Downfall – The End of the Reich

Richard Ostrofsky
(October, 2005)
A few weeks ago, Carol and I saw a German film called Downfall (Der
Untergang) at the Mayfair – a re-enactment of the last weeks of Hitler and
his henchmen in the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin in March and April, 1945. This
article is a response to the film itself, which we admired, and to some
hostile reviews (amidst many favorable ones) found afterwards on the Web
particularly that by David Cesarani and Peter Longerich, two professional
scholars of the war, in a review called "The Massaging of History" from
The Guardian, April 7, 2005. (You can easily find this C&L review with a
Google search on the keywords: "Cesarani,” “Longerich” and “Downfall”).
As a movie, the film is visually stunning, and superbly acted. The role of
Hitler, played by Bruno Ganz, is altogether convincing. Much smaller parts,
notably those of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, are also very well done. As a
representation of history, the film is questionable – at least insofar as
Cesarani and Longerich are able to question it. For example, they complain
that Traudl Junge, Hitler's private secretary through whose eyes much of the
story is told, was not the political innocent that the film asks us to believe.
They are astonished (though I see no real contradiction here) that Waffen-
SS General Mohnke whose unit massacred 80 captured British soldiers
outside Dunkirk in May,1940 and who later led a regiment in Normandy
that murdered more than 60 surrendered Canadian troops is depicted “as a
humanitarian pleading with Hitler to evacuate civilians and arguing with
Goebbels against the suicidal deployment of poorly armed militia against
the Red Army.” Why a humanitarian? Why not just a brutal, ambitious
general officer with enough sense, by 1945, to see that the jig was up?
I am not competent to judge the film's historical veracity. Its sins, as
pointed up in the C&L review, are of omission rather than fabrication, as is
not at all surprising. But I don't quite grant the review’s charge that the film
is slanted “to depict the German people as the last victims of Nazism” and
to reinforce “the sense of Germans as guileless victims.” I think its message
can more fairly be read as a study in political insanity. Indeed this is why I
found the film of interest, and why I am recommending it:
 There are only a few real crazies in this very crazy situation. And even
these few are insane or evil in very different ways, one from another. Most
of the characters in the Bunker itself, as in the crumbling city above ground,
are relatively normal human beings doing desperate and horrible things to
be sure, but mostly swept along by very commonplace human motives:
ambition, misguided loyalty, respect for authority, fear, desperation, or sheer
force of habit. To me, the “ordinary Germans” in the film did not come off
as “guileless victims,” but mostly as wretches and wretchesses who chose
willingly to follow insanity and evil, made themselves its willing
instruments, and then, when the end came, responded to the collapse of
their world in familiar, pathetically human ways.
This re-enactment of the events in Berlin in 1945 set me to musing on
Dubya's White House in Washington, sixty years later. In one case as in the
other, we see a weird combination of self-deceptive idealism and cynical
self-interest. We see a bunch of arrogant little men pretending to be masters
of a situation that is plainly beyond their comprehension. We see a nation
over-reaching, squandering its wealth and power, uniting a world against
itself, and wrecking its own social fabric. We see a whole lot of very large,
infuriated chickens coming home to roost.
Hitler, completely out of touch with reality by March of 1945, is
counting on a few no longer functioning army groups to relieve the siege of
Berlin, and win his war in a final dazzling stroke. One is prompted to
wonder what the American policy makers are counting on today.