Hitler’s project: “Making Germany great again.” The Nazis’ characterization of criticism from the media: “Fake news.” Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden: “It’s sort of like Hitler’s Mar-a-Lago, if you will.”
Donald Trump’s name is not mentioned in the six episodes of “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” a new historical documentary series on Netflix. But it dances just beneath the surface, and occasionally, as in the examples above, the production’s cadre of scholars, popular historians and biographers can barely stop themselves from giving the game away.
The series was directed by the veteran documentarian Joe Berlinger (“Paradise Lost,” “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”), who has a production deal with Netflix and has given it popular true-crime shows like “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich” and the “Conversations With a Killer” series.
In promotional material, Berlinger explains his decision to step up from true crime to total war and genocide: “This is the right time to retell this story for a younger generation as a cautionary tale,” he says, adding, “In America, we are in the midst of our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking at the door and a rise in antisemitism.” In other words, you can’t make a documentary about Germany in the 1930s and ’40s without holding the United States of the 2010s and ’20s in your mind.
To that end, Berlinger has made a deluxe version of the sort of history of Hitler, the Third Reich and the Holocaust that for years has been a staple of American cable television. The information is not new, but the resources available to Berlinger are reflected in the abundance of material he deploys across nearly six and a half hours: archival film, most of it meticulously colorized for the series, and audio; staged recreations with a sprawling cast of actors; and the copious roster of interviewees.
A new telling of an old story requires a twist, of course, and Berlinger has several. The American journalist William L. Shirer serves as the series’s unofficial narrator, despite having died in 1993 — an A.I. recreation of his voice recites passages from his many books about the period, and occasionally his actual voice is heard in excerpts from radio broadcasts. He is also represented onscreen by an actor in scenes recreating the series’s other primary framing device, the first Nuremberg trials in 1945.
Testimony from the trials is used to fill in the show’s accounts of political machinations, war making and mass killing. And the presentation of the trials is the most striking example of a visual style Berlinger employs throughout the series: sliding smoothly back and forth between elaborately staged recreations and real colorized footage, so that you need to pay attention to know whether you are looking at Hermann Goering or the actor playing Hermann Goering (Gabor Sotonyi). Berlinger is going for a seamless dramatic effect, and if it doesn’t always work as drama, it holds your attention.
Even the interviews are theatrical, shot on a darkened stage with blood-red curtains framing a ladder and what looks like a rough brick wall. It is unclear what the set dressing is meant to represent, but it might reflect Berlinger’s demonstrated tendency toward a kind of hushed sensationalism in the service of storytelling. That impulse comes through more clearly in some of the recreation, such as a scene of Jewish captives being shot at Babi Yar, or in the way the actor silently playing Hitler, Karoly Kozma, has been directed to play many of his scenes as if he were mid-seizure.
Much of the familiar material of a World War II documentary is missing or mentioned in passing, with events on the western front getting cursory attention. Berlinger is concerned with the development of Hitler’s psychology and worldview, and that takes the series on a track from the frustrations of his youth in Austria to his rise in 1930s Germany, and from there to the eastern front, the Soviet Union and the German and Polish concentration camps.
The focus is on how the personal drives the political, and you can’t watch “Evil on Trial” without considering how Berlinger’s and his colleagues’ feelings about Trump and the hard right in the contemporary United States might have affected what they chose to emphasize in their portrait of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
But the unspoken case they build is comprehensive. We are shown Hitler tapping into the emotions stirred by a nation’s loss of power; playing to people who feel economically exploited and alienated from a liberal, urban culture; and uniting moderate and radical conservatives in fear of the far left. We see him demanding absolute loyalty and pitting subordinates against one another in battles for his favor. We see an absence of empathy and an inability to admit defeat. Shirer chimes in: “I began to comprehend it did not matter so much what he said, but how he said it. In such an atmosphere, every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself.”
Whether you find the case persuasive or not is probably beside the point, since the most salient feature of our current political landscape is that most Americans appear to have already made up their minds about he who — in the case of “Evil on Trial,” anyway — must not be named.
