When Gabe Friedman interviewed the series’ director Joe Berlinger for the Times of Israel, Berlinger said: “I didn’t really feel like I had a Jewish identity growing up. My family came over [to London from Germany and Poland], but in the 1850s. So we had no German traditions at home, because we were long assimilated; we didn’t lose anybody in the Holocaust.
“But when I saw Holocaust liberation footage when I was 14 or 15, it just blew me away. I don’t claim that I was more disturbed than other people, but I just couldn’t get it out of my head.”
Anyone who sees this series won’t be able to get its images and messages out of their head either. It’s compelling viewing, although occasionally so appalling, you’ll have to look away for a bit.
Berlinger goes on to say, “One of the reasons I wanted to [make this series] is the level of ignorance about the Holocaust among millennials is so high... It’s to the point where what’s really scary was it used to be Holocaust denial, but now it’s moved into Holocaust affirmation, like Hitler was right. There’s such ignorance.”
The series begins with Hitler’s origins in Austria as a failed artist, lonely and secretive, and moves to his acceptance into the German army. His political success culminated in the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, where his offside Joseph Goebbels took charge of propaganda which, combined with Hilter’s own oratory skills, grabbed hold of German hearts and minds. They believed Hitler’s denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles, which he claimed enslaved them, and believed what Hitler said about racial supremacy.
The series proceeds to the rise of the German army and the Brownshirts, showing how much European land was in German sights in the early 1940s, and shows how anti-Semitism took hold. The history of the camps is shown through re-enactments and actual footage.
The series repeatedly leaves chronological order behind to go forward to the 1946 Nuremberg trials, where Nazis still living were required to admit their war crimes to judges from the US, Britain, Russia and France. This approach enabled Berlinger to provide immediate answers to any questions about what happened to those who’d committed atrocities when carrying out Hitler’s bidding.
William Shirer’s book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), and footage of Shirer himself as a CBS broadcaster, are the basis of the film. As one of the few American reporters in Nazi Germany at pivotal moments, Shirer was an eyewitness. He was censored as a journalist but managed to smuggled out his diaries; a heart-stopping re-enactment of that scene is a highlight.
Eventually, we arrive in the Berlin bunker in 1945, where we see Hitler shoot himself and give his lover Eva Braun a cyanide pill to swallow. What a life. What a death. A brilliant docu-drama.
★★★★★
