This question may be silly -- but I'm sitting at home recovering from surgery and have been on a WWII movie/tv show kick.
Currently, I'm watching Inglorious Basterds (yes the opposite of historically accurrate) and I watched all of Band of Brothers this past weekend.
In both show/movie the high ranking Germans speak English. My dad's family is German and my grandpa was not good at English. I find most older people in Germany haven't learned as much English (or any at all) as our younger generation.
Were there a lot of high ranking officers who spoke English? Or were translators almost always needed, and the (I assume) English in the movies/shows is just because the majority of the audience is English-speaking.
Thank you!
A fair number. You won't find any solid statistics on the subject because no one really kept tallies of such things but it was reasonably common.
English and German have the same source language so it wasn't as though it was exactly difficult for someone who spoke German to pick up English, and visa versa.
Furthermore between the US and the British there were plenty of reasons to pick up the languages. Prior to WW1 the Germans maintained very good relations with the United States- the largest minority in the US at the time was German, or at least Germanic and trade was common. Additionally, Germany in this era was- depending on who you ask- either the intellectual or one of the intellectual hubs of Europe. Germanic regions were some of the first to adopt compulsory education in Europe and much of the modern education system as we see it is the product of Prussians. So it wasn't as though Germany lacked for means or interest to learning the English language.
That being said the environment absolutely did not resemble what you see today where English is a common component of your typical modern education. Though anecdotal, this article does give a bit of context to the era- http://www.historynet.com/german-pows-and-the-art-of-survival.htm - learning to speak English or the language of whatever "invader" happened to be on your front had it's advantages.
English was taught only at higher education schools.
Most Germans only had volkschule (people's school), 8 years (or less) of school and no foreign language. This school was free and the norm. But if your parents had money (middle class and above), they could after the fourth year at volkschule send you to a higher education school with a total of 10 (middle school) or 12 years (high school) of schooling. There learning the basics of one foreign language was normal, either Latin or Greek or French or English.
Higher ranking officers often had attended these higher education schools and thus had knowledge of at least one foreign language.
But getting a higher education was rare - Berlin had in 1921 652 public and 102 private Volkschulen. Compared this to 27 public and 34 private 10-year schools and 109 12-year schools for boys and 53 12-year schools for girls.
So 652+102=754
27+34+109+53=223
754/223=3,38
So only approx every third pupil in Berlin went on to get a higher education. That is in Berlin with plenty of schools, unlike in the countryside where 3 years of village school is often the only available option.