If I recall (from the movie or the book, I can't tell which), this fellow Groth came from Chiapas, in southern Mexico, where the Germans were invited during the Porfirio Diaz regime and established coffee plantations. If Mr. Groth came from there, he grew up in a paradisiacal place. Can't understand why he would go back to the Fatherland to serve...shoot, I'd have stayed! The Germans did prove to be rather nasty in their settlements treating the local Indians very brutally and not respecting their human rights (kind of what happened in German Southwest Africa in imperial times). Not that the British or the Dutch were nicer in their treatment of their colonial populations. And the genocides carried out by McArthur's father while governor of Phillipines around the turn of the century were equally criminal. The treatment of the indigenous population was one of the reasons for the Zapatista uprising there in 2000.