Downfall ( ) is a
2004 German-Austrian drama
film, depicting the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's life in his Berlin
bunker
and Nazi Germany in
1945. The film was directed by
Oliver Hirschbiegel, written by
Bernd Eichinger, and based upon the books:
Inside Hitler's
Bunker, by historian
Joachim
Fest;
Until the Final
Hour, the memoirs of
Traudl
Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries; portions of
Albert Speer's memoirs
Inside the Third Reich;
Hitler's Last Days: An Eye–Witness Account, by
Gerhardt Boldt;
Das Notlazarett Unter Der
Reichskanzlei: Ein Arzt Erlebt Hitlers Ende in Berlin
(memoirs) by Doctor
Ernst-Günther Schenck; and
Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936–1949
(memoirs) by
Siegfried
Knappe.
The film was nominated for the
Academy Award for
Best Foreign Language Film.
Plot
The film
begins in East Prussia with a group of
German women being escorted to Hitler's compound in Rastenburg
so that Hitler could choose another personal
secretary. Shortly, the scene shifts to
Adolf Hitler's 56th birthday on April 20, 1945.
Secretary
Traudl Junge is residing in the
Führerbunker. Generals
Wilhelm Burgdorf and
Karl Koller indicate the
Soviet Army is just 12
kilometres from the city center. At his birthday
reception Hitler resolves to stay in Berlin and rejects any attempt
at a diplomatic solution. Certain officers agree that the Führer
has lost all sense of reality.
A parallel
story is that of Dr. Ernst-Gunther
Schenck, an SS
medical officer who is ordered by the evacuating
high command to leave Berlin, in response to “Operation Clausewitz”. Schenck
pleads with a SS general to be allowed to stay in order to take
care of the hungry and sick. He tells the general that besides
being an SS officer he would be considered a medical doctor with
the Wehrmacht which was still in Berlin. The SS general allows
Schenck to stay in Berlin.
Schenck is requested by Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke to bring all the medical
supplies he can obtain to the Reich Chancellery
. While doing this, Schenck and his adjutant
go to a hospital in search of medical supplies. They approach a
tank position where a panzer commander informs them that everyone
has left the hospital, and to be careful of the Russian troops in
the area. Once inside the hospital, Schenck finds a room filled
with elderly people. After retrieving what medical supplies were
available, Schenck and his adjutant (while in route to the Reich
Chancellery) try to prevent the shooting of two old men, but
without success. The elderly men were shot by the leader of a group
of Greifs-Kommandos. A brief standoff ensues. Each group backs away
from the other and Schenck and his adjutant make it back to the
Reich Chancellary with the medical supplies.
Another parallel story concerns a group of child soldiers (
Hitler Youth) in Berlin. A boy in the group is
urged by his father to flee with him due to the hopelessness of the
situation but the boy refuses. Later this same boy, Peter, is shown
in a group that is being awarded
Iron
Crosses by Hitler for their bravery. Later Hitler discusses his
new
scorched earth policy with
Albert Speer, who begs mercy for the
German people, saying that Hitler's
plans will return them to the
Middle
Ages. Hitler claims that the German people have shown
themselves too weak and therefore the ones left do not deserve to
survive. Later,
Eva Braun holds a party
for the bunker inhabitants up in the Reich Chancellery, but Soviet
artillery fire ends the party early.
In the bunker, Hitler discusses the situation with the generals,
believing that
Waffen SS General
Felix Steiner will save them. However, Steiner
cannot mobilize enough men. Upon learning this, Hitler dismisses
all except the four highest-ranking generals. He furiously accuses
the Wehrmacht of sabotaging him from day one, but acknowledges that
the war is lost and states that he would prefer
suicide over surrender.
SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke is shown on the front lines
with his troops when he observes a group of civilian volunteers
running aimlessly to their deaths in the streets. Mohnke asks one
of his officers for a situation report. The officer informs him
that the civilians are members of the
Volkssturm, and they are under direct command of
the Minister of Propoganda, Dr.
