Bunker film 'is too kind to Nazis'

Historians accept human portrayal of Hitler, but say crimes of inner circle ignored

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Tuesday April 5, 2005
The Guardian

Historians have condemned Downfall, the new film about the last days of Hitler, for its sympathetic portrayal of characters in the bunker.

"Soldiers who appeared to be good, solid troops were probably really up to their necks in war crimes of the first order," said Professor David Cesarani, a specialist in Jewish history.

Peter Longerich, professor of modern German history at Royal Holloway, University of London, criticised the characterisation of Albert Speer, the doctor Ernst-Günter Schenck and Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge. "We have only one source for Albert Speer's claim that he confessed in the bunker to having sabotaged Hitler's orders, and that is his own memoirs," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/story/0,14058,1452220,00.html

do they really need to say anything more to prove these were the bad guys?

one way or another, I do know that the German army conscripted men to claim allegiance to the Nazi party by refusing to give food ration cards to their families unless they were party members. This was a very effective way of getting people to be a "Nazi" - if the alternative was that your children would literally starve to death.

Not to whitewash anything but civil conscripts to their military service also built roads, buildings, repaired bridges, helped evacuate populations after bombings and did all the things that our "national" guard normally does. It is historically inaccurate and absurdly wrong and simple minded to assume that every German who was in the military was a monster.

...but the people who financed them. Krupp, Thyssen, Voegler, the major industrialists of Germany. Things weren't that different in the US, although most libraries don't carry Henry Ford's "The International Jew - The World's Foremost Problem", and it's forgotten who the DuPont family financed the Nazi-like Black Legion.

I look at the Nazi leadership, the SS, the Gestapo and whatnot as just sidekicks to them. As far as the Nuremberg trials, only a few significant Nazis were really punished, many were given slaps on the wrists, and the financiers were barely punished at all. The US actually reassembled the Nazi intelligence apparatus almost as soon as WWII was over, from people like General Gehlen to Klaus Barbie.

And you know how it ended for Thyssen.

It did make the Nazis a bit sympathetic, but I think we need that to remember that it was real people fell for Hitler and the Nazi's. It would be too easy to say Pass it off on the Germans being unique and it will never happen here.

You could see the struggles between the Career Soldiers, and the True Believers (and I think Traudl was more of a cult of personality than a Nazi).

that these were ordinary people, and that we could easily fall for another Nazi regime if we aren't careful.

Hitler was a sociopathic monster, but he was also (like it or not) just another human being.

The next sociopathic monster, the next Magic Answer Man who'll promise us free money and cheap gasoline and patriotic "revival" and an end to the scourge of (pick your poison) will also be just another human being.

This is something we forget at our peril.

And if you haven't seen the movie yeat, check it out - it's brilliant, overwhelming, and a damning reminder of what happens when just enough people abandon the horrific burden of thinking for themselves in exchange for freedom from thought and responsibility.

Bush, did not have any choices on where they got their news. Americans choose to believe what is put before them on the government/corporate controlled media.

Everyone knows there are only two kinds of nazi's...

1) The Evil General/Commander/Scientist 's....The ones with the monocles and the Mua Ha Ha laughs.

2) The grey uniformed mindless nazi soldiers, often jumping on bikes with sidecars for no apparent reason and riding around.

Showing any nazi to have the slightest form of compassion or character is just wrong....wrong...

Most movies potray the Germans as comic book caricatures, not human beings.

I saw it at the local Angelika last week

most Germans went along with it due to various reasons such as mass propaganda, purposeful ignorance, pride, nationalism, prejudice raised to extremism and other reasons. Hitler was a revered person because he did raise Germany out of it's Depression and gave them pride after their bitter defeat of WW1.

Most foot soldiers were not Nazis. There was resistance of some German people and the reprisals were brutal. This is not an excuse for what happened rather an explanation of how a Nation and the people can be led down a horrible path slowly.

but deadly blonde female spy. She usually turns out to be the daughter of the evil general/commander/scientist Nazi.

It might be that the movie is more powerful, when watched in Berlin. I have have bought the DVD today and watched it again. I wept like a baby.

It is an extremely moving film; the Guardian is slipping in its quality, if it states otherwise; a very depressing thing to witness.

Showing the characters in a view including shades of gray -albeit very dark shades of gray - means one thing more than anything else: to not acquit the German people.

I think the problem some people have is that it shows the Nazis as human beings rather than the caricatures they are usually presented as. In no way does it absolve them of the horror of what happened.