Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

"Humanising" Hitler

In the 1960s, in Konrad Adenauer's West Germany, school 
textbooks portrayed Hitler as an important leader who did great 
things for Germany, but who made mistakes which diminished his 
standing. Had he not made those mistakes, he would have remained 
one of Germany's great leaders.

With US and British connivance, the Adenauer regime rehabilitated 
ex-Nazis, restored their property and raised them to positions of 
influence, especially in the armed forces. Meanwhile, anti-Nazi 
laws were used to repress the Communists and other anti-fascists.

There was a highly influential bloc of revanchists who demanded 
the "return" to Germany of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland as well 
as large chunks of Poland and the USSR. In these circumstances, a 
realistic portrayal of the Nazi period in the mass media was 
simply not on.

West German films and television eschewed any link between the 
Nazis and big business, portrayed Nazi Germany's armed forces as 
victims of circumstance, helpless pawns in Hitler's "mad 
schemes", people to be pitied not reviled. Concentration camps 
and the horrors meted out routinely by the German military were 
simply ignored, brushed under the carpet where it was hoped they 
would be overlooked.

And meanwhile, all the wrongs of the Nazi period that were 
admitted were put down as the sole responsibility of one man — 
Adolf Hitler. By identifying all the evils of Nazism with Hitler 
(and to a lesser extent his "gang"), fascism as a system did not 
need to be examined.

The attempted return to the streets of neo-Nazi groups, however, 
brought large counte-demonstrations by anti-fascists determined 
to block them. If the streets belonged to the people, however, 
the mass media belonged to the capitalists, and in West Germany, 
anti-fascist films were as scarce as teeth in chooks.

In East Germany, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), by 
contrast, they were commonplace. Numerous GDR films portrayed the 
Nazi period and what it meant for the German — and other — 
people.

But films from the socialist countries tended not to show Hitler 
either, although for a different reason. They studiously avoided 
adding to the myth that the horrors of the Nazi period, and WW2, 
were the result of Hitler's personal whim, rather than the 
inevitable result of the dictatorship of big capital.

One of the best portrayals of Hitler on the screen in this period 
(before the overthrow of socialism in Eastern Europe and the 
unification of Germany), was by the Swedish actor Gunnar Moller 
in the splendid Czech epic Days of Betrayal, a detailed 
and fascinating recounting of the Munich deal of 1938. Moller 
gives a riveting depiction of the Nazi leader, complete down to 
the last nervous tic.

Hitler's telephonist, Major Freytag, has described Hitler as a 
physical wreck — at least at the end, in 1945 — who walked with 
a limp and hid a shaking left hand behind his back.

Some at least of these physical deficiencies are on display in 
the most recent — and in many ways the most disturbing — film 
portraying the German dictator: the new German film The 
Downfall. From the producer of The Name of the Rose, 
the film premiered in Germany in mid-September.

Based on the memoirs of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's 
secretaries, who found him "enchanting", the film restricts 
itself to Hitler's last 12 days, trapped in his bunker as the 
Soviet Army closes in on his regime. This is not the first film 
to focus on this final act, which so handily shows Hitler as a 
tragic figure.

Pabst's The Last Act was made in 1955 in Austria and many 
a Nazi must have watched its maudlin depiction of Hitler's end 
with tears in his eyes. There was even a British TV film on this 
same theme, with Alec Guinness as "The Leader", facing his end 
with head held high.

Hitler in The Downfall has been deliberately "humanised" 
so that we might better "understand him". As played by Bruno 
Ganz, he is "an avuncular character with a penchant for chocolate 
cake" (London's Daily Telegraph), "a considerate boss with 
a tendency to shout" (Weekend Australian).

The effect of this "humanising" was succinctly summed up by the 
Berlin daily Der Tagespiegel: "This Hitler, who is so nice 
to the female bunker staff while he sends a whole people to the 
slaughter outside, does indeed keep awakening sympathy.

"A lonely screamer, betrayed by his followers, who stands firm 
until the end — isn't that a hero, maybe not as appealing as the 
few positive supporting characters, but all the larger than life 
for that?"

Hans Joachim Dribell, a 70-year-old retired engineer, told The 
Times' Berlin correspondent that the film "went too far" in 
making Hitler human: "There was no real explanation for his 
fanaticism. If you show someone like this as human, then people 
might be tempted to forgive him as a human — after all, to err 
is human."

The Times also noted another key element in this big 
budget apologia for Nazism: "The strongest reaction of the cinema 
audience [at an afternoon screening] was not to the gentle 
portrayal of Hitler — but to the footage of Berlin under Russian 
bombardment in the spring of 1945".

Writing in London's Daily Mail, Allan Hall identified the 
film as part of the process of sanitising Nazism, of turning it 
into "Nazi lite", which he defined as "the embrace of mankind's 
wickedest regime as a historical entity, as innocent as a walk 
around a medieval castle or a trip to the museum".

Hall quotes Berlin real estate agent Frank Hanuskewicz, whose 
family suffered under the Nazis: "When I see tourists outside the 
Finance Ministry — Hermann Goering's former Luftwaffe 
headquarters — looking at maps and giggling or visiting 
underground bunkers, I see that the cumulative effect is one of 
forgetting the real horrors of Nazism, the pain and suffering it 
caused on a scale unparalleled in world history."