Ascensão e Queda do Terceiro Reich

A leader of low intellect who specialises in insulting people and inventing racial lies, with the help of big business, finds himself leader of the country, despite polling a minority of the votes. Blaming all of the nation's trouble on foreigners and minorities, and vows to create an employment surge while make the country great again. Not that there are any parallels in the world today (2017). This ought to be required viewing for every schoolchild and, in fact, everybody , as it is a comprehensive, detailed look at the reasons why one limited individual with only a twisted philosophy of hate rose to become a murderous monster, wreaking terror across Europe. Aided by sparing use of witness interviews and Shirer's own comments, this is a towering account of a horrific era.

For some reason my local PBS station ran this flick in the mid-1990s, and I caught all three (two-hour-long) episodes. Like most documentaries without re-enactments, the film is just footage from the period and interviews with survivors. What made it interesting was the brassy opening music, which sounded more like the score for a docu on gangland Chicago then one on Nazis.

Following (loosely) the structure of the book on which it is based, each episode chronologically followed the origins of Adolf Hitler, the milieu he grew up in, WWI, his discovery of the German Worker's Party, how he made this group of right-wing cranks into the Nazi Party, the Depression, his rise to power, the Nazification of Germany, WWII, the defeat of Germany, the Allied discovery of the Holocaust. The last hour of the show, I think, was taken up discussing the "Final Solution," with an interview of a survivor who was a child when he was sent to one of the death camps.

Despite the amount of material, I think the book is a better chronicler of what went on those twelve years. A good companion film is Alain Resnais' French short "Night & Fog."

This is too-severely cut down from the original 6-hour adaptation of William L. Shirer's classic history of the war in Europe, and it doesn't really work. The subject is simply too broad for this kind of hop-skip-&-jump treatment, though at this range, we might say (a little patronisingly) "Not bad for 1968".

We're essentially looking at newsreel that would have been almost as familiar then as it is now, and the film is little more than a chronological sequence of clips, overlaid with a few philosophical reflections, but no opportunity for creative theming. Of course, much new research has come out since, but I think it was already known that the Führer lost his temper with Ribbentrop for allowing Chamberlain to keep the peace in '38, because he'd been planning for war all along, and was in a hurry to get started, before his (uncertain) health declined any further. Also Albert Speer was out of jail by then, and had revealed that Hitler's first appetising taste of appeasement came in March '36, during the brief reign of Edward VIII, when that unwise monarch secretly reassured him that Britain would not oppose his occupation of the Rhineland.

Among the few interviewees, we meet a most impressive young Jewish survivor of the camps, recounting the genocidal acts that cost him the whole of his family. And Shirer himself pops up a couple of times, with insights that might have carried more conviction if he didn't keep nearly putting his pipe in his mouth the whole time.

The only problem I have with this version is that it is way too abbreviated, and Richard Basehart is not the narrator! I saw a longer abbreviated version on TNT in the early 1990s, but have never been able to find it. The Wolper office at UC will not release the original 6 hour version for some very unexplainable reason. What a shame for such a great documentary. The person I spoke with on the phone did not give a reason for this. This is a great film version of Shirer's book with the same title. It is a great summary of life in Germany from 1918-1945, a period of unbelievable importance to today's world, a period which indeed did change the world.

This documentary showcases the Hitlerian strategy for conquering hearts and minds by exploiting people's capacity to hate, something as relevant in our time as it seems to have been in his. This is a lesson which is especially worth remembering at this point in history.

I might also add that the IMDb has goofed here, and that the narrator is not Richard Basehart, but in fact whoever it is is never identified in the titles. Also, while the music is darkly effective, it turns out that for some odd reason Lalo Schifrin reprises a prominent piece of his MISSION IMPOSSIBLE score (a march) even though that show was still running in prime time when this came out in 1968.

This also leads me to another point -- one of the other reviewers here made the bizarre comment that the Cold War was over in connection with this documentary; to the contrary, in 1968 it was still going strong, heated as it was by the escalating war in Vietnam. That reviewer also gets his dates wrong with regard to the United States; it entered the war against Hitler in December, 1941, not 1944. Before Christmas, 1942, the US not only had a significant presence at sea fighting German U-boats (it had actually begun that months before hostilities between the two were formally declared in 1941), but it had been an equal partner (at least) of the British in carrying out the invasion of North Africa. By the end of 1943 it had been the leading actor in conquering Sicily and invading Italy, and had began striking Germany in the European war's only daylight strategic bombing campaign.