.

Yep. Being executed. Yeah, executing. Yep.

Waitman (18:13.31)
Germans and so it's almost like there's an idea that you know you're introducing different kinds of criminality but then you're also saying hey wait a second there's a different kind as well

John Orloff (18:17.501)
totally 100%.

John Orloff (18:24.296)
Exactly. There are gradations of, there's a lot of gray in the episode of behavior and what does war do to a person and what kind of crimes, petty crimes does war already sort of create, right? Just in the world of war, you know, you are forced to make those decisions and they're bad, right? Like we can all, you know, talk about, you know, the Mili massacre or

you know, things where American troops have done bad things, but there's bad and then there's really bad, you know. And and I think that's absolutely 100 percent in baked into the script.

Waitman (19:10.726)
yeah and then there's that there's that what we'll talk about i'm sure again but there's a great moment that that's a book ends the episode right where nixon is sort of looting the house and the woman comes out has been clearly been killed and you know she you feel kind of like who and nixon feels like this idea it seems like you know you that he's intruded on the situation he can't get scott doing a bad thing any kind of leaves you know the dog is pretty good about that

John Orloff (19:31.428)
Absolutely.

Waitman (19:37.85)
For some reason I picked up on that last night, you know, the dog is also like sort of condemning him. But then we get to the end of it. Oh, took the dog. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But then we get to the end. And again, it all comes, you have this emotional switch in the viewer, which is, oh yeah, screw that lady. You know, like, like she, you know, like I don't feel bad at all for her. Like, you know, yeah.

John Orloff (19:42.392)
The dog, and remember his wife has taken the dog.

John Orloff (19:55.36)
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, who has the moral high ground now? Yeah, all of that is intentional. All of that is in there for a reason. Interestingly, the house thing is true, but it happened to Dick Winters. He went into a German widow's house and started to just sort of make himself at home. And then...

this woman walked in and without saying anything, Winters left and it's like, okay, I am not welcome here. And I then transposed that to Nixon because I had decided weeks earlier that the episode should be about Nixon. We got to kind of choose our, you know, nobody was telling us what to write. So.

You know, I was like, okay, I'm doing the concentration camp episode. None of the guys will talk to me about it. Who's this episode about and what's the journey, you know? And Ron had been doing such amazing work next to the great Ross McCall that, um, uh, it's like, you know, maybe Nixon is a really interesting way into this episode.

Waitman (21:10.922)
What's a great it's a great if there's sort of a keyword one of the keywords I think is perspective in the episode right because on the one hand you have this perspective on criminality and what's really bad criminality and what's just sort of which again gives us perspective sort of the creeping overall criminality of war itself and the fact that war itself tends to degrade our moral you know boundaries but then you also have you know he's it sounds it sounds kind of cruel I suppose but it puts his life in perspective too

John Orloff (21:15.736)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (21:28.882)
Yeah.

Waitman (21:41.018)
You know, like he's upset that his wife's leaving him, which is awful, and taking the dog and he can't find, you know, that 69 that he likes, but then there's also the camp, you know, and, and are, are things are my, are my issues as bad as sort of larger issues that we're discovering, you know, in the, in the series.

John Orloff (22:02.148)
Right, as you said, it's a matter of perspective, right?

Waitman (22:06.046)
So speaking of perspectives, see this way, that's why I can do this transitions. So what's it like? And this is such a dumb question, but it's like the question at the heart of this whole thing, Ross, is like, what is it like to walk into a concentration camp? I mean, because essentially the actors in this episode really are the only ones that have.

done this obviously it's not a real thing and obviously it's not a hundred percent realistic in that sense but really you're the only ones that have done this since the people did it back in 1945 I mean it because obviously and for good reason this is not something that we recreate you know to experience but there was a justification for you guys experiencing because you were filming it so I mean what it was it like?

Ross McCall (22:56.322)
Well let me start by saying, let me start by saying I think, I think when you ask most people who've watched Banner Brothers, most, but there's a high percentage tend to pick out two episodes of the show. Tends to be episode seven and episode nine. Tend to be the ones that I hear from most people who are, you know, the most engaging, emotional, heartbreaking, heart rendering, real, it's, it's foy, yeah. Yes.

Waitman (23:16.826)
And seven's Bastogne, right? Second, like the one where things really get bad. Takes over and yeah.

John Orloff (23:18.788)
It's the second basstone.

It's when Spears, it's when Spears does the run.

Ross McCall (23:25.342)
Spears and Lipton are running the show and Spears, yes, goes over there. Sure.

John Orloff (23:29.836)
But can I interrupt Ross just one sec because that is my favorite moment in the show and I did not write it. When Spears runs. It's like the epitome of Band of Brothers.

Ross McCall (23:36.842)
Oh, it's magical. It's a magical moment in the show. My point of bringing that up is both episodes are directed by David Frankel. And David had a knack of, and he did nine first and then seven, so we shot out of order, you know, but had a knack of just sort of understanding really what that heartbeat of that particular episode was. And the thing that I've always said about

episode nine, which just stems from the great John Orloff's writing. It's handled so gracefully in a sense of, it's gratuitous in many ways and it's heartbreaking, but it's dealt in such a, it's strange to say the word, but John wrote it with such a kindness in a sense that when you sit down, you can't help but totally just be, you give in to the

into the episode. You just say, I'm here. You don't actually get to the camp until probably about the second act, maybe even the third. It's later on because we are dealing with Nixon, we're dealing with the men. You're talking about various different moments of criminality. I mean, yeah, I mean, I think there's a part where I had decided to smile at the French guys getting executed, you know, and that's a soldier's headspace, you know, and it's like, you know, where's that? And then...

It's funny looking back on it now, you know, I'm goofing around talking about, you know, flash Gordon and God knows what, and all these things are happening within that episode between the men. Um, for them to come across this monstrosity. Yeah. It was a very clever move. Um, the producers had spoken to me early on. I knew that I was going to have a pivotal role in the app. Um, I knew that eight, nine and 10 were primarily lead gods, like big, big.

strong episodes even though he's in every other one.

Waitman (25:30.206)
because for those who earlier listing it may not have picked up on this ross played that joe lee god who was a jewish american soldiers that's why site

Ross McCall (25:37.05)
Right. And I knew I had to speak and translate a lot of German within this as well. So yeah, you know, I'm doing an American accent and, you know, speaking German with that accent and trying to figure out what... So it was a, you know, it was a great piece for myself. But we discussed whether or not I should go and visit one of the memorial sites beforehand. And mutually decided, but I felt very strongly about it, was that I wanted to see what the men saw.

as close to that as possible. So I probably want to hold off going on a memorial site and see this for the first time on camera. That was my adventure. I know a lot of the other guys had their own ways of doing that and whatever, but mine was, I want to be, also when you first see Leap God, you see he's back at the trucks. He's hanging back. He's, I think I'm just smoking a cigarette with somebody. I'm not involved in it until Lipton brings him in and calls him in to translate.

