Who is the Victim? Well, it depends...

If the question is who was victimized in "Hangmen" the answer is clearly the Czech, afterall, some 300 hostages were killed on top of the deaths of countless of its people before the death of the Hangman. Yet, in the film, while the Czech are the ones who have the most deaths, they go to death honorably, (apart from the one man who ran out of the barracks screaming) which questions the idea of victim. Afterall, can they really be victims if they accepted their deaths as martyrs? Instead, I think that the Germans were the victims. They were afraid of the Czech. The people weren't cooperating, officers were taking bribes, the systematic death of the hostages wasn't producing results of exposing the underground so much as a greater resistance to their movements. Though they were still effective as an occupational army, they allowed their victims to gain control over them. This reaction is what causes them to be labeled as victims. They lost control and were seemingly afraid of the people. The reactions of the NEED to get the assassin of the Hangman drove them to seeming paranoia, and it is this over reaction in comparison to the "No surrender" of the Czechs that leads me to say that the Germans were the victims in "Hangmen also Die."