I've read countless books, biographies, and hagiographies about Hitler...
Hitler was a man, just like many others, with his fears, his idiosyncrasies... It's just that he managed to channel them in the right direction at the right time. In the end, it was his "disciples," or anti-disciples (for those who believe in the esotericism of Nazism, which is partially romanticized but contains many disturbing hidden truths), who indoctrinated him definitively. Characters like Hess, Speer, Himmler, Goering, and Stricher were crucial for the social, metasocial, and eschatological iconography of Nazism. They were the ones behind the "final solution," they were the bureaucratic apparatus of the party, its symbols, its Gods... Hitler was ultimately much more governable than one might think, and to put it politically, a lone man with his ideas is like Don Quixote battling windmills; many men sharing the same idea can change the world, positively (see '68) or negatively (see 1933).
Hitler, a paranoid hypochondriac, a misanthrope, one who (paradoxically) detested violence to the extent of disposing of the SA "hordes" in favor of the SS, who were much more "bourgeois," civil, and disciplined. A man who deeply hated criminals and pedophiles (in fact, he had the pedophile and former criminal Streicher assassinated), a man who needed to drink to face his first speeches in Munich beer halls... A man profoundly shy and introverted.
Everything and the opposite of everything has been said about Hitler, but one thing is certain, a historical truth established. The racial and supremacist theories were certainly not invented by him, nor by Hess or Speer... They were theories, like that of the so-called "Aryan race," or Pan-Germanic, or Indo-European, which had already emerged in the late 19th century in exclusive and often aristocratic circles in England, Germany, and even America. It was the music of Wagner, resplendent and cryptic; it was the works of Nietzsche, easily manipulable, also thanks to the philosopher's sister who did everything to twist them into a Nazi key...
Hitler was a great statesman, but let's not forget that, unlike Mussolini (surrounded by incompetent toadies), he surrounded himself with people who were, shall we say, "more qualified" than he was (yes, he evidently had a less pronounced inferiority complex than the Duce)... He surrounded himself with individuals who, within just five years, socially and otherwise rebuilt Germany, which in the 1920s was in worse shape than Italy... Factories, highways, economic plans implemented by ministers who, if we had them now in Italy, we would become the second global power within two years...
Hitler, a man consistent to the core... Who, rather than ending up at "Alexanderplatz" head down like his Italian friend/colleague, preferred the "German way"... A final, I dare say, "romantic," the much-loved Wagnerian ending, that Gotterdammerung of Siegfried.
The film shows for the first time the man, in those fatal days, an old man nearing the end, who still has the capacity to shout his anger and contempt at his generals, that "I should have done like Stalin and hanged you all!"
Not an Anglo-Saxon Hitler, not a Sir Alec Guinness, nor the usual American caricature, recently revisited for the umpteenth time in that abomination known as "Inglourious Basterds"...
A human Hitler, alone in his (self)d destructive madness, abandoned even by his closest friends (Speer)...
And that tremor of his hand at the beginning of the film presents him to us, in a Herzoghian face...
Because Hitler will be remembered in a thousand ways, but everyone must know that he was a man, an ordinary man, who one day became, albeit briefly, the master of the world due to a series of circumstances... A modern Nero, an updated Caligula who, for his purposes, chose a scapegoat: the Jews. And he did this lucidly, knowingly, just as 2,000 years earlier the two Roman emperors chose the Christians...
This must always be kept in min