Um, so yeah, seeing it, uh, Hatfield was where we shot the majority of the show a little bit out in the countryside sometimes and some in, in Switzerland, but the majority was all shot in this old disused air base that, you know, we would build the town of Carinthian and then you'd cross a bridge and you'd be in Eindhoven, you know, and then you cross another bridge and they demolish that and then they'd, you know, build another town for us for the next episode. Um, and this was deep in the forest of, of.

of Hatfield. So it was a good kind of mile trek on a douche and a half to get out there. And the day they took us out, and again it was offered, do you want to go see the set? And we said, no, I think we'll wait until the moment. And when you get there, you are again dealing with the highest echelon of greats within our industry. So that boils down to your customers, to your set design, to everything is just...

the best of the best. And we showed up and there was Landsberg. There were cadavers everywhere. There were background artists that they had brought in who were pretty emaciated anyway. That was aided with some makeup. That was aided with a tiny little bit of CGI on certain moments. That was, there was an animatronic at one point.

Ross McCall (28:03.934)
the old gentleman in his son's arms is, you know, an animatronic being controlled off screen to make him twitch. But we were just surrounded by and it was it was burning embers. It was horrific. It did what it was supposed to do. And I remember all of us. You've got to bear in mind, listen, Band of Brothers is an elite.

show in the sense of that trauma bonding that put maybe the 10 main of us through boot camp really solidified that brotherhood. And so there was a lot of goofing around on band. Everybody knew how to take it seriously.

John Orloff (28:48.425)
Also, by that point, you'd been working on the show for what, eight months? But my point is it's not like a normal movie where you're on it for eight weeks.

Ross McCall (28:52.018)
Yeah, been a while. I mean, we shot it just, yeah. I mean, we were, absolutely.

100%. We knew everything. We knew how to, I mean, we could, you know, goof around because we knew as soon as action was called, we were in, we were soldiering, we knew how to reload. We knew everything. You know, we knew how to do what we needed to do. We knew how to soldier. Uh, and so this immediately, as you can imagine, just stopped everything. And it stopped everything in a way of, we were only in the camp. I don't remember the exact amount of days, but it was maybe only four or five days.

We weren't there shooting for a long time, but those four or five days were extremely solemn, extremely respectful in many ways because we're on a Hollywood movie set, but it felt like we were absolutely in a concentration camp. Turrets, towers, barbed wire, chain link fences, guards, no, not guards, sorry, prisoners, just fire pits to huts to, I mean, just unspeakable and unfathomable things.

And you had to shoot a show within this every day. And there's a train carriage at the bottom full of cadavers, just bodies upon bodies upon bodies. And it was just a horrific sight. But what I do say, and again, it goes back to John's writing and it goes back to David's directing, was it was handled with such grace.

I don't think there's anything else that you can watch that's quite like that episode in Banner Brothers. Other concentration Holocaust movies are heartbreakingly real and terrifying and all that, but Band deals with it in such an incredibly gentle way in many ways, so anybody can sit down and watch it and really feel with it.

John Orloff (30:47.688)
One of the things that I actually really am really proud of is you've already mentioned it, that the first half of the episode kind of takes you off your guard as a viewer. You get sucked into this psycho drama of Nixon's. It's kind of funny a little bit. There's a little more dark humor.

in the first 20 pages and you don't know what's about to happen as an audience member any more than the guys do because you don't know this is the concentration camp episode going into episode nine and you still don't for 20 minutes. And so when it hits you, it's a sucker punch. I always say it's a sucker punch. And the other thing that the sort of ancillary of that is when you...

sit down to watch Schindler's List, you've made a commitment to watch a Holocaust movie and your head is in the right frame of mind and you sit down and you go, okay, this is gonna be a tough couple of hours. But when you sit down to watch Band of Brothers, you have not signed up for a concentration camp movie. So a huge amount of people are gonna learn about the Holocaust.

Ross McCall (31:51.697)
this.

Waitman (31:51.826)
Right.

John Orloff (32:14.82)
in not expecting to learn about the Holocaust unknowingly. And I think it works really, really well on that level, right?

Ross McCall (32:18.786)
knowingly, yes, absolutely.

Ross McCall (32:26.707)
That's a much nicer way of putting it than me skirting around. It really is like a very different, yeah.

John Orloff (32:30.376)
No, no, we're just saying different things. We're pointing out different things, you know?

Waitman (32:35.334)
Well, I think one of the things that's really beneficial is the history, that it's not Dachau, it's not Auschwitz, right? And again, this is a Holocaust historian saying this, you know, comparatively, it's not necessarily the worst place in the Holocaust, right? But it's obviously horrendous. And I think that actually makes it more powerful and I think speaks to what you've both talked about in terms of, I think in some ways, maybe what Ross was trying to say.

John Orloff (32:43.704)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (32:52.684)
Right. It's not even a death camp.

Waitman (33:05.178)
in a sense was that it's a little bit understated, but in an appropriate way. You know, you, you don't have like gratuitous sort of, there's no, there's no Nazis there, you know, um, there's no violence that takes place, you know.

John Orloff (33:10.016)
Right.

Ross McCall (33:10.999)
Well, and it's-

Ross McCall (33:15.564)
No.

Ross McCall (33:19.438)
But it's also the same as what John was alluding to there. It's like, when you sit down to watch Schindler's List, that's where you're at. And I think what band or that episode did so beautifully was, it's one of the greatest teachings of the Holocaust in many ways, because you're not jumping in to go, okay, here we go. You're watching something else and then it hits you the way that it was hitting the men. And all of a sudden now you're going, oh my Lord, and you're in it now.

and there's no way you would turn it away from it. Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.

John Orloff (33:49.024)
it's in some ways it's a more visceral, it's a really visceral audience reaction because the reasons we just said, right? You did not walk into the theater planning to do this and the way the episode unfolds is a gut punch, you know?

Waitman (34:06.686)
Well, I think you see that in a way that you don't necessarily see in other shows. I mean, I felt like when I'm watching this episode, that a lot of the actors aren't acting in the sense that, like, I mean, you know, they really are feeling stunned and overwhelmed. And I imagine in my imagination, it's there's a, you know, if there's a

John Orloff (34:19.873)
Right.

Ross McCall (34:29.034)
Well, and that was a tough, that was a hard...

Waitman (34:33.446)
if there's a break in filming everyone just kind of standing around they're not like where was in a different in a different episode they might be as ross mentioned like you know smoking and joking and my imagination this episode if there's a pause in filming or directing they're just kinda like at least in the first day maybe just kind of walking around in a bit of

Ross McCall (34:50.102)
The first few days, it was absolutely that. It was mourning. It was, you would literally, you would sit down and you would be mourning. You would just be, this is unreal, what I'm seeing. And so, look, there was a trick there because we are all relatively well-educated on the Holocaust. You know, my studies into Leibgart, into his faith, and into that world of Joe, I really wanted to delve deeper into

into the Holocaust for that reason and found out even more shocking things. But still you're going in with a knowledge. And so you had to turn that knowledge off because you had to come across like, I feel terrible for this person, but I have no idea why he's here. I'm looking at him and he looks awful. I don't understand. So what is this? You know, tapping into that was the beauty of the writing and the directing.

Waitman (35:49.396)
Well, and yeah, and how did you decide to play Leibgott the way you did? Because another way of playing it, which I think actually would not be as good, is sort of the angry avenging Jewish soldier, sort of, which you don't do. I mean, that would be sort of to me like the C plus, you know, amateur actor is like, I'm gonna be, you know, super angry and sort of vengeful,

You don't choose that. You choose something different.

Ross McCall (36:19.486)
I wanted to humanize him and for me, John mentioned earlier, these were kids. They were kids from a different part of the world and this was so unheard of. You also want to give, I hate talking about such a serious subject matter and then talking about the methods of our acting. But the truth is there's an arc and you have to have an arc and Leibgott finds that anger in episode 10.

