Product Description
Like no other portrait of the dictator ever made, this groundbreaking set shows how Hitler's personality shaped every aspect of the Nazi regime, from the battlefield to propaganda films. Documentary, approx. mins.
Amazon.com
Typical Hitler biographies start either at his birth or at his appointment to chancellor in 1933, and follow events through 1945. Not so here: ZDF and A&E's psychological biography The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler manages to give us something new. Each of the six tapes in this set starts with Hitler's youth and ends with his suicide but focuses specifically on only one archetype in his personality: "The Private Man," "The Seducer," "The Blackmailer," "The Dictator," "The Commander," and "The Criminal." Rather than present the historical events moment by moment, this documentary delves into normally unresearched areas and offers a behind-the-scenes psychological perspective on the 20th century's greatest criminal. A component of the production that disappoints, however, irregularly displays Hitler's citations between segments, accompanied by disharmonic music. The point is here perhaps too heavy-handed, even trite, in an age today when so many are desensitized through overexposure to Nazi rhetoric. The intent of these citations thus falls flat. Another unfortunate though common misjudgment in this English-language edition of the A&E production is the failure to translate Nazi concepts, imbuing them with a mystical feel that is totally absent in a German-language context. To an English-speaker's ears, such terms as Führer, Lebensraum, and Einsatztruppen seem abstract, even magical. It would be helpful if producers of Nazi-era histories could show how concrete, how base, such terms really are: Führer means simply "leader"; Lebensraum, "room to live"; Einsatztruppen, "commandos." Nazism is not a high-brow ideology, and there is no need to enhance National Socialism by inadvertently mystifying it this way.
These shortcomings do not dominate, however, and ZDF and A&E's huge effort at integrating oral history with film footage is praiseworthy. Enhanced with rare color footage and compelling interviews of those closest to Hitler, this biography is truly something unusual among hundreds of otherwise similar Hitler biographies. An informed recommendation for any history or psychology buff. --Erik J. Macki
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