Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial

…is the title of a six-part Netflix documentary about the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. To tell the story, director Joe Berlinger uses footage from the Nuremburg trial of Hitler’s principal henchmen, flashing back to archival film of the events described in the trial. That archival footage has been colorized so that it seems contemporary rather than black-and-white, grainy film from the distant past. When archival footage is not available, Berlinger presents actors recreating the  events.

He also uses artificial intelligence to reproduce William Shirer’s voice. Shirer was a newsman stationed in Berlin during Hitler’s Third Reich. Excerpts from Shirer’s books come alive as his AI-generated voice narrates the action. Although Berlinger does employ interviews with historians, that action is never impeded by scholarly commentary. The documentary is a drama, frameworked by the drama of the Nuremburg trial. 

This is, of course, a story of unspeakable violence. Besides the harrowing scenes from Nazi concentration camps, there is an unsettling film of the dead bodies of Hitler’s collaborators after the court’s death sentence was executed. The corpses are lined up, lying on the ground, the hangman’s ropes still attached to their necks. In short, those Friends who prefer not to see filmed violence may well want to avoid viewing Hitler and the Nazis.

And yet, the Peace Testimony pre-supposes that Friends have some experience, real or vicarious, of violence. And that experience should be relevant to contemporary events. Hitler and the Nazis makes us aware of the relevance of Nazism. Hitler speaks of “making Germany great again” and Hitler’s Berghof retreat is compared to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. It’s clear that some of the same forces operating in Nazi Germany—polarization and distrust of democratic institutions—are at work here in the U.S. of 2024.

I highly recommend this Netflix documentary, which transcends the documentary format and presents us a history that is alive and riveting.

~ Richard Russell