After Mathilda has taken Bridget's place to join the quiz game with the soldiers, bartender Eric leaves the counter and walks over to assist her. He is shown standing left behind her. Then the camera cuts to the officers' table. In the background Eric is shown standing behind the counter again.
When Hans Landa is talking to Shoshanna after ordering strudel for her he offers her a cigarette and lights one for himself. His cigarette doesn't appear to be lit when he removes his lighter but in the next shot there is half an inch of ash on it.
When the two sets of explosives go off in the cinema, both of them appear to be at the feet of audience members sitting still, facing the screen. However, at this moment, Shosanna's fire has started, and the two basterds are shooting at them, so naturally all the audience members are rushing to the door in a panic. Nobody is sitting.
Before Wilhelm starts shooting everyone in the tavern scene with a submachine gun, there is a brief shot showing the waitress standing up against the wall with bullet holes in her blouse, well before she is actually shot.
After Shoshanna shoots Zoller in the back, he turns on her and shoots her with his service weapon. However, he is in formal military dress and at no point prior to that scene is he carrying his weapon. And nothing in the previous scenes accord him a reason to be carrying his weapon, given the security that surrounds the event.
The theater in Paris is shown brightly lit at night and street lamps are on. All occupied cities within range of Allied bombers were under strict nighttime blackout. The cinema is also lit inside during the afternoon, but there were severe power restrictions in Paris from January 1942 until after the war.
Apart from a few essential occupations, a French civilian in Paris would not be working outdoors after dark. There was a strict curfew from September 1940 until after Paris was liberated.
During the card game, Bridget's card reads "Genghis Khan". However, since the game was played entirely by Germans, they would have used the German spelling, "Dschingis Khan". (Also, when leaving the table, Bridget comments that she never would have guessed it and uses the English pronunciation, even though she's speaking German.)
In the tavern scene there is a female Nazi sergeant. There were no female soldiers in the Third Reich, except of helpers for AA guns, medical orderlies, and aircraft mechanics in the Luftwaffe.
Standartenfuhrer Landa is wearing the correct rank patches on his collar, but they are pointing in the wrong direction. The top of the oak-leaf should point away from the head. Change them over and they would be correct.
Archie refers to Aldo as "lootenant." Normally, a British officer would pronounce it "leftenant" among fellow British officers. Out of professional courtesy, however, British officers typically use the American pronunciation when dealing with American officers.
By the time Allies had landed in Normandy, Hitler's paranoia was such that no officer was allowed to wear a sidearm in his presence. Thus Zoller would not have been able to wear the gun he shot Shosanna with. However, such is the convention of the movie, which is not a document. Hitler also would not attend the cinema with only two guards.
At the beginning of the film Perrier's daughter is hanging sheets on the line to dry; however, the sheet she is securing to the line is already dry (it isn't wet). In those days, however, people hang their sheets to air them so they didn't have to wash them so often. So dry sheets would be hung.
Col. Hans Landa claims the Bubonic Plague was caused by rats. However, the plague was caused by fleas on the rats, not the rats themselves. In the 1940s it was believed that rats were the cause so it is correct for Landa's character to be mistaken.
Many of the subtitling "errors", such as "Merci" instead of "Thank You", are intentional, given that these phrases are interchangeable and can be understood without English translation.
Units such as the Basterds are used as clandestine units that constantly move positions so as to avoid detection. After the ambush, the unit remains in the area way too long. Especially since the gunfire would be easily heard and other German troops could easily race to the scene. Raine is aware, based on his interrogation of the sergeant, that there is another German unit out there looking for them. The unit would have quickly moved after the firefight to a more secure and taken any prisoners that they wished to interrogate with them.
Shosanna and Zoller are talking outside the theatre. It is supposed to be June in Paris and you can see them breathing like it is winter time.
We can see that Hicox is moving his eyes while being dead when Hans Landa is looking at his body.
When Lt. Raine is talking to the Basterds at the beginning of the movie, they are all outside and the Basterds are each holding a rifle. Raine is wearing his hat, called a cover by the military. None of the Basterds are wearing a cover. Cover etiquette requires that anytime personnel are outside, they are required to wear a cover, which is to be removed when going inside. When carrying a weapon, personnel are required to wear a cover at all times, inside or outside.
After Sgt. Donowitz ("The Bear Jew") kills the German soldier with the bat, he struts about shouting a "play-by-play" account of his action. During this, he uses the phrase "Donowitz goes yard!", meaning hitting a home run. The term "goes yard" was not used for a home run until the 1990s.
