A fascinatingly original takes on the subject of what made Hitler Hitler, and why a nation paid any mind to a radical loser. It doesn’t take filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (Gunnar’s Palace) but 125 seconds to mention Trump by name, and still I found myself asking, “Why so long?” We end in Sobibor, Poland, which for a year-and-a-half served as a Nazi German extermination camp. Hitler turned it into a forest in 1943. Today it’s a wooded glade where even birds won’t perch. Everything that remained was erased. Why Jews? Jews were different, and based on this difference, had to be eradicated. A nation acquiesced; no one stood up to Hitler. It was as easy as that. Unlike today’s politicians who fear losing their jobs over Trump’s disapproval, Hitler’s henchmen feared for their very lives. The past is horrifying, but looking forward, the rewriting of history is such that kids are playing Neo Nazi games on YouTube and referring to Hitler’s crimes against humanity as “the myth of the 6 million.” As our unerring narrator points out, in the case of Trump, “It took a catastrophe to see the obvious.” Were it not for Covid, who knows what Joe Biden’s chances would have been? Early on, we are asked, “Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the expansion of the Nazi thematic universe?” One runs that risk any time his name appears in the title. The only thing we have to fear is not fear itself, but the normalizing of Hitler that thrives on social media. The millions of average folk who voted for a man who inquired about the possibility of injecting household disinfectants as a cure for the pandemic aren’t gonna lap this up like moonshine-laced Kool Aid. As historian and scholar of the Holocaust Yehuda Bauer so wisely put it, “The problem isn’t that the Nazis were inhuman, but that they were human.” (2020) — Scott Marks
This movie is not currently in theaters.