Joseph
Goebbels. Mohnke orders the officer to get the Volkssturm out
of the line of fire, and states he will take responsibility for
doing so.
Mohnke
makes his way back to Reich Chancellery to confront Goebbels about the Volkssturm.
Goebbels is in the bunker communications room talking to his wife
Magda Goebbels. Goebbels tells his wife to bring the children to
the bunker and not to bring many toys or nightwear, that it is no
longer necessary. Thereafter, Mohnke tells Goebbels that the
Volkssturm are easy prey for the Russians. When confronted with
this, Goebbels is angered and tells Mohnke that their belief in
“final victory,” makes up for their lack of weapons and combat
experience. Mohnke tells Goebbels that if these men do not have
weapons their deaths are pointless. Goebbels informs Mohnke that he
has no pity for them for the German people brought this fate upon
themselves.
Later Hitler, Eva, Junge and Gerda discuss various means of
suicide. Hitler proposes shooting oneself through the mouth, while
Braun mentions taking
cyanide. Hitler gives
Gerda and Junge one cyanide capsule each. Eva Braun and
Magda Goebbels type goodbye letters, Braun to
her sister and Goebbels to her adult son (from her former marriage)
Harald Quandt.
The child soldiers fight in the streets of Berlin, but to no avail.
The young boy, Peter, witnesses the death of all his squad mates
and later flees home to his parents, only to find that they have
been murdered.
General
Wilhelm Keitel is ordered to find
Admiral Karl Dönitz, whom Hitler
believes is gathering troops in the north, and help him plan an
offensive to recover the Romanian
oilfields. Oberscharführer Rochus Misch, Hitler's radio operator, receives
a telegram from
Hermann Göring,
head of the
Luftwaffe.
Martin Bormann reads the telegram to Hitler,
where Göring asks permission to assume command of the Reich and
asks for acknowledgment by 10 pm, at which time he will assume
authority in the absence of a response. Considering this
treason, Hitler orders Göring's arrest and removal
from office.
General Weidling reports that the
Russians have broken through everywhere. There are no reserves and
air support has ceased. Brigadeführer Mohnke reports the
Red Army is only 300 to 400 meters from the Reich
Chancellery and that defending forces can hold out for a day or two
at most. Before leaving, Hitler reassures the officers that General
Walther Wenck will save them
all.
On Hitler's wedding day, Traudl takes dictation of the Führer's
political testament. Hitler has ordered
Joseph Goebbels to leave Berlin, but
Goebbels intends to ignore the order. Hitler marries Eva Braun.
When Günsche later brings a reply from Keitel that the main armies
are encircled or cannot continue their assault, Hitler states that
he will never surrender. He also forbids all officers to surrender.
Upon leaving the conference room Hitler gives Günsche the order to
cremate his body and that of Eva Braun after their death.
Eva Braun has her last conversation with Traudl. She gives her one
of her best coats and advises her to escape. Hitler has his final
meal in silence with
Constanze
Manziarly and his secretaries. He bids farewell to the bunker
staff, gives Magda Goebbels his Golden Party Badge (marking
original members of the
NSDAP from 27 February
1925 to 9 November 1933, with numbers 1 to 100,000), and retires to
his room with Eva Braun. Despite Magda Goebbels' pleas, the pair
commit suicide. Rather than live in a world without Nazism, Herr
and Frau Goebbels poison
their
children and commit suicide themselves. All the bodies are
burned outside the bunker complex.
Most of the bunker survivors attempt to escape, but die at the
hands of
Red Army infantrymen. Junge makes
her way through the Russian lines. Junge escapes from Berlin by
bicycle along with Peter from the group of child soldiers. The
fates of the film's main surviving characters are shown, before the
credits roll.
Cast
Reception
While treatment of the Third Reich is still a sensitive subject
among many Germans even 60 years after World War II, the film broke
one of the last remaining
taboos by its
depiction of Adolf Hitler in a central role by a German speaking
actor (as opposed to using actual film footage of Hitler).