You know, that's where that comes again, you know, but yeah, playing that same beat over and over is, is not going to be, you know, it is not going to find the emotions that I wanted to convey. And what I wanted to convey was the every man of going, this is just, not only is this horrific, it's also personal. And why is it personal? Like, how, how can that be? How can this be? You know, anyway.

Waitman (37:15.93)
And did you guys have to like, have to process this? You know, when you're, I don't know, I don't know what the routine is, uh, you know, for being a big time act. I don't know if you go sort of hang out after filming or whatever, but you know, it was this a situation where you sort of had to like, you sat down and thought with each other or talk with each other, you know, gosh, like, what was that like? You know, this was amazing or this was terrible or how did you, how are you dealing with this?

Ross McCall (37:39.45)
Yeah, I mean, of course there was moments that I mean, again, we had read the script, we had a table read. I don't know if you were there or not, John, I can't remember you, and we did a table read in one of the tents, you know, one of our dressing tents, and we all sat there. So we knew what was coming on paper, you know, on paper, we knew what was coming. And so...

John Orloff (37:50.985)
Nope.

Ross McCall (38:06.538)
A lot of those conversations were perhaps happening beforehand because we were also in research mode. I was inundated with facts and horrible things that we had to talk about and deal with and whatever. That was already there. So by the time we got to work, it was about, okay, how do we tell this story in the best way possible to honor the script that we've been given?

to another direction of someone like David who had such a personal investment in this himself. I know he had a hard time when we were shooting because it was so real.

Waitman (38:47.954)
I mean, that's one of the things that, again, I just, watching it and realizing on the one hand that these are other people, like normal people who are portraying, for example, concentration camp inmates. I mean, imagine that, you know, they're extras or whatnot, but I mean, even for them, it must've been like a very, what an amazingly difficult and complex role to play, even if it's a non-speaking sort of inmate role.

John Orloff (38:48.292)
All right.

Ross McCall (39:15.458)
Well, there's something that the producers of the show, I've always said was a genius stroke. The fact that you have Tom, you have Steve and we had Tony Toh, who's our Boots on the Ground producer at that point, Meg Lieberman who cast it and Captain Dye who was our military advisor, him and the cadre. I've always said that group of people by putting us in a boot camp by...

you know, keeping us all away from our trailers and hanging out together in between setups and in between and kind of living together for a year that really created such a bond between the majority of the men, you know, obviously there's different sections of that, you know, there's, you know, there's like 10 of us and then there's maybe another 30 around that and another 50 around that. But, you know, everybody was close, but what they did was I never saw, I never saw a German soldier the entire time until we were...

like shooting. I never saw a prisoner until we were there. We never saw anything outside of what we were supposed to be doing. I rarely saw the members of the public until we were shooting at the beginning of episode nine. So it was a very clever way of just keeping everything separate. So everybody going in, and again, I can't answer for the folks that came in and played the prisoners because...

I have no idea what they'd be going through, but I'm sure it was a big conversation. But everybody was kept apart until the cameras were rolling.

Waitman (40:47.402)
And I think this is one of the interesting things, again, we talked a lot about reactions, whether it's the actors reacting to the scene that they're portraying or the actual soldiers themselves. And I think maybe John, you can speak to this a little bit, the way that you wrote O'Keefe's character into this episode, right? Because he's the new guy, the FNG, we would say, right? Who shows up and like, nobody gives him the time of day, though, who's it, is it Lutz? Kind of is nice to him a little bit, right?

John Orloff (41:04.26)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (41:14.852)
It's Perconti. Oh, yeah. It's Perconti who's giving him a really hard, it's Perconti who keeps not saying his name right.

Waitman (41:17.766)
But, you know, but he's kind of the new guy with no...

Waitman (41:24.234)
That's right. Yeah, the guy who we see, he's at the 30 cal guard post with. And he gets sort of a hard time, but it's almost like, maybe this is just me looking at it, but it's almost like he becomes a veteran at the camp.

John Orloff (41:28.861)
OP. Yeah. He's at the OP and

John Orloff (41:41.212)
Oh, completely, completely. And that guy's real. O'Keefe is a real guy and one of the few guys who would talk to me about Landsberg because he hadn't been so bruised by Bastogne. He came in after Bastogne as a soldier in Easy Company. And so he didn't have those horrible, horrible combat experiences that the other guys did.

So he was razed a little bit. I might have made that bigger than it was. I can't remember exactly how much he was razed. But I'm pretty sure it was my idea to keep on calling him different names until the very end of the episode when Perconti calls him O'Keefe. For the whole episode, he's called him different things. O'Brien, O'this, O'that. And then after the camps,

They call him O'Keefe because yeah, he had his own combat experience without combat, you know, and he was one of the guys now, in a superficial way at least. Yeah.

Waitman (42:57.63)
Well, but I mean, I think it's more than superficial, right? Because one of the themes throughout Bender Brothers is this rites of passage theme, right? Like, were you there for T'koa? Were you there for... Yeah.

John Orloff (43:06.088)
Yeah. Yeah, but you were a Toccoa guy or you weren't. There is always gonna be, if you were a Toccoa guy and you're not.

Waitman (43:13.974)
Right, even Webster gets that when he comes back, right? And he's not.

John Orloff (43:16.544)
Yeah.

Ross McCall (43:18.058)
That's, that still happens in real life. If they didn't go to bootcamp, there's a thing. You know, it's still like... Eh! Heh heh

John Orloff (43:20.397)
Yeah.

Waitman (43:22.266)
Yeah. You know, I mean, but I think that it's interesting that, you know, we talk about now, we talk about moral injury as a thing that soldiers often encounter, right? Which obviously happens in World War II. We just don't have the words for it. You know, but in that sense, it is sort of like a psychological combat that O'Keefe is experiencing. And you sort of, he, you know,

John Orloff (43:26.512)
Heheheheh.

Waitman (43:50.642)
without putting too fine a point on it, it's almost like he grows up exponentially years in that, because he's even sitting like a soldier would be sitting after combat, with the helmet off, kind of sitting on the hill there. But obviously he hasn't fired his weapon, but he's.

John Orloff (43:57.549)
Yeah.

John Orloff (44:02.712)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (44:07.78)
Well, and remember, he's also key in that beat you both have brought up when the French soldiers execute the POWs. That's really playing off of O'Keefe horrified and Liebgatt and whoever else is sitting next to him just shrugging it off. The beat only works if both of those exist, right? If O'Keefe's naivete is counter-pointed.

by Liebgott's sort of brushing it off as just another day at the office.

Waitman (44:45.478)
yeah i mean i think i think it works really well there because i a and it you know it took me a couple watching to pick up on the there there's crime of varying amounts continuing you know throughout the episode but then you know you get to it you get to the camp period and it's there's clearly you know this is clearly worse and one of things that i think i have a question about you know that with his with regard to nixon

Waitman (45:14.958)
in his detail the first couple of times, you know, many years ago when I watched it, is that they only go to the camp that really that one time, right? And then they hand it over to the armored division to take care of it. But actually, then you have to ask the question, well, how does Nixon get back there? And it's because he intentionally makes an effort to go back and see it again. And I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that choice, you know, why

John Orloff (45:39.104)
And in.

Waitman (45:44.515)
Why does he, why do you have him do that?

