Just to set the record straight

Rating: 10/10 (21 June 2012)

I feel the praise of this movie has been sung many times already on this site, so I will not go into all that it does right. However, after reading some of the reviews that are rightfully in the back pages here, I do think there is an issue that needs to be addressed here.
Apparently some people think we are all ignorant children, who need to be spoon-fed a message about how "inhuman" the Nazis were. I have even seen reviews that called this movie dangerous, because it sympathized with Hitler.
If you haven't seen this film yet, don't get fooled by these misguided comments. If this movie is dangerous, it is dangerous to people who wish to believe that Adolf Hitler was Satan incarnate, and that all who followed him were bloodthirsty demons who fed on baby corpses. I can hardly believe this fact offends people but: he wasn't, and they weren't. Both Hitler and his followers were human beings, who did things human beings do. They were friendly to each other, they cared for the people close to them, while at the same time plotting to kill millions of innocent people. They enjoyed cake and embraced their lovers, and then decided to send twelve year old boys to sacrifice their lives to keep off the Russian army for a couple of hours more.
This is what Der Untergang shows, and why it was hailed with so much praise. It actually moved beyond the cardboard cut-out cliché of movie Nazis. Just show a man utterly devoid of any humanity, a death machine, and stick him in a nazi uniform, and hey presto, an accurate depiction of a nazi. That has all been done thousands of times, and it makes us feel safe, because we can identify them as bad guys from a mile away, and we can then morally judge the idiots that fell for the whole nazi movement. We would never fall for anyone that evil. This movie chooses selfconsciously not to go for that approach, but instead show us the true insanity of the nazi-regime. That they actually believed that what they were doing was for the good of the German people.
If people see Der Untergang as a campaign to show the Nazis as the good guys, let them explain the scene in which Frau Goebbels killed her own children, the scene in which Hitler condemns the German people for being weaklings who deserve death, or the scene where Joseph Goebbels tells an army officer that the German people brought their destruction on themselves, with a smirk on his face, showing he enjoys this consequence of his decision (or, for that matter, one of the many other scenes which show the cruelty of the Nazis). Do you really believe this movie will make anyone believe the Nazis were just idealistic dreamers who should be sympathized with for not achieving their goals?