Ganz did
four months of research to prepare for the role, studying a
recording of Hitler in private
conversation with Finnish Field
Marshal Mannerheim, in order to properly
mimic Hitler's conversational voice, and distinct Austrian
accent.
The film's impending release in 2004 provoked a debate in German
film magazines and newspapers. The tabloid
Bild asked "Are we allowed to show the monster as
a human being?"
Concern about the film's depiction of Hitler led
New Yorker film critic David Denby to
note:
With respect to German uneasiness about "humanizing" Hitler, Denby
said:
After previewing the film, Hitler biographer Sir
Ian Kershaw wrote in
The Guardian:
Addressing other critics like Denby,
Chicago Sun-Times film critic
Roger Ebert wrote:
Hirschbiegel confirmed that the film's makers sought to give Hitler
a three-dimensional personality.
The film was nominated for the 2005
Academy Award for
Best Foreign Language Film in the
77th Academy Awards. The film also won
the 2005
BBC 4 World Cinema competition.
The film
is set mostly in and around the Führerbunker. Hirschbiegel made an effort to accurately
reconstruct the look and atmosphere of the bunker through
eyewitness accounts, survivors'
memoirs and
other historical sources.
According to his commentary on the DVD, Der Untergang was filmed in Berlin,
Munich
, and in a district of Saint Petersburg
, Russia
, which, with
its many buildings designed by German architects, was said to
resemble many parts of 1940s Berlin.
Authenticity
The young boy in the Iron Cross ceremony outside of Hitler’s bunker
on or around mid-April 1945, is identified in the movie as Peter
Kranz. The boy that is being depicted is actually named Alfred
Czech. There is controversy around his exact actions after the
awards ceremony. In the film it shows Peter Kranz returning to the
front lines to fight the advancing Soviet army. The boy is shown
running with a Panzerfaust from a German position. When Peter is
faced with the death of several of his comrades, he falls asleep in
an artillery crater. Once the boy realizes that all hope is lost
for Germany, he returns home to his father and mother. Another
point of controversy is also exactly what Hitler said to the young
boy. In the film he asks the boy, “So you’re Peter? I wish my
generals were as brave as you.” In an interview with Czech
conducted by Independent magazine in the United Kingdom, there is
no mention of this conversation.
Uniforms worn in the film
German oak and green leaf camouflage tunics, smocks and helmet
covers, can be seen worn by many of the soldiers throughout the
movie. This uniform was issued in particular to units of the Waffen
SS, however, in the movie it appears to be worn by SS and
Wehrmacht-Heer soldiers alike. Several of the soldiers in the movie
are wearing the uniform of the
Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler
(LSSAH). This division was the only unit in the Wehrmacht or Waffen
SS allowed to wear the name of Adolf Hitler on the division cuff
band of their tunic. Soldiers wearing this insignia would include,
Brigadeführer Mohnke, Sturmbannführer
Otto Günsche and Oberscharführer Rochus
Misch.
Suicide in the film
In the film there is a large emphasis on suicide with several of
the main characters committing suicide or contemplating suicide.
This epidemic has been accurately portrayed in the film, it is
estimated that at one point during the latter part of the war
approximately five and a half million Germans and Nazis alike
either commited or considered commiting suicide. How many of these
resulted in death by suicide is not accurately known
(Usborne).
Criticism
The author Giles MacDonogh criticised the film for sympathetic
portrayals of Wilhelm Mohnke and
Ernst-Günther Schenck. Mohnke was
rumoured, but never proven, to have ordered the execution of a
group of
P.O.W.s in
Normandy, while Schenck's experiments with
medicinal plants in 1938 allegedly led to the deaths of a number of
concentration camp
prisoners. In answer to this criticism, the film's director, in the
DVD commentary, stated he did his own research and did not find the
allegations as to Schenck to be convincing. Furthermore, Mohnke
strongly denied the accusations against him, telling author Thomas
Fischer, "I issued no orders not to take
English prisoners or to execute
prisoners."