The Gestapo officer in the tavern is shown wearing a M1932 Allgemeine-SS uniform, which was made famous by the SS in the 1930s. A Gestapo agent would not have worn one, especially in 1944, as its use had been abolished in 1942. They would have instead appeared either in civilian attire or in an SS-style gray field uniform similar to Landa's.
In the opening sequence of the film, which is set in the year 1941, The SS Colonel refers posthumously to Reinhard Heydrich, "The Hangman," in his conversation with the French farmer and mentions that he had been assassinated; however, Heydrich was attacked and mortally wounded on the 27th of May, 1942, and died a week later on the 4th of June, 1942 - a year later than the time in which this scene of the film is set.
In the interrogation scene, Hans Landa who is Austrian smokes a high-quality Austrian calabash pipe, specifically a Strambach. On the contrary, Perrier LaPadite smokes a much smaller and cheaper corncob pipe, which is foremost identified with rural pipe smokers in the USA. However, in the 1940s France, corncob pipes were neither known nor smoked. A farmer with small income would have a plain clay pipe or a second-hand Jacob clay pipe.
In the opening scenes at the farmhouse, it can be clearly seen that the fields have been farmed using mechanized farm equipment - the crop marks from spraying from tractors, for instance. Rural France before the 1960s in general and during the war in particular, was not mechanized in any meaningful way until an influx of wealth from Great Britain and Germany via the Common Agricultural Policy of the Common Market/European Community/European Union. It would all have been horse drawn or manual.
Several times the subtitles translating the French into English the word "oui" is translated to "oui". I realized that most people know that this is French for "yes", but there were other times when this was correctly translated to "yes".
Around the 24:50 mark in the scene when Hitler appears for the first time, the film lights and other lighting equipment are reflected in the large brass buttons on his white coat.
On the map behind Adolf Hitler is Turkey shown as "Ottomanien", is German for Ottoman empire. Since 1923 Ottoman Empire is replaced by the republic of Turkey.
After the basement bar fight, Landa identifies one of the basterds as Cpl. Wicki, stating/implying that he was a German jew who emigrated to the US before the war. However, Wicki is neither a 'typical' jewish name, nor a German name but in fact a typical (and fairly common) name in Central Switzerland. If he was a Swiss Jew, Wicki would have most probably fled to Switzerland, but Landa doesn't mention anything in this direction concerning Wicki's family name and fate, which seems improbable since Wicki is a foreign sounding name to Germans and since Landa cares to show off his military intelligence.
Stiglitz comes along to the rendez-vous with von Hammersmark although he is basically a fugitive from Nazi law after escaping from prison, killing the guards and being in the newspaper. The Gestapo officer in the basement should have known him from the moment of seeing him.
When Hitler looks at Private Butz' mark, it's a fully-healed scar, which has also darkened with skin pigment. That takes years. The debriefing and order not to reveal what actually happened would have taken place within days, at which time the wound should still be sutured, bandaged, and bleeding (given the brutality of the cuts).
It's never explained how Shosanna came into possession of the theater. She claims to have inherited it from her aunt and uncle and a conversation between her and Marcel confirms that, at least, the "aunt" existed. However, given her religion and where she lives, it's unlikely they were actually related.
When Landa captures Raine at the theater, he pokes him gently in the eye. Raine then viciously head butts Landa, but a few minutes later when they negotiate Landa's surrender at the restaurant, there are no marks on Landa's face.
During Adolf Hitler's first appearance we see a map of Europe and where Turkey is supposed to be, reads "Osmanien" (written in Fraktur, making the "s" look like a "t"). The Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1923 and Turkey was established in that region, approximately 20 years before when this movie is supposed to be taking place.
When Landa arrives at Lapadite's farm, one of his subordinates refers to him as "Herr Oberst". As an SS officer, Landa would not be addressed using an Army rank. His correct title would be "Standartenführer".
When the British soldier Lt. Archie Hicox is introduced to his superiors, he is instructed to "stand at ease" which is still a formal position, but Hicox "stands easy", which allows him to relax arms and move the feet.
Lt Hicox said prior to the war he wrote a book about the film director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who described as being German. If Hicox really wrote Pabst's biography, he would know that Pabst was Austrian.
Hugo Stiglitz is shown slowly sharpening his knife. At the end of each stroke there is an ominous "shhhlick" sound as he twists the blade with a flick. This would actually remove the edge he is attempting to sharpen, and dull the blade.