Simply one of the best war movies ever made!!

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2010)

When the US Army started to participate in the war in Europe it was already over, to some extent. The German army had received a gut-shot on the eastern front in 1942/1943 from which it was bleeding out and bleeding out fast. COI shows part of what happened on the eastern front, in all it's brutality and senselessness.
James Coburn brilliantly portrays Segt. Steiner, a wearied and disillusioned veteran, whose only goal it is to save as many of his squad as possible. He is no Nazi, in fact he despises the Nazis, despises all the higher ups, who send him and his men out to die.
When Captain Stransky, the newly arrived company leader, arrives, things change for the worse. Stransky needs the "Iron Cross", he'll do anything to obtain it. When Lt. Meyer leads a successful counter charge against the attacking soviets, dying in the process, Stransky quickly tells his commander, that he lead the fighting action, so that he can obtain the Iron Cross as a reward.
There is but one problem, Steiner knows that Meyer lead the charge and that Stransky was in fact hiding cowardly during the Russian attack. Knowing that Steiner would never lie for him, Stransky quickly decides to not inform Steiners squad of the general retreat.
Although Steiner manages to save his troops from the initial soviet attack, they are caught deep behind enemy lines and have to make their way back to their battalion.
Besides Coburn and a, for once, great part by Maximilian Schell as Stransky, there are James Mason and David Warner as worn-out commanding officers who both give great performances. I also want to recommend the German actors portraying Steiners squad, they do a great job, especially Klaus Löwitsch as Cpl. Krüger and Vadim Glovna as Private Kern.
It is a different war movie, because it depicts the German soldiers as actual living people, not the human targets for heroic Americans.
I think more Americans should watch movies like this, or "Das Boot" or "Stalingrad", so that they can overcome the dehumanizing portray of Germans in Hollywood Movies.
The average German grunt was fighting for his live, perhaps for his loved ones back home. Most of them had no interest in politics or had the politics driven out of them by the sheer terrors they experienced on a day to day base.
The crimes of Nazi Germany are undeniable and something we still have to deal with almost daily, but the Germans in WW II were still humans. Misguided, foolish, cruel and uncaring perhaps, certainly flawed, as are we all, but they were men like the ones in the opposing trench.