by Robert Alstead

Making a historical drama based on truth is a tricky business. The tendency is to play fast and loose with the facts to jazz up the story.
Downfall, a dramatization of the last two weeks of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, can’t go there. Six decades on, the war seems more, rather than less, politically sensitive. Especially if you are a German filmmaker.
Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film, set in large part in the claustrophobic confines of Hitler’s bunker as the Allies close in, interprets events with rigorous attention to historical detail that is commendable. The fact that it takes a German perspective, with a large German-speaking ensemble, is undoubtedly what make it so intensely watchable. It’s rare to see German filmmakers touch this subject.
That criticisms have been leveled at the film because it doesn’t highlight the gruesome reality of Hitler’s “final solution” is understandable. But in attempting to show the man behind the monster, it leaves you in absolutely no doubt about the chilling brutality of his reviled regime and of the man himself.
Bruno Ganz’s performance as Hitler is a brilliant study of surface charm and reserved friendliness, that can switch in a second to explosive vitriol and demonic rage. It is strange that this brooding, isolated figure who haunts the dimly lit corridors of the bunker, one arm quivering behind his back from advancing Parkinson’s disease, could command such respect. Yet, when all is clearly lost, Hitler’s staff still lack the temerity to speak against him. Easier to indulge his fantasy that he has armies to wage war up above, than risk incurring his wrath. Such was the myth and fear that surrounded Der Fuhrer.
Bernd Eichinger’s screenplay is framed around the eyewitness account written by Hitler’s last secretary, the late Traudl Junge, in Until the Final Hour. It draws also on Inside Hitler’s Bunker by renowned Hitler biographer Joachim Fest.
Junge’s suggestion that she was too naïve to see past Hitler’s status may seem a little hollow, considering how rabidly anti-semitic her employer was. But her uncritical eyewitness account, she only left the bunker after Hitler’s suicide, offers many intimate details about those last days, down to Hitler’s table manners and how she would sneak out for a smoke with Hitler’s devoted fiancé Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler) when the shelling stopped. Smoking disgusted Hitler.
Braun, wearing traditional folk dress and a brave smile, or madly rallying Hitler’s staff to party as the bunker shudders from exploding shells, comes across as even sympathetic. Her relationship with Hitler is less as a lover than as a true believer. As she confides to Junge not long before her death, Hitler shows more affection to his dog Blondi than to her.
This disturbing romance is brought painfully into focus when, kneeling at Hitler’s feet, she pleads that he spare her sister’s husband, the careerist SS officer Fegelein. Hitler spits angrily that Fegelein is a traitor and must be shot. Braun wipes away the tears. “You are the leader,” she suppliantly accepts.
The tragedy is that she is loyal, unquestioningly so to the end, a tragedy that was shared by a generation weaned on national socialist ideology and terror. The film is littered with suicides, none more shocking than when Magda Goebbels methodically drugs and then poisons her six children rather then let them live “in a world without national socialism.”
We also see Berliners scrabble about in the rubble for survival. Russian bombs and soldiers bear down on one side and Nazi lynch mobs ready to string up “deserters” who refused to join the Volkstorm are on the other. This desperate last struggle is poignantly conveyed in the story of a boy soldier, Peter, whose veteran father urges him to quit the barricades and come home.
Unsurprisingly, there is that sense that history is written by the survivors. Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect, survived the war, and wrote about his experience. He is an ambivalent figure, despicable for his favoured status, but almost heroic when he disobeys Hitler’s orders to follow a scorched earth policy at the end.
Another subplot about Professor Schenk, an SS doctor, who risks his life to help the wounded has been criticized for glossing his character. The man was linked with medical experiments on prisoners in Dachau.
The film may have flaws, but still it remains a serious and compelling insight into this dark era in Germany’s history.

Robert Alstead, who also writes for iofilm, is currently making a documentary about cycling called You Never Bike Alone.