John Orloff (45:46.912)
Well, from his perspective or my perspective, from my perspective, he goes back because I want him, I wanna finish the note of the public culpability in all of this, right? The German culpability. He becomes a witness of the housewife who shamed him, right? He then becomes a witness.

Waitman (46:03.186)
He becomes the witness for that.

John Orloff (46:15.96)
to her being shamed. The reverse of that moment in the house is the moment in the camp where she's burying the bodies and she looks up and she sees the guy that had so rudely invited himself into her house. And so that payoff was there. And I wanted to, as somebody who was just writing the script, I wanted to show

the relationship between the villages and the camp, that's why there's the whole Baker beat. How could you not know, didn't you smell it? I am in the firm belief, kind of, I guess, like you, I have not read your book, that the culpability is very wide in German society for the Holocaust. Not just the bad guys. I think there's a wider.

And so I wanted to explore that, right? So that's what the Baker is doing there. And then that's why Nixon goes back to see the villagers also coming firsthand with the crimes that they were part of. And Nixon goes back, I think, because, you know, he has heard that this is happening.

that these camps are being cleaned up. And I think he just wants to go and sort of put a period in it himself, his own sort of trying to understand what the fuck did he see, and who are these people that did that. And he wants it from a character standpoint, he wants it ingrained, because I don't know if you notice, he turns down a clean-ac, a handkerchief to...

keep the smell at bay.

John Orloff (48:17.14)
And again, remember the episode is really about Nixon. So it has to end on Nixon. Nixon has started the episode, if you take out the frames, Nixon's in a place of really doubting way more than some of the other guys, what the fuck he's doing there. And we first see Nixon, he's just come back from Operation Varsity, which was not a successful mission. And...

He was in fact in a C-47 that blew up and he was in fact one of two or three people who got out of there alive. And so those are also sort of like, what am I doing here? Why did those 20 guys die? And so it's all part of a piece. It's all one story in the end.

Waitman (49:16.018)
well it's great to because it it's an individual allusion to eisenhower's whole reaction to the holocaust which was basically you know i personally i'm gonna give is these places so that no one can ever say this didn't happen but also you know he made a kind of a policy is as you show with taylor you know that we're gonna put as many people through this as well as i think in some ways soldiers to uh... you know if you could see it to see it you know so that

John Orloff (49:27.748)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Waitman (49:45.386)
But it's much nicer to see a character do that than just to have it as a general policy, right? Which I think...

John Orloff (49:48.457)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (49:52.)
And there's no, it's again, it's just so beautifully directed. And also we cannot, we cannot say enough about Michael Kamen, the composer who composed the whole show, which was not something that normally happens. Normally like a big deal composer like Michael Kamen, who sadly died five or seven years after band, but he was at the top of his game when he made band, one of the most in demand.

Ross McCall (50:01.595)
Hmm.

John Orloff (50:20.92)
feature score writers in the business. And he also had an, I think it was an uncle or two, and he was Jewish who served in the war. And he might've lost some people, he might've lost some family as well, Michael. And my point is he wrote the whole music from beginning to end of Band of Brothers.

Ross McCall (50:36.898)
Thank you.

John Orloff (50:47.916)
which again, normally doesn't happen. Normally the big guy comes in and he writes the theme song and then somebody else writes all the other music. But the music in episode nine is really good. And it is part of the episode and the music, as he's in that, because there's no dialogue when Nixon revisits the concentration camp. And for me, if you're a filmmaker,

and you can convey a lot of information and a lot of emotion without any dialogue, oh, that's a good day. That is a good scene. And yeah, there's basically no dialogue in that last two minutes of him at the camp. And yet you as the audience know so many things that is being said without it being said or being discussed thematically without us telling you what to think.

Ross McCall (51:43.821)
Hmm.

John Orloff (51:44.284)
And I think the music is a huge help in that sequence in particular. And then music is important to this episode because of the setup of Mozart versus Beethoven. And that's important for a couple of different reasons. But mostly it's because, you know, the culture that gave us Beethoven gave us the Holocaust. And what do we do with that as human beings? Like...

Waitman (51:54.642)
The violin is at the beginning and.

Waitman (52:12.522)
I mean, I was going to ask this about sort of your influences upon you of other films about the Holocaust. Because one of the things that popped into my head immediately was the scene in Schindler's List during the ghetto clearance where there's an SS guy playing the piano. And of course, at the same time, they're shooting people and everything else. And the two SS guys come in and they are leaning the door and the guy's like, uh, Beethoven. And the guy's like, no, Beethoven.

And then Nixon does the same thing. Nixon corrects them at the end. And he has.

John Orloff (52:44.972)
Well, Germany was and is, was an incredibly cultured country. You know, I mean, they took their conductors very, very seriously. Furtvangler and Herbert von Karajan was actually a Nazi. And classical music was a huge part of German culture, still in the 30s and the 40s. And yeah, I just, I mean, all the great, you know, I'm a huge classical music fan. So.

I wasn't, I don't think, I have to this day only seen Schindler's List one time. The one time I saw it in the movie theater. I do not love those kind of movies as an audience member. They're very hard on us, the audience, you know? So I have not revisited Schindler's List. So if there is that similarity would only be coincidental, you know, because I think thematically it...

It is a weird thing. Goethe, Beethoven, these humanists, these really artistic humanists that really are at the birth of German culture and the Holocaust. I mean, it's like, how do these things, how do they exist in the same world?

And I guess to me, in some ways the episode is, well, none of us are above a Holocaust. I don't think it's explicitly stated in the episode because I'm not sure that was where my head was when I wrote it, but I certainly think in the ensuing 20 years, we can say, yeah, it doesn't really matter what culture you're a part of. We can all do really, really.

culturally bad things and even this incredibly rich, liberal, artistic, self-aware culture, the home of Freud and all these things, the culture that created all this great Western thinking created the most evil, mechanized, killing process imaginable.

Waitman (55:13.422)
Yeah, I mean, and.

John Orloff (55:13.748)
And are they part of the same? Can you have one without the other?

Ross McCall (55:19.274)
Well, I've always questioned, like, you know, when I think about anything that pertains to exactly what we're talking about is, you know, and it was sort of asked by the veterans at the beginning of the show, you know, that whole thing of could we have been friends? And we probably could, because the thing that's always sort of spun my wheels a little is, was every person involved what you would call personified evil?

Waitman (55:19.402)
I mean, and then, yeah.

Ross McCall (55:47.85)
You know, was there a soldier going home at night who was a good husband, a good father? Probably. A German soldier was vastly different from a Nazi soldier. You know, in Naziism, when it came, when it came in, Germany had gone through, you know, a horrific downfall in their country. You know, they were burning, you know.

money to stay warm at one point, there was no bread on the table. And then all of a sudden power came in, people started having food on the table, people started going on vacations again, commerce had built back up. And there were these families, you know, going away on vacation and did they know what was going on down the street? I'm pretty sure a lot of them did. And it was that thing of, do you speak up and will you be vilified or do you, you know, what you don't look at doesn't hurt you. And I think, you know, I don't know if you've seen a zone of interest, you know, but that's.

John Orloff (56:39.552)
Yeah.

