World War II, the harrowing tale of archetypal evil versus the powers of good, has spawned everything from Oscar-winners to comic books. The average person probably feels they know the whole story. They couldn’t be more wrong. The Third Reich not only deserves to be seen, it should be required of every student. Using only real footage shot by amateurs, newscasters, and filmmakers, never has Hitler’s Germany been seen so honestly and objectively, in all its splendor and for all its horror.
The Nazi’s fall has been examined ad nauseam, but Hitler’s rise remains a largely untold story. The horrors of the Holocaust and the war itself leave most people wondering, “How could the Germans commit such atrocities?” And then they go on with their everyday lives, uninterested in the answer.
Segment 1 of The Third Reich devotes 90-minutes to this unbelievable tale of normal human psychology, showing how one man took a democratic nation, impoverished and disarmed, and engineered it into a thriving dictatorship of hope, nationalism, and, finally, war. Hitler’s reign didn’t begin with World War II. He appeared in 1923, a mere four years after the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I with 440 provisions, 414 of which were punishments against Germany.
Hitler’s revolution was gradual, slowly engulfing the arts, culture, politics, religion, and every other facet of daily human existence into one of the most compelling and staggeringly well-executed social revolutions of all time. The Hitler Youth created 8 million fresh soldiers out of German sons who thought they were going to the Boy Scouts. The Hitler Maidens took Aryan girls and prepared them for motherhood. 900 women left the Nuremberg rally pregnant, while women with unwanted attributes were forced to undergo operations of sterility. The concentration camps were filled first with dissenting Germans, years before the Holocaust officially began.
The world watched as Germany changed and rearmed, even attending the 1936 Olympic games. What The Third Reich accomplishes by only using real footage, is to create the climate of Germany that Hitler rose to power in. The scary result is that we see humanity in the German people not so dissimilar from our own, as we realize they were guilty only of hoping, just as the world was guilty of watching.
All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. And they did. The world over.
"The Third Reich" is on sale December 14, 2010 and is not rated. Documentary. Written and directed by Nicole Rittenmeyer.
