Ah, yes, you are of course correct that under the Nazis, the interpretation of the words was changed 😀
Sadly, this tainted a beautiful patriotic song, and the melody from JosephHaydn‘s „Emperor“ quartet as well.
Yes, the anthems of nations. It’s often fascinating how they change.
But in that film (I have never seen it, but I‘ve heard of this scene) the Germans sang the „Wacht am Rhein“, a quite anti French song from 1840, when President Thiers threatened to attack the German Rhineland.
Originally, they were supposed to sing the Horst Wessel song, but the filmmakers decided against it, since they would have had to pay royalties for including it. So they used a song which was in the public domain.
Btw, I personally never liked the Marseillaise particularly, although it is an utterly grandiose work of music.
To me the anti German undertones are too strong, and the first time I stood up for it was in November 2015, when it was played in Paris in remembrance of the Bataclan massacre victims.
May they all rest in peace🙏🏻
P.S. it seems to me that the March of the Volunteers, the Chinese national anthem, was somehow modeled on the Marseillaise, or am I mistaken?
And, yes, you are correct in that the The Internationale was based on La Marseillaise, so the song of the French Revolution resonates in the March of the Volunteers, just as the French Revolution itself helped inspire Marx, Lenin, and Soviet and Chinese Communism.
Perhaps there is a principle of revolutions and music at work, with bad revolutions producing stirring music and good ones like the American Revolution offering more pedestrian tunes and lyrics.
In the larger view of things, we may have cause to be grateful that our anthem is based on a slap dash poem inspired by an enemy bombardment long after our Revolution and set to the tune of a drinking song. And France has suffered because her anthem is based on the doggerel song of hired killers brought to Paris from Marseilles to kill off the domestic opponents of her Revolution.
No wonder that President Mitterand, nominally a Leftist, downplayed the Revolution's bloodier aspects when France celebrated its bicentennial. Mitterand was a scoundrel in many ways but he did not want to inspire anyone to try to again upend the country that he ruled over. Some experiences are best had only once -- if at all.