Ross McCall (56:40.706)
That was the first film that I've seen, you know, where I've gone, oh wow, they're really trying to show that, you know, a lot of these guys were what you would call normal men that were going out and doing unspeakable evil acts and then coming home and kissing their wife and taking their kids to school. I mean, it's just, you know, it's something that, and I think John sort of touched on that a lot with the old lady in the house, or young lady, I should say, I should call her old. But you know, that,

and the baker and everybody just keep to their lane and if they don't look over here then it's not happening.

Waitman (57:14.982)
well i think the point is made it ross it's super important uh... you know i always say this when i'm teaching or talking anybody is that ninety nine percent of nazis are not psychologically abnormal human beings now they're not that associate past they're not they don't lack the capability to empathize it said earlier you know they are they are you know psychologically normal people ready to be a culture as different ways and i think you know it for me at least and again you know i'm probably not the target audience for the episode but you know

Ross McCall (57:25.524)
Right.

John Orloff (57:25.793)
Right.

Ross McCall (57:28.29)
I'm just frightened to think, but yeah.

Waitman (57:43.558)
I'm thinking that Baker supplied bread to the concentration camp, guaranteed, to the Germans at least, to the guards. I mean, you're in a very small town with a small sub camp next door. The guards lived in that town. The camp bought its stuff from that town. Even if you look at the company that built the ovens, eventually for Auschwitz, it started out because they were a crematorium firm in the town where Buchenwald was.

John Orloff (57:48.544)
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

John Orloff (57:55.668)
Yeah.

Waitman (58:13.558)
camp. So like, you know, the camp needed an oven and there was, right? So I'm thinking, you know, exactly right. And Webster is an interesting character in the whole episode, right? Because he's like, he's sort of like the educated guy. And he's, you know, he's screaming off the back of the truck in the beginning. The exact opposite to John's point, which is also valid about, you know, how cultured they are, but he's also like you pathetic, servile scum, you know, and that's also, I think in some ways setting up this dichotomy.

Um, or maybe it's not an icon, which is the larger, more important point, you know, is that, is that there isn't necessarily anything ennobling about being artistic, um, you know, it doesn't mean you can't be a horrible, a horrible person or a horrible culture, you know, just because you did these things, it's not a pass, um, if that makes sense. Um, and, and Ross, I wanted to ask a question cause you mentioned this earlier. Um, you know, it.

John Orloff (58:59.092)
Exactly.

Waitman (59:13.934)
what's what it's another actors due to sort of prepare because you said you know i'm not going to go to a camp i'm not gonna in necessarily go into that that's what exhibition space and did other people decide to do differently or

Ross McCall (59:28.922)
I don't know, would be my quick answer. You need to ask them. I don't think so. I don't think there was anybody disappearing over the weekend. I think a lot of people also during that episode realized how pivotal it was for Leap God's character. And so it was sort of left alone in a strange way. It was sort of like, you know, allowing me to go and find that.

Waitman (59:30.012)
Okay.

Ross McCall (59:55.79)
in a strange sense. So it was, everybody was affected the same as I was when we were actually on, it's weird calling it a set, you know, because that's really what it was. They built a set, but I mean, it was just so realistic. It was a camp. And so everybody had a very, very solemn, you know, few weeks having to deal with it.

Waitman (01:00:20.042)
And when you said that the director sort of filmed it with grace, what do you mean? Because for someone that's not in that environment, how does that...

Ross McCall (01:00:27.328)
What I'm saying is it's sort of what we're touching upon, like what John's saying about Shinra's List where you're going in and it's just like, it's just, you know, it's hard hitting now. Of course, Episode 9 is hard hitting, but it's, I've never seen anything like Episode 9 when it comes to showing anything of the Holocaust because it's dealt with, you know, again, it's, it's easing you into something you're not sure you're about to see. Then of course it, you know, it sucker punches you and it...

but what it does is it makes you sit there and watch. So that's what I mean by handling it with grace. It's like this episode.

John Orloff (01:01:00.636)
I also think it has the advantage, Ross, of Holocaust movies center around characters that are experiencing the Holocaust firsthand, right? I mean, they're in the Holocaust. And that's not the case here, right? The characters that we are watching and falling in love are observing the Holocaust, you know? And we are observing them observing

Ross McCall (01:01:15.246)
Mm. Sure. Yeah. Right.

John Orloff (01:01:30.156)
the Holocaust, which I think also, it is a form of grace in a artistic sense in that it allows us to be really, really devastated and moved, but one layer back from it, because again, we're participating in it with our characters as observers, if that makes sense.

Ross McCall (01:01:58.77)
Yeah, you're not seeing anybody get...

John Orloff (01:02:00.216)
This episode is not about the Croatian that's bald who is the only person who really talks to Winters, explaining what the camp is, right? This is not about his Holocaust experience, which is just a different narrative way to talk about the Holocaust.

Waitman (01:02:20.262)
Well, I think it's again, as someone who, you know, I've watched a lot of Holocaust films and I think what's interesting about this one too, is that often if ever when liberators show up, they're sort of the end that's, you know, the end of the, of the story. And then the liberator show up even in the history itself, you know, even in survivor testimonies about the Holocaust, you know, they will often, and then the liberator show up and we were liberated. And then that sort of draws a line under the entire experience.

John Orloff (01:02:34.709)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

John Orloff (01:02:41.461)
Yeah.

John Orloff (01:02:50.347)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (01:02:50.874)
Um, but one of the things that we've learned, and I think we learned even from what you told us today is that, you know, liberation is a, is a two way street in the sense that it also impacts the people doing the liberating, um, you know, and is another form of sort of, again, sort of the psychological moral injury. And you see it, what, what makes it, I think, particularly powerful in this sense is, um, because we've been watching band of others for

seven eight episodes by this point we know the people and that as you point out then it then it makes it makes the experience even more visceral because we can imagine I've been forgetting the entire time that the name of the sergeant who's like the big country boy yeah random it yeah there's that there's that's just that one shot of him just sitting there right and you have this like giant guy

John Orloff (01:03:37.405)
Randleman? Bull Randleman?

Ross McCall (01:03:43.502)
spoken to subscribe to our channel.

John Orloff (01:03:45.112)
He can't process. Yeah. Yep. Who's been a tower, he's been a tower of dependability and just he can do anything. Bull can do anything, right?

Waitman (01:03:48.777)
who throughout the series, he's like the, yeah.

Waitman (01:03:57.434)
yeah he gets to anything he's the big tough guy you know water goes right off his back and you know again it's i think it's also a great example of the writing in the directed where you know it's just that one shot for like a couple seconds of him just sitting there like what like what i do like what is this

Ross McCall (01:04:13.694)
And that's the difference. That's the difference between the show and anything else that has covered the Holocaust for me. And that goes back to where I say it lands gracefully for me because it's not, you're not watching a guard shoot a prisoner. You know, we already know the horrors of the concentration camp. We know that as educated people and what the show does so beautifully.

John Orloff (01:04:26.408)
Mm-hmm.

Ross McCall (01:04:35.634)
is it shows you a complete, it shows you how you would feel seeing that. And it's what, it just goes to what John's saying. You're not seeing it from the Croatian or the Jewish prisoners point of view. You're seeing it from our point of view. You're seeing it from the audience. You're going in and going, oh my God, this is just, this is not what I was, oh my Lord. And then you can't, you can't take your eyes off it. I mean, that's the other thing. You can't, you can't look away from episode nine. Can't look away from the show, but.

