The Fall
- Episode aired 2010
- 1h 27m
IMDb RATING
8.5/10
63
YOUR RATING
Photos
Adolf Hitler
- Self
- (archive footage)
Else Klamroth
- Self
- (archive footage)
Wibke Bruhns
- Self
- (archive footage)
- (as Wibke Klamroth)
Hans Georg Klamroth
- Self
- (archive footage)
Julien Bryan
- Self - Filmmaker
- (archive footage)
Willy Peter Reese
- Self - Soldier
- (archive footage)
Joseph Echstaler
- Self
- (archive footage)
Franz Echstaler
- Self
- (archive footage)
Liesl Echstaler
- Self
- (archive footage)
Dan Bittner
- Self
- (voice)
Geoffrey Cantor
- Self
- (voice)
Eliza Foss
- Self
- (voice)
Adam Grupper
- Self
- (voice)
James Lurie
- Self
- (voice)
Beth McDonald
- Self
- (voice)
Christina Neilsen
- Self
- (voice)
Jason Schulmann
- Self
- (voice)
- Director
- Writer
- All cast & crew
- Production, box office & more at IMDbPro
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaReleased as part of a six DVD box-set entitled "The Nazis: One People. One Reich. One Führer", in connection with the History Channel.
Featured review
War, The Decisive Human Failure.
This footage -- no talking heads, just narration -- was taken by Germans at home and at the front, from the beginning of World War II in 1939 to the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945. Mostly we get glimpses of young men and woman, stupid, as many young men and women are, shooting home movies of their pets, their spouses, their holidays and vacations, their families celebrating Christmas, and the mutilation and hanging of men, women, and children that the Nazis decided they didn't want around.
Nobody knows the exact figures of those who were executed or murdered in the extermination camps. The figure most likely to come to mind is six million, but that roughly accounts for the Jews. In addition, the Nazis exterminated communists, Slavs, Polish intellectuals, homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents, and the feeble minded. The total is closer to twelve or thirteen million.
That any collectivity of human beings was capable of such grievous behavior came as a surprise to everyone, because until the 20th century Germany had not been thought of as particularly militaristic. It was the land of Kant, Beethoven, Schiller, Schubert, and Goethe. The French writer, Madame de Stael, romantically portrayed for the Napoleonic world of the early nineteenth century a Germany utterly unlike the grotesque image later drawn by the Allied propagandists of two World Wars. Madame de Stael's Germans were a nation of "Poets and Thinkers," a race of kindly, impractical, other-worldly dreamers without national prejudices and, strangely, in the light of later stereotypes, "disinclined to war." For years after 1945 the image of Germans was one of Aryans and Prussians like Erich von Stroheim.
This episode takes us quickly from the happy early years of the war to the entry of the United States and the Battle of Stalingrad, by which time things didn't look so hot, either at the front or at home. The soldiers were dying in droves in Russia, freezing to death. Christmas is the most honored and revered holiday in Germany and in 1942, on Christmas day alone, 1,280 German soldiers died. Field Marshall Paulus finally surrendered his entire army to the Russians -- some ninety thousand beaten, starving men, of whom about five thousand survived the war. At home, goods were rationed and scarce. The horses disappeared. Bread was baked with potato flour sawdust.
In the Spring of 1943 the propaganda films shown in Germany still presented the usual colorful pageant -- victories, circuses, acrobats, pretty girls smiling, handsome men doing one and a half gainers off the diving boards. It must have taken a great deal of cognitive effort to make the films concordant with the reality witnessed outside the theater. Berlin was being bombed and the results were horrifying. Churches were blasted into rubble. The Tiergarten, the famous zoo, was blown up and wounded zebras and deer screamed and galloped down the streets. By this time many expected to lose the war and acted as if, in fact, they had nothing more to lose. There's a decent feature film available describing Berlin's civilians during this period, "Aimée and Jaguar."
The Normandy invasion pretty much put an end to fantasies by either civilians or the military. The plot to kill Hitler failed and hundreds more died horrible deaths. Erwin Rommel was forced to commit suicide although he'd had little to do with the plan, his only wish being to see Hitler deposed and a separate peace made with the Western Allies, perhaps all of them joining in the battle against the Soviet Union. Well, as he'd always said, Rommel was a soldier not a politician. The Red Army occupied Berlin and were not magnanimous. Not so much the initial wave of combat soldiers but those following later. Stalin had urged revenge. Thousands of women were raped and one in ten of them committed suicide.
