None of the five friends are Nazi zealots, and none can see the catastrophe that is coming. Viktor’s father, who served in the German Army in World War I and whose tailor shop was destroyed during the state-sponsored anti-Jewish vandalism of Kristallnacht, believes that his fellow Germans will come to their senses “once they see how much they need us.”

Charly and Wilhelm are the most overtly patriotic, but this is more passive acceptance of the reality they have grown up with than the fervent embrace of ideology. They are happy to participate in their country’s heroic destiny and only gradually come to realize that this will involve the murder of innocents, the betrayal of comrades and the destruction of their own ideals.

Both of them witness — and do — terrible things, as do the others. Friedhelm, the most sensitive of the group, is transformed into a cold and effective killer. Greta, having begun an affair with the Gestapo officer who took her music, becomes one of the Reich’s top recording stars. Viktor, escaping from a train bound for Auschwitz, takes up with a group of fighters loyal to the Polish Home Army.

What happens to all of them is absorbing, exciting and sometimes very moving. The moral choices they face are credibly agonizing, even if the plot turns are sometimes a bit forced. (There are only so many times one movie can fool the audience into thinking a major character is dead.) As television drama, “Generation War” is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.

This has less to do with factual accuracy than with the way facts are shaped, juxtaposed and given emotional weight. The evil of the Nazis is hardly denied, but it is mainly localized within a few cartoonishly sadistic SS and Gestapo commanders, who are nearly as cruel to regular German soldiers as they are to Jews and Russians. There is also an element of moral relativism in the way the film portrays the Polish resistance, whose members hate Jews as much as the Germans, but with worse manners, and the bestial, rampaging members of the Red Army, who have no manners at all.

There is good and bad on all sides, a dash of mercy mixed into the endless violence. But the suggestion that the Nazis were not the only bad guys in Eastern Europe in the early 1940s is undermined by the film’s disinclination to show the very worst of what the Nazis did. We see massacres of Jews by local militias in Ukraine under the supervision of the SS, but “Generation War,” for all its geographical range and military detail, steers clear of the death camps.