John Orloff (01:04:40.896)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:05:02.918)
one with your with your character leave you get that you because you get a very you know in case in case the audience have been asleep for the first eight episodes and you get that very clear the very clear signification that you're jewish cuz you're like i'm gonna go back home and i have like a much a jewish kids you know in brooklyn et cetera so we know that right

Ross McCall (01:05:19.784)
I'm in a fight at the beginning about being a Jew, of course, it's like it's a whole thing throughout.

Waitman (01:05:22.662)
yet so we know that right and so then that ads the moment for me that's that i think is actually the most powerful in terms of lead dot stu ishness as a character experiencing liberating a camp is the moment when you're told to tell that they have to go back in right because that's a moment absolutely happened in lots of different situations for all the reasons that the script shows great with that with the medical doctors is that the way but it's

It's that moment that we all know would be difficult for anybody. Um, but it's particularly difficult for your character because it hits you in a place that's unique to you, or at least amongst most easy company people who aren't Jewish, right? You're, that's, that's one place I, it seems in the, it seems in the way that it's portrayed.

you're feeling you're taking it personally in a way that another person asked you that wouldn't be.

Ross McCall (01:06:20.298)
Of course, and then that, look, that fell on Liebgarten because he was a translator, right? So I mean, that could have gone away any other German speaking man in easy, you know? But it fell on Liebgarten. That's why even before Rezai, I can't tell him that. You're crazy. That's why, and you've got to. Okay, here we go. You know, just seeing the devastation. But yeah, it just humanizes everything.

I think in that episode from that moment. Because you just see what it does to a soldier. We're talking about bull, we talk about malarkey in the camp. Have you ever seen anything like this? No. Webster, no. All the men just, what is this? What do we do with this? This is not, we don't know this. And just that confusion. Yeah.

John Orloff (01:07:10.744)
They don't know how to process it. Literally, what is this place?

Ross McCall (01:07:15.486)
What is it? How is it? How did this come to be? And who are they? And then we find out who they are. But that still doesn't make any sense. Why? You know, and it's just those questions.

Waitman (01:07:25.118)
Well, and this is a place where the script, I think, also does a good job. Now that you mention it, right? Because when they're asking what kind of a place is this and like the, the prisoner is kind of like, it's a, it's a prison camp. Um, and then the guy says, oh, are these people prisoners like criminals? Right. Because that's the only way that somebody who's unfamiliar, you can see of why you might be clearly, you must've done something to be, to be put in this place.

Ross McCall (01:07:40.778)
Yeah, Nixon asks, they're criminals. For pressure.

John Orloff (01:07:46.613)
Exactly.

John Orloff (01:07:50.292)
And one of my actually favorite lines in that scene is kind of a throwaway when he says, the woman's camp is down the rails.

Ross McCall (01:08:01.25)
Is it the next railroad stop?

John Orloff (01:08:02.592)
Yeah, the next railroad stop, you know. That's where you go, oh. And it's almost a throwaway line, but it just has so much meaning, you know.

Ross McCall (01:08:08.446)
Yeah.

Ross McCall (01:08:12.618)
Because there's way more to this. It's like, this is not, because again, we're walking in, going right back to the beginning of our conversation. We're walking in going, is this the first thing? Is this the only thing that we know looks like this, right? Oh no, it starts and it starts and it starts and it's gonna go on and on and on. Yeah.

John Orloff (01:08:15.126)
Right.

John Orloff (01:08:26.218)
Right.

John Orloff (01:08:32.544)
Yeah, and then and then there's the scene where, you know, Winters is explaining about Taylor and they found all of these camps. The Russians found bigger ones, you know, blah, blah. So then we have the context of the wider. Machine that the Nazis created.

Ross McCall (01:08:41.305)
Yeah.

Waitman (01:08:49.126)
yeah i mean it again i think it's a really i mean it's almost in addition you wouldn't want to do this but i mean i could show that as a standalone episode about liberation about the liberation experience you know i think you know it's

John Orloff (01:09:02.448)
Oh, I think you totally could. Yeah, I think it is used that way in some instances. Yeah, they do. Although I get a lot of shit, I have to tell you, I get a lot of shit because of the sex scene in the beginning. So to lighten the show up for a second. So when we started to write this, when we started to work on this thing, all the writers, we called ourselves the band of writers. We became super tight. It was actually kind of weird because it wasn't a TV.

Ross McCall (01:09:06.099)
People do use it that way, yeah.

Waitman (01:09:07.514)
Yeah, I mean, it's just quite, it's quite good there. And again, I think I.

John Orloff (01:09:32.044)
show in any way, the way we made it is not how you make a TV show, including in the writing department. Normally you have a writer's room and you all get together and I don't even know what that process is because I've never been part of it. In this show, there is no writer's room. Technically, we didn't have a head writer. We had Eric, who was the first writer and knew more than anybody else.

but in the chain of command, he wasn't like my boss. You know? And we all become friends really, really quickly. And we all said, oh yeah, we gotta, you know, I hate that there's no sex in the, you know, these guys are getting laid all the time. We gotta have sex in this thing. We've gotta have sex. Okay, we all agreed we're gonna write sex scenes. I was the only one who did that.

Waitman (01:10:21.885)
Heh.

Well, and you actually did too. There was like an attempted sex scene, which is really interesting too. At the beginning, you know, which is, which is a whole nother, I mean, it, you know, it plays into that criminality thing, you know.

John Orloff (01:10:28.616)
Yes, yeah, exactly, I did too. I did too.

Well, it is part of the story. It was not gratuitous, actually. I bring it up only because I've heard complaints that people think about showing that school in high schools or whatever, and there's this fucking nude scene that they get all upset about.

Ross McCall (01:10:47.638)
Well, I think all the actors were just upset because none of us got that scene. Some new kid came in and you gave him, yeah. And you gave him the scene and we're like, really, really John? Nine months. Nine months we've been. Ha ha ha.

John Orloff (01:10:52.544)
Yeah, exactly. Tom Hardy, right? That, uh.

John Orloff (01:11:01.236)
Yeah, yeah, I've seen your ass Ross. It wasn't gonna make it. Hehe

Waitman (01:11:06.168)
I was gonna say now, is that a thing where you're like, I really wanna do a sex scene or, I mean.

Ross McCall (01:11:10.934)
No. I mean, you know, I think that.

John Orloff (01:11:11.772)
No, I mean, no, it was originally, no, it was originally, you know, but there were gonna, I mean, we talked about it. I did, but I didn't do it gratuitously. I did it to talk about fraternization and the idea that we were so comfortable with the Germans that we loved fucking them, you know? I mean, that was happening a lot. Oh, totally, yeah, it's a great Spears moment.

Waitman (01:11:26.54)
Well, it also does a great job of...

Waitman (01:11:34.858)
But I think it also does a great job of highlighting spears because the guy walks in, he's like, I give a shit that you're having sex with a German. I just, did you have on myself that I'm looting? You know, like, it's just like.

John Orloff (01:11:42.184)
Yeah. I love that moment. Yeah, it's so well directed. It's so well directed. And I love the Spears arc in this episode actually. He's just kind of there and it's always a little funky. The lighter beat where he just kind of looks at the lighter and then throws it back to, I can't remember if it's Perconti or Randleman or.

Ross McCall (01:11:42.71)
Such a great moment. Yeah. Where's my stuff over here? That's so great.

Waitman (01:12:01.587)
Bye!

Ross McCall (01:12:08.334)
for a co, you know?

