Inglourious Basterds was the second entry in Tarantino's revenge trilogy, which began with the Kill Bills and wrapped up with 2012's Django Unchained. Each of those films definitely exists within the "movie movie" reality since, whilst the latter two claim to take place in real historical periods, they tend to break from the actual events that occurred. Try as we might, we can't find any evidence of black slaves that were freed by bounty hunters, trained up to be badass cowboys and then got revenge on their former owners. We're also a little rusty on our GCSE history, but we're reasonably certain Hitler didn't get shot to death by a couple of Jewish Nazi hunters. He died in a bunker whilst complaining about the PS4 or Half Life 3 or something, right? The titular Basterds seem like a classically Tarantino creation, the Dirty Dozen taken to a new extreme, a bundle of references to other World War II movies involving a rag-tag group of soldiers going rogue on a personal mission of revenge. In fact the film lifts its title from a seventies Italian war movie by Enzo G Castellari, The Inglorious Bastards. Turns out that the Basterds - a renegade unit of American Jewish soldiers who go around killing and scalping Nazis, under the command of Brad Pitt as Lieutenant Aldo "The Apache" Raine - might not be quite as original an invention as old QT thought. The Nakam, also referred to as The Avengers or the Jewish Avengers, might not have had quite as evocative a name as the Inglourious Basterds, but what they lacked in a snazzy title they made up for in, erm, actually existing. And killing a load of Nazis. Originally formed as a Jewish militia during the war, the group rebranded themselves as Nakam (Hebrew for "revenge") following the end of the conflict and dedicated their lives to tracking down and assassinating war criminals who had been involved with the Holocaust. This was all done in secret, of course. The original Avengers, the Nokmim, would travel in British uniforms, arrest Nazis, and conduct quick "trials" and executions in the field. After the war the group expanded to sixty former Partisans as well as other Jews who survived the Holocaust. They went back to Germany, did things like poison 3000 loaves of bread for former SS guards and planned on doing more, aiming to kill 6 million Germans - the same amount of Jewish people killed in the concentration camps. Which is a rare example of real life being even more hardcore than a Quentin Tarantino film. Which is kinda scary.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
