by G. Jack Urso
Hitler: The Whole Story (1989,
CINE-ART/Munich), is a two and a half
hour documentary providing an overview of the life of Adolf Hitler from birth,
to his days as a homeless vagrant, his military service, and finally his rise
and fall from power as dictator and war monger. Rare footage, including color
film shot by Eva Braun, provide a look at Hitler’s private life as well as
German life under the Nazis. Segments from the documentary from a
digital copy of a 1989 videotape distributed by the Discovery Channel are presented below.
Originally
titled Hitler: A Career, this documentary
is one of the better profiles of Hitler’s life and provides a focus on the various
influences that contributed to his psychological make-up. All too often Hitler
is simply dismissed as a “monster,” but he was not. Indeed, his behavior was
rooted in very human insecurities; however, that spark of conscience that keeps
the devil on our shoulder from having too much say was absent from Hitler's
soul. He became a brutal, cruel man who demanded from others what he could not
do himself and sought power as a buttress for his own psychologically
maladjusted outlook on life.
Segments from Hitler: The Whole Story have previously
been featured on Aeolus 13 Umbra and include:
- How Hitler's Public Speaking Skills Deceived a Nation
- The Nazi Community of the People and its Victims
- Raising Nazi Youth under Adolf Hitler
I saw this
documentary in early 1990 and it launched a hitherto untapped interest in
Hitler and the Nazi regime. While I grew up with a multitude of World War II
vets and was inundated with various epic films on the topic, I did little
reading of the conflict apart from my school studies. As an administrator for a
local college, I could take books out of the library for an entire semester,
and I did so with a vengeance. I poured through all the important biographies
of the major Nazi figures, U.S. Army psychological reports, and classic
documentary series like The World at War,
which, in my opinion, still has yet to be surpassed.
What I find
compelling about Hitler is how his life is a study in brutality and irrationality,
from the severe beatings at the hands of his father to his genocidal rage as an
adult. Hitler, however, remains an enigma for certainly others have been
physically abused and homeless, but did not lose their humanity. His career is
as much a result of luck and timing as it was fear and brute force. In this
documentary we get a glimpse at the complicated mix of events and sociopathy
that created Hitler and the Nazi phenomenon.
If Hitler kept
his anti-Semitism in check and still pursued a war with the West and Russia it
is likely many German Jews and other minorities would have fought in the army,
as they did in World War I. In fact, it was a Jewish officer who recommended
Hitler for the Iron Cross in the Great War. What we learn in this documentary,
however, is that Hitler did not love Germany, or Germans — Aryan or otherwise. In
the end, he abandoned them to a fate he engineered. He was so scared of the
world that he needed to either mold it to his wishes or destroy it. It is that
fear of the world, fear of those unlike ourselves, that has driven many to
commit heinous acts against humanity — a phenomenon that is played out to this
very day.
A study in
microcosm on how the Nazi’s were able to control and manipulate German society
is profiled in my article, The
Nazi Seizure of the German Peoples’ Community. More information regarding
Hitler's public speaking skills is covered in my article, Adolf Hitler: A Rhetorical Analysis.
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