#207: Rise of the Nazis (Season One)
The origin story of the worlds’ most notorious villains
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 6, 2020. (If only we knew what was to come, right?)
Initial release: September 2019 (First season, three episodes)
Network: BBC
Documentaries and books about Nazi Germany and World War II are a dime a dozen, but with the rise of fascism in the popular consciousness, the BBC produced Rise of the Nazis, a fresh look at how the Nazis transformed a battered democracy into a fascist superpower in this three-part documentary.
With modern politics being what they are, it’s not hard to draw parallels to the state of Germany in the early 1930s, and the kind of people who would flock to a man like Hitler, ambitious men who in their need for power turned to a man they didn’t fully understand. Over the course of three hour-long episodes, we see the three stages that Hitler’s rise to power goes through, presented smartly by re-enactments, file footage and interviews with experts and historians who reveal little details not often touched upon in discussing this topic.
Each episode has a different focus, with different central characters who are the driving force of the narration of events that play out as ambitious men play with fire, and conscientious people try to avert disaster. So we go from Hitler’s ascending to the role of chancellor, to the first six months of his being in power, and in the final episode, the build up to what one commentator describes as “mafia politics” in the infamous Night of the Long Knives.
Key characters are of course Hitler himself, often depicted from behind in re-enactment scenes; President Paul von Hindenburg, who only ever wanted stability for Germany; and shrewd political operative Kurt von Schleicher, who makes a deal with the devil for political gain. We also get a look at the internal machinations of Nazi leadership, such as the rivalry of Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, and the eventual fate of Ernst Rohm, whose execution capped off Hitler’s final grab for power and a united party after the Night of the Long Knives. On the other side are Hans Litten, a Jewish lawyer who sees the writing on the wall and tries to undermine the Nazis in court; Josef Hartinger, a prosecutor who tried to uncover illegal executions in Dachau; and Edgar Jung, who wrote the last public speech denouncing the Nazis.
As documentaries go, this is a hard-hitting work that is often shot and edited like a film noir, a mafia film and a horror movie all at once, all set to a disturbing soundtrack mixing dark ambient, low-key electronica and classical music. It’s not perfect, of course. the series reuses a lot of its re-enactment shots — you’ll be seeing a lot of the same scenes of Hitler in a car at night, or men climbing a flight of stairs — and interiors that are a tad too modern to really look like the 1930s. But through careful editing and camera-work, the showrunners have managed to hide the most obvious anachronisms. And though you’ll sometimes see the same scene used for two different events, it doesn’t really matter, because the narrative ties it together well. We get to consider perspectives that are often disregarded or forgotten, such as Ernst Thalmann, leader of the German Communist Party before his arrest in 1933 (with his story discussed by Ash Sarkar, whose earlier defense of pro-Palestine graffiti enraged the right-wing press.) One of the major speakers who appears in every episode is Sir Richard Evans, who wrote the definitive book series about the rise and fall of the Third Reich. If anyone could tell you how the Nazis operated and how they fell apart, it’s him.
The series does not shy away from presenting the Nazis’ rise to power, their methods, their thinking, in the unspoken context of modern politics. At one point, their propaganda is summed up as “make Germany great again,” and I don’t have to tell you the implications of that. In a very real sense, it’s like we’re watching a real-life horror movie unfold. The early 1930s gave us the modern image of classic movie monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein and the Mummy, but history’s greatest monsters were all too real and all too human.
In the years since I originally wrote this review, there have been three more seasons released, telling the story of how the Nazis consolidated power during the war, how they fell apart, and the hunt for the survivors in the decades after Hitler painted the wall with his brains. I haven’t seen these later seasons, but it’s interesting to know — especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s version of the Beer Hall Putsch on January 6, 2021 — that the series would continue to tell the full story of the 20th century’s biggest villains.
