A chilling account of Hitler’s rise, by those who knew him
Channel 4’s exemplary documentary, Dictator: The Hitler Interviews, feels terrifyingly relevant to today
Television history rarely repeats itself, but it often rhymes. Nearly 30 years ago, The Nazis: A Warning from History told of the rise and fall of the Third Reich with the help of those who were there. An unimprovable six-part documentary, it can be found on BBC iPlayer.
The homily enshrined in its title was that we must look to the past to avoid its mistakes. And yet a century on from the birth of Nazism, you can’t move for populist strong men selling the snake oil of nationalism. Hence the timeliness of Dictator: The Hitler Interviews (Channel 4).
Once again this is a serial that calls on the highest expertise. Where The Nazis consulted Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw, Dictator leans on Third Reich historian Richard J Evans. All witnesses now being dead, it draws instead on a remarkable trove of interviews, many done for ITV, with many who were in the room with Hitler. They range widely, from Hitler’s Linz classmate who recalled their history lessons in German exceptionalism, to the ghastly Diana Mosley who simpered that the Führer had “something very special thing within him”.
The starry-eyed picture they all painted was of a mesmeric bulldozer who could reduce all in his presence to putty or puddles. Reinhard Spitzy, Ribbentrop’s private secretary, “loved being in his aura”. But to be there meant to listen. “He was absolutely convinced about himself,” said Helene Hanfstaengl, with whom Hitler was infatuated. “He couldn’t stand anybody who wanted to talk.” Does such a leader sound familiar?
Or how about the observation of Ewald von Kleist on the serpentine hiss of propaganda? “If you have very few possibilities for other information,” he explained, “then you become very impressed by the things which you are told and it’s very difficult to make up your own mind.” It sounds horribly like the groupthink that hardens in the silos of social media.
This is an exemplary re-run of the last century’s most well-worn narrative. Deft colourising of footage shrinks the distance between then and now. If I have a quibble, it is that in a three-episode dash there are ellipses, particularly in relation to the Holocaust. Not one of the camps is named, nor the Nuremberg Laws or Kristallnacht.
Perhaps this reflects the average German’s claim that they were hoodwinked and knew nothing. The delusion went to the top: there are chilling pleas of ignorance from Speer and von Schirach, both grilled by David Frost after their release from Spandau, and from a harrumphing Leni Riefenstahl.
Except Germans did know, and several say so here. When Emmi Bonhoeffer spread the word that Jews were being killed in the camps, her husband Klaus deplored her loose tongue. Although not mentioned here, he was executed for his role in the failed assassination of Hitler.
The attempt and its aftermath are reconstructed in some detail. “No one,” screamed the performative judge in the plotters’ show trial, “can be German without being loyal to our Fuhrer!” This is the closest Dictator strays to holding up a mirror to contemporary nativism. Hitler so feasted on images of his would-be assassins’ execution that a shocked aide of his recalled leaving the room. We must never follow him through the door.
Dictator: The Hitler Interviews is on channel4.com
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
