Set in Berlin, 1945, this powerful and provocative war drama retells the final days of the Second World War as recorded in the diaries of Adolf Hitler’s private secretary, Traudl Junge, while barricaded with Hitler and his closest confidants in the Führer’s secret bunker. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (The Experiment) with an astonishing performance by Bruno Ganz (The Manchurian Candidate) as history’s most notorious figure, this unprecedented and controversial insider’s perspective is gripping insight into the madness and desperation of Hitler in the final hours of the war as the Russian Army closes a ring around Berlin.
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
Actors
- : Adolf Hitler
- : Traudl Junge
- : Eva Braun
- : Magda Goebbels
- : Joseph Goebbels
- : Albert Speer
- : Hermann Fegelein
- : Heinrich Himmler
Film Crew
- : Oliver Hirschbiegel
- : Bernd Eichinger
- : Rainer Klausmann
- : Claudia Bobsin
- : Bernd Lepel
- : Bernd Eichinger
Technical Information
- Color
- German, Russian
Images
Videos
Trailer
Set in Berlin, 1945, this powerful and provocative war drama retells the final days of the Second World War as recorded in the diaries of Hitler’s secretary.-
Admiration I did not feel. Sympathy I felt in the sense that I would feel it for a rabid dog, while accepting that it must be destroyed. I do not feel the film provides "a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did," because I feel no film can, and no response would be sufficient. All we can learn from a film like this is that millions of people can be led, and millions more killed, by madness leashed to racism and the barbaric instincts of tribalism.What I also felt, however, was the reality of the Nazi sickness, which has been distanced and diluted by so many movies with so many Nazi villains that it has become more like a plot device than a reality. As we regard this broken and pathetic Hitler, we realize that he did not alone create the Third Reich, but was the focus for a spontaneous uprising by many of the German people, fueled by racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear. He was skilled in the ways he exploited that feeling, and surrounded himself by gifted strategists and propagandists, but he was not a great man, simply one armed by fate to unleash unimaginable evil. It is useful to reflect that racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear are still with us, and the defeat of one of their manifestations does not inoculate us against others.
Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times
This is a film of genius and one that I will always remember as the one that dared to show the world war from the other side. It shows how crazy the idea to fight the war was from the man who started it all, and almost makes us feel sympathy for one of the most hated men who ever lived.