Recommend me a movie & documentary

spongebob89

Im taking myself and the misses to Berlin in January and although ive seen plenty of documentaries on discovery channel about ww2 and nazi Germany.. Im wondering dose anybody know a well explained simplistic movie or documentary of nazi Germany in ww2 to bring the misses up to speed and get us more excited about doing the tours!?

Thanks!

Mankyspuds

spongebob89 wrote: »

Im taking myself and the misses to Berlin in January and although ive seen plenty of documentaries on discovery channel about ww2 and nazi Germany.. Im wondering dose anybody know a well explained simplistic movie or documentary of nazi Germany in ww2 to bring the misses up to speed and get us more excited about doing the tours!?

Thanks!

Well, yer only man is 'The World at War', all episodes are on youtube and you can cherry pick the parts you want to watch. Lots on the German Homefront and Fall of Berlin, all with 1st hand accounts. Superb stuff!

'Downfall' is an excellent watch

possibly 'Generation War' too.

Hope its of help.

silverharp

dont forget the Cold War! if anything as a city they play that up more than the nazi period , Goodbye Lenin was a fun end of communism movie.

Jawgap

For the Cold War era, I'd suggest the 'Lives of Others'

I can't think of any film that handles the rise of the Nazis well, as @Mankyspuds said the couple of episodes of the World at War that deal with the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis would be worth a watch as would "The Nazis: A Warning from History" or "The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler."

.......or you could just watch the Bourne Supremacy and 'accidentally' let her see that you have a rake of passports just before you fly out

Snickers Man

Might be a bit obscure and inaccessible for a newbie to the history of the war but one of the best films about the Nazis and how they operated is Conspiracy, a British/American collaboration about the Wannsee Conference.

This was when Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo and fourteen other police, SS and Civil Service top brass met in a house in Berlin to allocate responsibility, and of course blame, for the final destruction of Europe's Jews.

The film had an American director and screen writer and a largely British cast, with the exception of Stanley Tucci playing Adolf Eichmann. The cast included Kenneth Branagh (Heydrich), Colin Firth (as Stuckart, the lawyer who had crafted the Nuremberg Laws) Brendan Coyle (of Downton Abbey fame as a Gestapo chief) and David Threlfall (of Shameless fame) in a superb performance as a senior civil servant, horrified at what he is being asked to do but realising he has little choice but to go along with it.

It is one of the best dramatic examples of how you get men, many of whom are perfectly decent but with fairly common faults including ambition, sycophancy, jealousy of their rivals and self importance to agree to a thoroughly evil enterprise.

Some of the Nazis are portrayed as brutal monsters, others are portrayed as really quite nice guys. But all end up agreeing to something that is brutal and monstrous.

So much more subtle and chilling than other "goodies and baddies" movies that have received much higher accolades but didn't deserve them. eg 12 years a slave.

The scary thing about Conspiracy is you see how guys who could just as easily be seen as heroic crusading figures could be sucked into a terrible enterprise.