Waitman (01:12:09.81)
I mean, he's one of those guys that, again, this isn't necessarily related, but I mean, you know, he starts out with this allegation, we'll leave it at that, right? That he like murdered a bunch of POWs. Yeah, so like, you know, yeah. Exactly. And so like, you know, he's not a great guy. He's not a guy that you want to like...

John Orloff (01:12:20.5)
Oh, it's not an allegation though. It happened. I mean, in the show, it's an allegation. In reality, he killed those POWs.

John Orloff (01:12:33.384)
You know, I have, it's really, I mean, you've got, God, you've brought up a huge issue. I don't know what to do with that, actually. You know, because Spears is a great warrior and his post-war career is really interesting. And...

John Orloff (01:12:55.424)
And yet he killed a group of POWs. Yet what was he supposed to do with them? He was, I don't know, it's very complicated. Ross, you want to help me out here?

Ross McCall (01:13:09.814)
Nope.

Waitman (01:13:10.07)
Hahaha!

Waitman (01:13:13.61)
I mean, I'm only speaking professionally. You know, you just can't kill prisoners. It's not a thing you can do. No, but what's interesting is it's...

John Orloff (01:13:21.824)
No, no, you can't. And he's not the only one to have done it, by the way, in Easy Company. No, in Easy Company, there's a couple of things that we sugarcoat.

Waitman (01:13:31.058)
But I suspect that the SS, killing an SS guy after Bastogne hits differently. I mean, it's still wrong, but then killing regular German soldiers during the Normandy drop, right?

John Orloff (01:13:42.916)
Mm-hmm.

I, listen, I'm just saying I don't know what to do with it. You know?

Waitman (01:13:51.09)
But I mean, it's, you know, ultimately, right? It's, again, it's a great part of the story because, you know, as I always say, I have an issue with the idea of the greatest generation as sort of a generic commentary, right? Because I sort of feel like they were really, really great in some ways. And also they were a generation that has its own problems, just like every single generation does, you know? Like everyone likes to bag on the millennials, but you know, like...

John Orloff (01:14:15.352)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (01:14:20.338)
for the past 20 years that we were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, those were the kids that were volunteering to go fight that fight too, right? So Spears is a good example of that. On the one hand, he's a complex character. And I suspect as both a writer and an actor, you much prefer a complex character than sort of a person who's just 100% a caricature of one direction.

John Orloff (01:14:28.056)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (01:14:45.32)
True story, Spears didn't have anything to do with the book or the show. He was alive, wouldn't talk to any of us, didn't talk to Steven Ambrose, and was invited to the premiere in Normandy and came to the shock of everybody, especially the writers. And apparently, he was not going to come. I don't know.

If you know the story Ross, do you know this? He had told Dick he was not going to come to the premiere because he was worried about being arrested for war crimes.

Ross McCall (01:15:17.132)
I know.

Ross McCall (01:15:25.206)
Wow.

Waitman (01:15:26.974)
Whoa.

John Orloff (01:15:29.032)
And, you know, Dick convinced him to come. And so he came. But he was worried about being arrested by the French.

Ross McCall (01:15:38.492)
Wow, I did not know that.

Yeah, there was still, I remember in episode 10, there was a whole thing that we were going to do when Leifgort gets sent up to kill the Commandant. And there was the, the rumour was he was instructed to do so by Spears. And I think by that point, when 10 was getting shot, like whispers had already started been happening of did these things happen? Did they not? People are going to be upset? Are they not? And so we exnade the, the

John Orloff (01:15:56.536)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (01:16:11.32)
Mm-hmm.

Ross McCall (01:16:12.034)
the order coming from Spears. I mean, I think I say it in the scene, but we were certainly gonna be exploring it beforehand, and it was decided no, best just to, just go. Just go do it, and we'll sort of allude to the fact that Spears gave you the order to do it. So, wow. That's a dark story.

John Orloff (01:16:31.807)
Yeah, it's pretty intense, right?

Waitman (01:16:32.928)
We're all just kind of nodding and shaking our heads. Yeah, I mean that's...

Yeah, well, I had to, yeah, great. Before I let you go, I promised John that I was not gonna talk about Masters of the Air, so I'm not really, with the exception of just a moment perhaps, because the Holocaust does appear in the series, sort of briefly. I'm up to date, so I'm up to episode.

John Orloff (01:16:42.26)
So there you go.

John Orloff (01:16:55.361)
Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (01:17:00.396)
Have you watched the whole thing?

Okay, because some people got advanced screens because we do revisit it in episode nine, in our upcoming episode nine.

Waitman (01:17:08.518)
Yeah, no, I'm only up to, yeah, okay, so I'm only up to basically where they pass in the night, where the POWs are passing a train. And how does that play in? And why did you decide to write that in the way that you did?

John Orloff (01:17:15.428)
It's yeah, yeah. There's a, yep.

John Orloff (01:17:30.604)
Very much, yeah, I mean, that was very intentional, obviously. Well, Masters of the Air, I mean, it's a whole other topic and a whole different show about a lot of different, yeah, it's about a lot of different things than band is about. But one of the things that we wanted to do was sort of, again, create the why we fight element into the show. And.

Waitman (01:17:39.75)
And I promise we won't talk about it for very long, but.

John Orloff (01:17:59.576)
You know, what will happen as the show progresses is we see Nazi Germany from a POW's perspective. And for me, a stalag is a metaphor for Nazi Germany. You know, it is a group of people in a cage being told what to do every single day by their Nazi bosses. And to me, that's Germany.

You know, it's not just a stalagm. And so the POW's journey through Nazi Germany from episode six through nine is all sort of a why we fight. It's all sort of a, this is the state these people have created, which includes these mysterious trains taking clearly civilians and women and children to very scary places.

John Orloff (01:18:58.304)
And again, just hinting at it, you know, we get a little bit more into it later in the show, but nothing, there's no dedicated episode like episode nine of Band, because we already did it. You know, like, you know, some of the early reviews of Masters were very upset that it was not Band of Brothers in the Sky.

And it's not Band of Brothers in the Sky. It's not about a company of soldiers that you get to know in basic training and then get to see them. Well, they're all gonna be dead by episode four. But it wasn't, it's never meant to be Band of Brothers in the Sky. But my point is, so yes, we talk about the Holocaust because I think Rosenthal, Robert Rosenthal,

Waitman (01:19:28.042)
because it literally can't be. Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

John Orloff (01:19:51.14)
who's one of our main characters, has a really interesting arc vis-a-vis the Holocaust. And if I may, and I'm sorry, Ross, to talk about another show for a sec, but Rosie, for me, two of the two most amazing people I've ever written about are Dick Winters and Robert Rosenthal. And Rosie is to me kind of the anti-Winters. I sort of like to say that you couldn't name these two men

Ross McCall (01:20:02.862)
I don't know.

John Orloff (01:20:20.356)
more correctly as a screenwriter. Winters, cold dude, man. An amazing dude, an amazing leader. I would not want to have been his son. And Rosie, happy, doesn't salute back. I would have loved to have been his son. And they were both these amazing, heroic men. But Rosie's journey, and it's history, and I'm going to give you spoilers.

Rosie's Jewish, grows up in Brooklyn, becomes a lawyer right before the war starts, joins up after Pearl Harbor, becomes a pilot, ends up flying thousands of hours in Texas as a gunnery school flight pilot, meaning he flew B-17s.

