At first I thought I will watch it just like you did: as a normal TV series, nice for reenactors because of uniforms etc., etc. . However, just as it started I found so many stupid, unreal and deceitful things in it that I am not able to watch it without strong emotions, even though it really had some nice battle scenes.
Let me start from the beginning. First scene: two German soldiers (one is an officer) having a party with a Jew in the summer of 1941. Really? You actually believe it? Have you read Stauffenberg`s (yes, THIS Stauffenberg) letters to his wife that he wrote from Poland in 1939? A short quote:
( http://books.google.pl/books?id=2k7vugC ... &q&f=false p.115 )The inhabitants are an unbelievable rabble, very many Jews and very much mixed population. A people which surely is only comfortable under the knout.
I don`t think he was a Nazi - after all he tried to assassinate Hitler. You think that he would party with this "rabble"?
Second thing: German soldiers in Russia paying for food to peasants. Have you ever heard about something called 'kontyngent'? The farmers from eastern Europe were obliged to provide food products to Germans for free. If they didn't, they were killed:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Germa ... d_1941.jpg
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Polis ... ,_1943.jpg
As for military aspects: SS-Standartenfuhrer riding into a forest in Poland with only one motor as an escort in the summer of 1944? ...
If you read memoirs from that time you will find that at that time Germans didn't enter Polish forests in the strength lower than a battalion. The high Police Officers were not safe even in big cities ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Kutschera ) let alone in the forest, where you could find partisan units of a divisional strength.
But the biggest amount of nonsense is to be found in the part showing Viktor`s story in occupied Poland.
In the first scene in Poland he is shot at by a Polish farmer. If a weapon was found by Germans - the Pole was instantly shot to death or sent to KL for that. I think that the series script writer read to much of Karl May - Hitler`s favourite writer and he mistook a Polish farmer under German occupation with American farmer fighting with Indians.
In this series Armia Krajowa (AK) - the partisan unit is shown as anti-Semitic organisation. It is strange, because it was only underground organisation in Europe that created a special unit to help Jews under German occupation called 'Żegota' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zegota ) and it were AK soldiers, that liberated Gęsiówka KL - it was only Konzentrazionslager liberated by resistance in Europe ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesiowka ). Most of Jewish survivors from that camp joined the AK unit that liberated them. Would they fight along with anti-Semits?
Before war there were almost 3 millions of Jews in Poland. The relations with them were sometimes good and sometimes worse, just as you have them with people from Muslim countries or India living in UK. However nobody in Poland ever thought of murdering them. That's nonsense!
These are my thoughts about this TV series. I hope that people will not learn history from it and read some books before stating any personal opinions.