Oliver Hirschbiegel
La Caduta

Berlin 12 April - 2 May 1945.

In the bunker specifically built for him under the rubble of the German capital, the slow but foretold and predictable agony and decline of the Führer takes place. That is, of a man who convinced millions of people that humanity is divided into races, of which the superior and dominant one is the Aryan race composed of tall, blond, and fit Germans, he who was Austrian, ugly, short, with black hair and mustache.

But, just a moment… are we really speaking about a man? Can a human being think and, through his men, carry out such abominations? Can a human being rationally plan the genocide of entire “races”, and, at the same time and in the moment of defeat, show no interest and actually feel shame and disdain for his people who, for him and with him, slowly drag themselves towards collapse and total humiliation?

Oliver Hirschbiegel's film presents us with a Hitler as no other cinematic work had made him known to us. A mad man, indeed, clear in his madness, yet still a man. Physically debilitated, plagued by Parkinson's, bent over himself, he wanders among the walls of the bunker that runs throughout its branches under the Reichstag, dispensing orders his lieutenants cannot execute.

The war is lost, and the only one who seems not to realize it is him, who angrily rejects Himmler's advice to leave Berlin and continues in his ordinary insane certainty of uniting all the world's populations under the swastika. Extremely fragile, furious with the army generals whom he considers the cancer of the Reich, full of fears but also, at times, caring towards his family and his dog, kind, affable.

Thus we are presented with the leader of the sadistic murderers who, directly and indirectly, caused the death of almost sixty million people during the Second World War, reducing the European Jewish population by a third. Obviously, such a presentation could not fail to provoke the ire and condemnation of many (including director Wim Wenders) which resulted in the strong stance of the Human Rights Organization created by Simon Wiesenthal.

For sure, the film is based on the accounts given in detail by Hitler's personal secretary, Traudl Junge, hence it does not propose itself as a form of revisionism of the most bloodthirsty dictator in history. I don't believe, in all honesty, that viewers could derive such a message from the viewing, rather, one more tends to think about how mad and hallucinatory the vision of the Reich was by the protagonists, to the point of legitimizing collective suicide, which finds the apex of repulsion and inhumanity in Magda Goebbels' killing of her children, making them ingest a poison capsule so they would not live in a world without the Reich.

This, at least, was my feeling. However one wishes to consider it, there's no doubt that Bruno Ganz's portrayal of the Führer is magnificent. I would like to dedicate a small memory to my grandfather and to those like him who experienced on their own skin the sufferings and tortures of the German prison camps.

Just to say that the true men are them and no one else.