The young local girl walks out into an uncleared area of beach and Ernst walks through it to keep her calm whilst Sebastian clears a path to her. He forces them to march close together across the cleared zones of the beach to confirm that they are safe. This causes Rasmussen to snap and begin abusing the boys again. Werner is blown to bits after encountering landmines buried one above another and his twin brother Ernst goes to search for him and continues to deny his death even after being comforted by Rasmussen.Īfter a casual game of football, Rasmussen's dog is blown up in a supposedly cleared zone of the beach. Rasmussen stops them but is confronted about the theft by Ebbe, who accuses him of being sympathetic towards the Germans. Hearing rumours of Rasmussen stealing food for the boys, Ebbe brings a group of British soldiers to abuse and torment the boys. He also allows the boys to use a device invented by Sebastian to improve productivity.
Rasmussen begins to treat his charges more kindly, stealing food from the base for them and tries to maintain morale by reporting that Wilhelm has survived. Most of the boys are poisoned by rat faeces in grain that they find on a nearby farm they are treated by Rasmussen who makes them purge themselves with seawater.
The optimistic Wilhelm's arms are blown off and he dies in a field hospital. The POWs are not given food due to post-war shortages and begin to suffer from malnourishment, with Ernst befriending a young local girl to steal some bread from her. Rasmussen's hostility begins to recede slightly and the boys' leader Sebastian Schumann attempts to remain optimistic as they discuss their plans for when they return home. After marching his squad onto the dunes, he promises that they will return home in three months, if they can each defuse six mines per hour for a total of 45,000 mines. Rasmussen is rude to and contemptuous of them and the neighbouring farm treats them with hostility. Rasmussen shares this contempt and is determined to treat the young prisoners without sympathy. They are warned not to expect any sympathy from the Danes, who resent their former occupiers. A group of young German prisoners are handed over to Rasmussen's commanding officer Captain Ebbe Jensen and sent to the west coast, where they are trained to use their bare hands to remove the mines that the Germans had buried in the sand.
Returning to the Danish Army after service in the British Parachute Regiment, sergeant Carl Leopold Rasmussen furiously beats up a German prisoner for carrying a Danish flag. įollowing the end of World War II in Europe and the liberation of Denmark from German occupation in May 1945, the Wehrmacht occupiers became prisoners of war.
The removal was part of a controversial agreement between the German Commander General Georg Lindemann, the Danish Government and the British Armed Forces, under which German soldiers with experience in defusing mines would be in charge of clearing the mine fields. It is estimated that over two thousand German soldiers, including numerous teenagers, under the command of German officers but against the Geneva Conventions, removed mines, nearly half of them being either killed or wounded. The film is inspired by real events and tells the story of German prisoners of war forced to clear land mines in Denmark after World War II. It was selected and nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the 89th Academy Awards. It was shown in the Platform section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. Land of Mine ( Danish: Under sandet, lit.'Under the Sand') is a 2015 Danish-German historical drama war film directed by Martin Zandvliet.
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