Les SS frappent la nuit

I watched The Devil Strikes at Night after browsing Son of Dracula director Robert Siodmak's IMDB credits and reading the film's extremely interesting synopsis.

Disillusioned German detective Axel Kersten investigates the identity of a serial killer who possesses the incredible strength of shattering the tiny u-shaped throat bone in his roughly 80 female victims.

Axel initially finds the full support of the Nazis, until the findings of his investigation threaten public perception of Hitler's SS. What could have been a more straightforward movie about a serial killer during Nazi Germany turns into a story about how quickly the lines of culpability can become blurred in such a bleak place as Germany towards the end of World War II. It's a great movie with excellent performances that really holds your attention for its two-hour runtime of reading subtitles.

It blew my mind to learn after watching The Devil Strikes at Night that it's story was loosely based on real-life serial killer Bruno Lüdke who shares his name with the character in the film.

Nachts,wenn der Teufel kam has realistically shown perversion of justice as a convincing argument against nazis.Robert Siodmak has convincingly outlined the historical background to examine one of the most ghastly episodes in German history.He elucidates how Nazi leadership made effectual use of crime,violence and totalitarianism in order to remain in power.Nachts,wenn der Teufel kam appears realistic as a result of nice all-round acting performances by Mario Adorf and Hannes Messemer.The film was a big commercial success as it won numerous prizes including the best direction award at Karlovy Vary.

There's nothing as intense and disturbing as German-produced serial killer films, especially when they are inspired by raw, macabre factual cases, like "M" (Peter Kürten), "The Tenderness of Wolves" (Fritz Haarmann) and "Angst" (Werner Kniesek). Okay, admittedly, that last one is 100% Austrian, but also and truly one of the most harrowingly realistic thrillers ever made. "The Devil Strikes at Night" is another masterpiece that fits into this category, as it's based on serial murderer Bruno Lüdke and very accurately depicts the period and the circumstances of his arrest in Berlin during the summer of 1944. Mario Adorf, still in one of the earliest roles of his rich career, impressively portrays the strong and potent but mentally disabled Lüdke. He breaks through the cork of a wine bottle with the tip of one finger, but he also occasionally feels the incontrollable urge to strangle young women, like the Hamburg waitress Lucy Hansen. Her lover, Willi Keun, is wrongfully arrested for the murder and sentenced to death, but you don't really care since he's a Nazi commander and a sleazy pervert. Commissioner Axel Kersten, however, does believe in justice and connects the murder to several ones that took place before the war. He unmasks Lüdke, but this isn't good news for SS-Gruppenfuhrer Rossdorf because he doesn't like the idea of a handicapped Aryan being able to remain below the radar in their superior Third Reich. Master director Robert Siodmak ("The Spiral Staircase") returns to Germany to portray his native country how it really was during World War II: corrupt, ugly, hypocrite and completely devoid of honest and honorable men! It's not a very exciting or action-packed thriller, but it's hugely atmospheric, depressing and wonderfully shot by Georg Krause. My inner horror fanatic is somewhat disappointed that a killer suspected of 51 murders is only seen strangling one victim, but Siodmak opted to put all his energy into the drawing of Lüdke as an atypical serial murderer and the slow but certain extirpation of Nazism.

"Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" is a film from the second German period of Robert Siodmak. Leaving Germany with the rise of Nazism in 1933 he returned to his home country after the Second World War in 1952. In the USA his film career suffered from his image of being a film noir director, in Germany this same image was more of a blessing. Also "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" is a good example of the film noir genre.

In German films the serial killer is portrayed in a different way than in for example American films. In American films he is portrayed as a savage beast who likes to kill. In German films the serial killer is both perpetrator and victim. He is a psychopat who has to kill. This is most clearly in "M" (1931, Fritz Lang), but is also the case in "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" (1957) and "Es geschah am hellichten Tag" (1958, Ladislao Vajda). Most convincing in his role as psychpat remains however Peter Lorre in his role as Hans Beckert in "M". In "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" Mario Adorf as Bruno Luedke can not match that performance, and he is hardly te blame for that.

In "M" the serial killer is hunted down by organised crime (who wants to keep the level of police activity at a low level). In "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" there is also some sort of organised crime, namely state crime in the form of the Nazi government. They are however not interested in the real killer, whose identity is uncovered by an honest detective. For reasons of public relations they prefer to give a death sentence to an innocent man, thereby showing their contempt for the value of a human live.

"Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" takes place in 1944, at the end of the war. A great deal of the film is devoted to the (miserable) life of German citizens. In this way there are similarities with films such as "Germania anno zero" (1948, Roberto Rossellini) or "Der Untergang" (2004, Oliver Hirschbiegel).

There is a strange continuity in German movies: about every 20 years someone makes a film about a serial-killer. Apart from "Es geschah am hellichten Tag" (recently remade by Sean Penn) I'm thinking of the following works:

* M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931)

* Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957)

* Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (1973)

* Der Totmacher (1995)

While three of these films are more or less loosely based on the case of Fritz Haarmann who killed more than 24 young men in the 20s, "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam" is about Bruno Luebke who murdered several people in Hamburg during WWII (also a true case). In contrast to the picture that many American movies (e.g. "Hannibal") paint of a serial-killer as an evil being who kills for pleasure, these German movies show men who are helpless victims of their urge to kill, to which they succumb not when they want to, but when they 'have' to. Mario Adorf plays Bruno as such a man and his performance is of the same rank as Peter Lorre's in "M" or Götz George's in "Totmacher" IMO.

Even better is Hannes Messemer as an SS-Officer, who, for 'political' reasons, wants another man executed against better judgement. The main forte of the film however, is the depiction of everyday-life in the last years of the third Reich. In the scene where the ugly harvest helpers get their reward from a sweating hanger-on Robert Siodmak perfectly captured the moral corruption (thinly veiled by empty propaganda phrases) within Nazi-Germany. In view of mass-murder of an entirely different caliber (i.e. genocide), the question if the right man is sentenced for a killing series becomes secondary in the end.