Insights into the private life of Mr. A. Hitler

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2010)

It is a peculiarity of Germany that it produces, on the one side, uninterruptedly movies about the time of the National Socialism with the clear purpose of "explaining the unexplainable", but, on the other side, it punishes and persecutes with the utmost severeness all those who try to have their own opinion about national socialism or some of their exponents. Exactly the latter happened to "Der Untergang" (2004): Director Hirschbiegel was most heavily criticizes through weeks in the boulevard tableaux because he did not dissociate himself from the "benevolent and favorable" picture that Traudl Junge (on whose memories the film is based) gave about her former boss Hitler. Indeed: Somebody who watches this movies without the burden of allegedly commonly borne (and "suffered") past, he or she may sense Hitler as a bearer of sympathy: He does not drink nor smoke, eats only vegetarian and small-sized meals, drinks herb-tea and no coffee, is not pro miscue and loves animals and children over anything. Junge/Hirschbiegel also clearly differentiate (at various places of the movie) between "the human A.H." and "Der Führer".
It seems to be forbidden, at least in Germany, that also a dictator (who was by the way correctly elected Reichskanzler) is a human being and not a monster from outer space. When recently multi-Oscar winning director Oliver Stone called Hitler a "scapegoat" - whole Germany shook frightened its head. Had Stone been a German (or perhaps only in Germany to the time when he uttered that), the police would have arrested him because of "belittlement" of war-crimes. Of course: Only about two years ago, famous and popular TV moderator and writer Eva Herman lost her job because she was telling in one of her shows that the children's care had been much better in the NS-time than it is in present-day Germany. Nothing else. When, again some years earlier, a chemist offered a court house to show his chemical proof that cyclone B could not possibly have been used in cold Auschwitz - he was arrested and sentences without even having been given the possibility to show his scientific proof. The same happened to a meanwhile whole bunch of scientists who have tried to shade light on some of the innumerable inconsistencies and contradictions of what happened or not happened between 1933 and 1945. Speaking nicely about Hitler is strongly forbidden in Germany, one just wonders that this movie has not been banned in Germany. The more one has to praise its director, not only for his great and admirable achievement, but mostly for his courage in a land where only that is accepted as "truth" about the NS times which is accepted by Jewish historians.