NOTE: Unfortunately, I was unable to make the deadline last Friday due to illness. To catch up, another blog post will appear tomorrow at 10am on the site.
***½ out of ****
Joe Berlinger became known as a documentarian of extraordinary power with films he co-directed by the late Bruce Sinofsky. Both were responsible for a trilogy of television docs concerning the West Memphis Three trial, another legendary case during the “Satanic Panic” of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Those three films—Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory—were made as the events were unfolding and helped (partially) exonerate three innocent men of a wretched homicide, the investigation of which was botched from the get-go.
Recently, Berlinger has been responsible for many docuseries on Netflix, the latest of which also covers a famous trial—perhaps the most important trial of the 20th Century: the Nuremberg trials. My interest in how Western Civilization could have achieved such a failure as allowing the Shoah to take place has led me to comb through as many movies on the subject as I possibly could, the standouts being Stanley Kramer’s magnificent 1961 epic Judgment at Nuremberg (featuring the finest performances of both Spencer Tracy and Maximilian Schell's careers) and an all-star television film, Nuremberg, from the early 2000s. Books such as Raul Hilberg’s massive and essential The Destruction of the European Jews show how the National Socialist German Workers’ Party meticulously plotted, mostly through documents, first the expulsion, the ghettoization, and then, later, the mass murder of more than six million Jews during the reign of the Third Reich as it was perpetrating wars on both its Western and Eastern fronts.
Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial has its faults, but there is perhaps no better dispelling of the myth that if Adolph Hitler had not come to power, someone else would have gone down the same road. After all, antisemitism in Germany pervaded the society for centuries after Martin Luther spent the last days of his life choking on his own bile, excoriating his Jewish brothers and sisters.
Often, Hitler is thought of as a cypher who was caught up in the Zeitgeist and gave Germany what it craved. Instead, the six-part series shows Hitler’s evil genius as he rose from humble beginnings in Vienna as a frustrated painter to become a fascist dictator unlike anyone excepting Stalin. The series probes his life, his political thought, his ruthlessness, and his flair for surrounding himself with sycophants—evil geniuses in their own right such as Goebbels and Göring—who did his bidding.
The story is told primarily through the reports of American war correspondent William L. Shirer who came as close as any foreign national to witness Hitler’s rise to power. Audio from his radio broadcasts (sometimes, unfortunately, “recreated” by AI—hey, guys—hire actors!) and extensive film and audio from the Nuremberg trials (most of which has never been heard or seen before) ground the series, ultimately making it compulsive and necessary viewing.
When the documentary turns to its talking heads, however, we are treated to academics who are clearly making comparisons between Hitler and Donald J. Trump. Not one, but many of the interviewees portray Hitler’s campaign as “Make Germany Great Again.” Perhaps that’s true, but every time this is mentioned, you find yourself scoffing at such blatant attempts at making connections from the ‘30s and ‘40s with our present day in an election year. Whatever your feelings about Trump, the way the term “Hitler” is thrown around to just about anyone we don’t like is as tired a trope as revealing it was all a dream at the end of a movie.
That being said, there were stories of the Holocaust I had never heard before or seen portrayed—Himmler, himself a maniac, becoming disgusted at watching the compulsory mass shootings of Jewish civilians prior to the creation of the death camps, a deep dive into the feelings of Germany after bearing the brunt of World War I on its back, and the despicable “answers” given by top Nazi officials at the trials themselves who keep passing the buck: “We were only taking orders.” Perhaps they were, but they obviously could not live with what they had done for the few who were not killed in war or hanged took the easy way out—suicide by cyanide capsule.
On the whole, if you have a strong stomach, I encourage you to watch it. There is always trepidation when I approach a Holocaust film. One wonders if the magnitude of the carnage could ever or should be visually demonstrated. And, yet there is enough in this series to recommend that I would say it is perhaps Berlinger’s best work since he lost his collaborative partner.
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