The Teutonic Knights were an order of monks founded in 1190 in Acre, Kingdom of Jerusalem. Like the Hospitallers their stated aim was to aid Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and establish hostels and hospitals. But, also like the Hospitallers they degenerated into warriors ("warrior monk" is the mother of all oxymorons). After Christian forces were defeated and expelled from Palestine the Order fled back to Europe and was invited/disinvited by various local princes. After a while the Order settled in allegedly Germanic lands and since 1230 devoted its efforts to Christianize by fire and sword the eastern realms, in particular the Baltic Old Prussians and Lithuanians. It also campaigned against peoples as Christian as they were, such as the Republic of Novgorod in the 1240s.
The Knights were not deterred by the conversion of Lithuania to the Cristian faith, which voided any pretext for a Crusade. Foolishly, some Polish nobles invited the Order to their territories, which was answered with expropriations, plunder, enslavement of serfs and further encroachments on Polish lands. Poles and Lithuanians were finally fed up and organized a joint army commanded by King Wladislaw II Jagiello and Grand Duke Vytautas. They confronted and decisively defeated the Knights in the battle of Grunwald on July 15 1410, one of the largest battles in the Middle Ages, fought in a field southeast of Hamburg in the Order's home turf. The Knights military might was destroyed and their molestation of Eastern lands severely curtailed.
The last half hour (and centerpiece) of this movie is a reconstruction of the battle of Grunwald; the rest is on the abuses of the the Knights leading to the battle. The script is based on a 1900 novel by Henryk Sienkewicz, of Quo Vadis fame. His books based on history (translated to numerous languages and never out of print) are fast paced and exciting, which makes the movie equally exciting. I watched it in 1960, the year of its release and again recently, and it has stood the test of time; it is now as stirring as sixty years ago. There are some iconic shots: a screenwide line of defiant drummers shown later broken and decimated, the King wielding the two swords across the screen, the commanders of each army asking God's help in slaughtering the enemy with the same words.
The Knights left a sinister resonance in modern history, The Prussian military caste venerated them and many Prussian officers (including some of Hitler's generals) claimed descent from a Knight or other. There were riders dressed as Knights in Nazi parades. And, Hitler credited the Order with the concept of Drang Nach Osten = Drive to the East that. In his view, justified his invasion and attempted subjugation of Slavic lands. Obviously, the Order is vilified in Slavic countries; the Russian name for them is the Dog Knights, apparently coined by Karl Marx.
