I enjoyed—though “enjoyed” is not the right word—the Netflix documentary Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial (2024). I wanted to write a review of it at least in part because right-wingers are coming at it in Google reviews as propaganda due to the clear parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany and the rise of fascism in 2020s America. You’d think a person, realizing that the candidate they support is taking his propaganda and policy cues from Hitler would step back and say “My God, what have I done?” But, you’d be wrong, of course. The response, as many one-star Google reviews will show, is perl-clutching accusations of (yet another) grievance. You really can’t win with these people.
To the documentary itself. I’m particularly fond of the ways in which Hitler and the Nazis combines sources. A good bit of the narration is provided by the works of William Shirer, the journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). Most of the quotations are not from that volume. They come, rather, primarily from several of the other books Shirer wrote about his experiences as a foreign correspondent: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (1960), Berlin Diary (1941), The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940 (1984), A Native’s Return: 1945-1988 (1990), et al. The documentary uses Shirer’s radio broadcasts. But, as that author, who died in 1993, isn’t around to voice his books for a 2024 documentary, they also—cleverly, responsibly, and quite effectively—used AI to create voiceovers of Shirer “reading” from his works. This fact is stated in the opening of the documentary. And the documentary is always clear about which source is being used for each particular bit of narration.
Shirer is a good pick for a narrator, as he had access to the events as they were unfolding and was also present at the Nuremberg Trials where some of the culprits were tried for their involvement in them. Bits of Shirer’s biography are worked into the documentary as well. His daughter and granddaughter are among those interviewed for it. These choices give us an insider’s view of the events themselves as well as some insight into the difficulties of working as a foreign correspondent under Nazi censorship. Shirer is, essentially, our point-of-view “character.”
The documentary flips back and forth between the the rise of Naziism and the Nuremberg Trials. We are told that, while only ??? hours of video from the trials was recorded, over 1,200 hours of audio exists. The documentary makes ample use of this audio, much of it in German and presented with English subtitles. This dual track of progress in history from two different starting points works very well. We learn of what the Nazis were doing in their march down a path to world domination, and we see them on trial, sometimes being forthright, sometimes doing their best to minimize their involvement, and sometimes clearly lying in a vain effort to cover their tracks.
(As a side note, the audio engineers are to be commended here. They are the unsung heroes of this documentary. Audio from the 1940s is often terrible. They’ve done an amazing job of cleaning it up.)
Any war documentary is going to take advantage of archival footage. Some, this one included, make use of reenactments. Hitler and the Nazis also makes the potentially controversial decision to colorize the archival footage. I once found colorization distasteful, but I think the state of the art has come a long way. And I realize that very few people these days–especially young people–are willing to slog through black and white footage. Here, I side with what I take to be among the goals of the director and producers: give this thing reach. A great documentary that no-one watches might still be an artistic achievement. But, if your goal is to have a voice in a wider discourse, you make certain concessions. In an interview with Salon, director Joe Berlinger makes this goal clear, noting that he “wanted to reach a younger demographic with this show” as a response to “demagogues of today who have normalized hate.” And what’s the solution for that? Berlinger makes it clear, “You embrace the tools of cinema that they’re used to.”
I’ve seen several online commentators complain that Károly Kozma, the actor portraying Hitler in the reenactments, doesn’t look enough like the villain he portrays. I think this is likely deliberate. It seems to me that the casting directors, in every instance, chose actors for the reenactments who don’t look too much like the historical figures they portray. The effect of this, as you watch the documentary, is to make it always clear when you’re going back and forth between archival footage and reenactments. It’s not the only marker, of course, but it’s an effective one. And it saves the editors having to add a “reenactment” declaration on screen, which would be distracting given how often the point of view switches between archival footage and these recreations.
So far, I feel like I’m defending this limited series from pearl-clutching commenters who see it as left-wing propaganda (it isn’t), object to the use of colorization, or dislike the use of reenactments. Let’s move to the thing itself. Hitler and the Nazis is a six-part limited series. Each episode is an hour long. So, it’s a non-trivial investment of time to watch the entire thing. But it’s quite worth the effort. Six hours gives director Joe Berlinger time to explore both the trials and the crimes that inspired them in some depth, mixing archival footage, voiceovers, reenactments, and commentary from contemporary historians and journalists and a few eye-witnesses to the events themselves. Here’s IMDB’s list of the full cast.
For me, the net result was that it never got tiresome. While certainly not rushed, the pace was comfortable. The cuts between different sorts of media as well as between the trial and the events that inspired it kept thing moving along. I’ve seen other documentary treatments of the Nuremberg Trials. And they were mostly–like many trials–painfully boring to watch. But Berlinger uses the trials as a way to frame the narrative. The real goal is to tell the history itself. This movement back and forth between actions and their outcomes is clever and, aesthetically, quite useful. Furthermore, I’m not ashamed to admit that the documentary helped me put into sequence many of the facts about WWII that I knew but, due to a lack of context, couldn’t really pull together into a useful narrative.
Berlinger made a name for himself shooting true crime documentaries. And his skill in that genre comes through here. I was familiar with him from the Paradise Lost trilogy of films, which were also co-directed, as have been many of his films, with Bruce Sinofsky. The trilogy recounts the wrongful prosecution of the “West Memphis Three” (Jessie Misskelley, Jr., Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols), three teenagers accused of murdering three younger boys. I’d also enjoyed his documentary about Ted Bundy, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019), and his narrative fiction film about Bundy, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019). Creating documentary and dramatic accounts of the life and crimes of a small-scale sociopath and serial killer was excellent training for documenting and dramatizing the life and crimes of a large-scale one.
No forcing is required to see clear parallels between the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of Adolf Hitler. This isn’t to say they’re identical. But there are clear similarities in both ideology and tactics. Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial is, among other things, a cautionary tale. And there are times when we need one. I can’t recommend it highly enough.