In the tale’s first stage, the Dane treats his charges in a fashion that verges from screaming ferocity into near-sadism. He tells the boys there are 60,000 mines buried on a nearby beach if they remove six an hour, they can go home a few months hence-assuming they don’t blow themselves up while executing their task. (The press notes don’t say whether a group of prisoners was commonly left to a single Dane it seems a little improbable.) At first, he seems as a fierce as he did in that first scene. Rasmussen is in charge of 14 young Germans in a makeshift camp near a beach. Needless to say, one wrong move and life or limb can be sacrificed. It involves taking a stick and probing the sand till a mine’s metal bulk is detected, then gently removing it from the sand and defusing it by unscrewing and extracting the trigger. So, the Danes provide instruction on this very perilous undertaking. How many have seen mines, the boys are asked.

More than two million mines were left behind. In an early scene, Danish officers explain to them that Denmark’s coast was the most heavily mined in Europe, apparently because Hitler expected the Allied invasion to come there since it was the closest land point to Berlin. Its task is simplified somewhat by the fact that the Nazi Reich has been reduced to smoldering rubble by the time the story begins, and the Germans we see are scared, skinny kids drafted into the army near the war’s end-most look in the 15-to-17-year-old range. “Land of Mine” belongs to the line of mostly European films that have continued that effort. In 1981, Wolfgang Petersen’s “ Das Boot,” about the perils of life aboard a Nazi U-boat, became an international hit in part by humanizing the servicemen whose lives it dramatized. But it was always a simplification that invited correction. Granted, there are large and very obvious reasons why Nazis have been portrayed as the most brutal of human monsters in the popular mythology of the movies. According to Zandvliet, it has never been dealt with adequately in Danish histories or public discussions of the period.

Rather curiously, the film itself doesn’t say what its press notes spell out: under the international treaties of day as well as the 1949 Geneva Convention, this action-which was ordered by the British but carried out by the Danes-was a war crime. It involved using numerous German soldiers to clear hundreds of thousands of land mines that the Nazis had left buried along the Danish coast, resulting in the deaths of many. The punishment described by writer/director Martin Zandvliet in “Land of Mine,” though, is collective.

Such a display of anger at the Nazi occupiers on the part of a Dane is understandable, but it’s only individual.

Land of mine film