Waitman (01:21:17.45)
Please find the targets.

John Orloff (01:21:19.372)
flying the targets or flying the ship that the shooters were in. I think that's what he was doing actually. He was the base, but it gave him thousands of hours in this B-17 and an advantage over a lot of other pilots. So he goes over in September of 43 as a replacement pilot in the 100th bomber group. And he's Jewish, but he's not, he does not, that is not his...

Waitman (01:21:23.355)
Right, okay, yeah.

John Orloff (01:21:49.332)
reason for being in the war and he's really a humanist and he comes down to he ends up if you've seen episode seven he re-ups he's done he's against unmistakable odds he re-ups after doing his 25 missions and the reason yeah he ends up flying 52 but the reason he re-upped

Waitman (01:22:01.705)
Yeah, yeah.

Waitman (01:22:10.587)
knowing it's going to be 30.

John Orloff (01:22:18.48)
he says it in the show pretty much how he had said it in various documents. You know, it's not because he was Jewish and he wanted to, you know, to defeat anti-Semitism. It was that he was a human being and he wanted to, as he says, you know, when you see somebody beaten up innocent people, you got to do something about it or you don't have a civilization. You know, and that was

really what moved him and grounded him and he ends up...

John Orloff (01:22:54.852)
I'm not sure I should give anything away, but he ends up being shot down over Prussia, over Poland, and sees some of these camps. He's rescued by Soviets, by the Red Army, and he sees some of these camps too. And we have a lighter version of kind of what we see in why we fight. He comes back. And after the war...

The job's not done. So he's a lawyer and he volunteers to prosecute Nazis and gets on a boat to Hamburg in 1946 where he meets his future wife, who's also a lawyer who has volunteered. They're married within three weeks and they spend their honeymoon prosecuting Nazis.

Waitman (01:23:52.798)
prosecuting Nazis, as one does.

John Orloff (01:23:54.956)
together, including Herman Garing. He was on the prosecution of Herman Garing. She was on the prosecution team of IG, yeah, she was on that prosecution team. Yeah, so it's sort of like Leibgott going one step further in that journey, you know.

Waitman (01:24:02.598)
IG Farben.

Waitman (01:24:15.218)
what's fascinating you mention it because uh... for the last episode when this came out for this podcast i interviewed and the director of the at national museum of american military a jewish milk jewish american military history indy c and you know the start the had lots of state of stories of either people who have been who had fled the nazis and then enlisted and went back and fought them or people who stayed on

Waitman (01:24:44.794)
and then basically stayed on to work with displaced persons, for example, in the camps to help Jews get situated and get immigrated and those kinds of things. So it's really fascinating to find out that Rosenthal did that. And I must say, when I was watching the Master of the Air episode, and again, I'm not your target audience, but the way I read it, which I think was actually really...

John Orloff (01:24:49.42)
Wow.

Ross McCall (01:24:58.93)
Hmm.

Waitman (01:25:10.922)
good in some ways was a reminder that as bad as Stadoglouf 3 is, it's not a concentration camp in the sense of, you know, SS run, predominantly Jewish. I mean, so I felt like that was really necessary because, you know, just the scale of awfulness. And again, the suffering Olympics is not a good game to play. But you know,

John Orloff (01:25:15.3)
Oh, yeah.

John Orloff (01:25:34.597)
No, it was actually a problem for some of our younger filmmakers to understand that the Stalag was not a concentration camp. Well, can't I show the bad Germans doing this to buck and bucky? And I was like, no, they didn't do that. That's not how these people were treated. It's a whole different ball of wax.

So yeah, I mean, we couldn't just leave the audience with the idea that Stalag Luft III was what it was like to be captured or imprisoned by Nazis because it also depended on what country you were from. The Russians treated, the Russian POWs were treated almost like Jews.

Waitman (01:26:21.894)
Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, two million out of the three million died in the first eight months of the war.

John Orloff (01:26:26.484)
Yeah, but even the POWs, like they had POW camps with Russians and it was a whole different fucking ball of wax than the Germans and the Americans and the British and the French for whatever reason.

Waitman (01:26:28.89)
And the ones that, yeah.

Ross McCall (01:26:34.78)
Mmmph.

Waitman (01:26:40.646)
Oh yeah, I was watching the episode and it's unshareable, but I'm a Holocaust story. I was like, oh no, they got your radio. That's the bad thing that happened to you compared to...

John Orloff (01:26:49.376)
Yeah, no, exactly. No, they were giving lectures, they would put on plays, they had the Luftbandsters, that was in the script at one point. They had big bands, they had, you know, listen, they were really fucking cold all the time, and they had very little food. I mean, it wasn't like it was a camp, like summer camp, but it was nothing like.

Waitman (01:27:12.518)
Absolutely, yeah.

John Orloff (01:27:16.428)
you know, dachau or a slave labor camp or an execution camp, you know.

Waitman (01:27:21.518)
I think that's a great way to sort of to wrap up as well, because I think the why we fight question is even harder in some ways for the bomber people, because they're never seeing. I mean, it's terrifying, and that has just reinforced your series, reinforced how terrifying and awful it was to do that job. But it's in some ways very detached from, you know, you.

John Orloff (01:27:31.838)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Orloff (01:27:46.948)
Mm-hmm.

Waitman (01:27:49.126)
I don't want to suggest that there's satisfaction in killing anyone. Um, but when you're in an infrared unit, moving from point A to point B, you are making progress, you are removing the enemy, you are defeating the enemy. And it's all sort of visible and measurable. But when you're in a plane, it's, it's a, it's almost a numbers game that you're not, it's hard to sort of be as viscerally sort of angry and yeah.

John Orloff (01:28:12.168)
Yeah, it's a totally different thing. Totally, totally different thing.

Waitman (01:28:19.934)
uh... well thank you guys so much i want to close with our with our question that i normally ask everybody and which is you know what is what is one book on the holocaust anybody that you found influential or interesting engaging or you would recommend

John Orloff (01:28:36.384)
May I go first, Ross? When I started working on this project, Hanks asked me to read a book called The German's War by Stargardt, I think is his name. Yeah. And it's not specifically about the Holocaust, although it kind of is. And that one I found really, really informative and eye-opening. Basically it's...

Ross McCall (01:28:37.851)
Sure.

Waitman (01:28:48.57)
Nicholas Stargardt.

John Orloff (01:29:05.556)
it's stating that he looked at just a ton of letters coming from the Eastern front, but the Western front too, where basically what you were saying is that, yeah, everybody knew, everybody knew this was going on because they would write about it. They would take pictures of it, send the pictures home. And so that book is a lot about where did this antisemitism come from? Was it baked into the German culture? And...

how prevalent was it during the war? Anyway, so I found it fascinating.

Ross McCall (01:29:39.719)
Mine would be a man's search for meaning.

was actually gifted that book and I thought it was as well as thought-provoking and ultimately heartbreaking and very important read and a very easy read, I must say, in the sense of page count, not as, you know, in the sense of tone or situation. But yeah, I would advise anybody to pick up that book and have a read.

Waitman (01:30:07.218)
Well, thank you. Um, and for everyone else, um, thanks for listening. Um, please like and subscribe and all the good stuff and all the different places you can, um, John or law frost McCall. Thank you guys so much for being on.

Ross McCall (01:30:20.322)
Pleasure.

John Orloff (01:30:21.42)
Yep, our pleasure. Thank you so much.