I can't say I cared for the narrator's overdramatic presentation but the editing is judicious and quietly artful. A teen-aged girl plays in the sunshine and tosses a ball into the sky and there is a cut to a black-and-white shot of an Allied fighter zooming along somewhere overhead. The teen-agers, as young as thirteen, would be rounded up along with the old men and formed into the Volksturm, the last pitiful effort for nation to die with honor.
I don't know why anybody would want to die for honor or for any of dozens of other reasons. As General William Tecumsah Sherman said, "War is all hell." It certainly is. But it has its appeal for some of us, like General George S. Patton: "Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best." In either case we seem unable to shake the habit.
Nobody knows the exact figures of those who were executed or murdered in the extermination camps. The figure most likely to come to mind is six million, but that roughly accounts for the Jews. In addition, the Nazis exterminated communists, Slavs, Polish intellectuals, homosexuals, gypsies, political dissidents, and the feeble minded. The total is closer to twelve or thirteen million.
That any collectivity of human beings was capable of such grievous behavior came as a surprise to everyone, because until the 20th century Germany had not been thought of as particularly militaristic. It was the land of Kant, Beethoven, Schiller, Schubert, and Goethe. The French writer, Madame de Stael, romantically portrayed for the Napoleonic world of the early nineteenth century a Germany utterly unlike the grotesque image later drawn by the Allied propagandists of two World Wars. Madame de Stael's Germans were a nation of "Poets and Thinkers," a race of kindly, impractical, other-worldly dreamers without national prejudices and, strangely, in the light of later stereotypes, "disinclined to war." For years after 1945 the image of Germans was one of Aryans and Prussians like Erich von Stroheim.
This episode takes us quickly from the happy early years of the war to the entry of the United States and the Battle of Stalingrad, by which time things didn't look so hot, either at the front or at home. The soldiers were dying in droves in Russia, freezing to death. Christmas is the most honored and revered holiday in Germany and in 1942, on Christmas day alone, 1,280 German soldiers died. Field Marshall Paulus finally surrendered his entire army to the Russians -- some ninety thousand beaten, starving men, of whom about five thousand survived the war. At home, goods were rationed and scarce. The horses disappeared. Bread was baked with potato flour sawdust.
In the Spring of 1943 the propaganda films shown in Germany still presented the usual colorful pageant -- victories, circuses, acrobats, pretty girls smiling, handsome men doing one and a half gainers off the diving boards. It must have taken a great deal of cognitive effort to make the films concordant with the reality witnessed outside the theater. Berlin was being bombed and the results were horrifying. Churches were blasted into rubble. The Tiergarten, the famous zoo, was blown up and wounded zebras and deer screamed and galloped down the streets. By this time many expected to lose the war and acted as if, in fact, they had nothing more to lose. There's a decent feature film available describing Berlin's civilians during this period, "Aimée and Jaguar."
The Normandy invasion pretty much put an end to fantasies by either civilians or the military. The plot to kill Hitler failed and hundreds more died horrible deaths. Erwin Rommel was forced to commit suicide although he'd had little to do with the plan, his only wish being to see Hitler deposed and a separate peace made with the Western Allies, perhaps all of them joining in the battle against the Soviet Union. Well, as he'd always said, Rommel was a soldier not a politician. The Red Army occupied Berlin and were not magnanimous. Not so much the initial wave of combat soldiers but those following later. Stalin had urged revenge. Thousands of women were raped and one in ten of them committed suicide.
I can't say I cared for the narrator's overdramatic presentation but the editing is judicious and quietly artful. A teen-aged girl plays in the sunshine and tosses a ball into the sky and there is a cut to a black-and-white shot of an Allied fighter zooming along somewhere overhead. The teen-agers, as young as thirteen, would be rounded up along with the old men and formed into the Volksturm, the last pitiful effort for nation to die with honor.
I don't know why anybody would want to die for honor or for any of dozens of other reasons. As General William Tecumsah Sherman said, "War is all hell." It certainly is. But it has its appeal for some of us, like General George S. Patton: "Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best." In either case we seem unable to shake the habit.
helpful•12
- rmax304823
- Apr 13, 2016
Details
- Runtime1 hour 27 minutes
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