Wim Wenders called the filmmakers'
collaboration with a history professor as "a strategic move to
compile cultural capital and move the film beyond the reach of
reprehensibility, challenge, or contradiction by writers or critics
unwilling to engage the material other than by pointing out
historical inaccuracies." He felt that the film said: "Wir wissen,
wovon wir reden" ("We know what we're talking about"). Further,
Wenders argued that
Der Untergang clearly presented an
uncritical viewpoint toward the barbarism of its subject matter,
and accused the filmmakers of
Verharmlosung (rendering
harmlessness). Wenders supported this observation with close
readings of the film's first scene, and of Hitler's final scene,
suggesting that in each case a particular set of cinematographic
and editorial choices left each scene emotionally charged,
resulting in a glorifying effect.
The film's ending has also been the subject of criticism for not
revealing what actually happened to several of the women who were
present in the bunker. After the fall of Berlin an estimated 2
million German women were raped by the Soviets. In the film, the
women manage to escape or are seemingly left unharmed when the
Soviet soldiers arrive, whereas in reality several of the women
were
raped, some
gang
raped, and brutalized by the Soviet soldiers.
Gerda Christian,
Traudl Junge,
Else
Krüger and
Constanze
Manziarly, together with others, left the bunker on May 1 under
SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke's leadership. This group slowly
made its way north hoping to link up with a German army holdout on
the
Prinzenallee. The group, hiding in
a cellar, was captured by the Soviets on the morning of May 2. Like
millions of other German women, Gerda Christian and Else Krüger
were raped by soldiers of the Red Army. For these two women it was
apparently in the woods near Berlin. According to author James
O'Donnell of
The Bunker, Junge was also raped. However,
Junge herself never mentioned this in her autobiography.
While the film states that Manziarly vanished in 1945, Junge
recounts her being taken into an
U-Bahn tunnel by two Soviet soldiers,
reassuring the group that "They want to see my papers." She was
never seen again.
Parodies
The scene depicting Hitler's furious outburst to his generals when
he realizes that the war is lost has become a staple of internet
viral videos. Ganz's voice remains in
the videos, but subtitles show him talking about some setback in
politics, sports or video games. The original parody was about
Hitler getting banned from
Xbox Live; the
video gained a massive amounts of views on YouTube and was posted
on video game related sites including
IGN,
Joystiq, and
Kotaku.
At one point the most popular video showed Hitler in character as
Hillary Clinton denouncing
Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 U.S.
Democratic Party presidential primary campaign. Another video
featured Hitler as
Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper
outraged over the
NDP-Liberal
Coalition.
In February 2009, a Downfall parody
video protesting parking issues in Tel Aviv
, Israel
sparked a
heated debate with Holocaust survivors
about the legitimacy of jokes involving Hitler and the Nazi
regime. British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown was also cast
as Hitler in parodies of political developments in the United
Kingdom
, including a by-election
in Glasgow East.
Another approach is dubbing the scene with dialog from other films.
The Star Trek fan page was surprised to see Hitler claiming to be
Borg, in a speech from the
Star
Trek: First Contact film.
Bibliography
- (studies about the Film)
- Fischer, Thomas. "Soldiers Of the Leibstandarte." J.J.
Fedorowicz Publishing, Inc., 2008. ISBN 978-0-921991-91-5.
See also
References
- Fischer, Thomas. Soldiers of the Leibstandarte, J.J.
Fedorowicz Publishing, Inc. 2008, p 26.
- Hanna Schissler The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West
Germany, 1949-1968
- The Bunker, James Preston O'Donnell, Da Capo Press, 2001, ISBN
0306809583 page 211
- The Bunker, James Preston O'Donnell, Da Capo Press, 2001, ISBN
0306809583 page 293
- Retrieved October 2, 2009.
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