Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

I saw the movie in the Netherlands with my Dutch Meijse in a so called Culture- centre (art - movie) in town. The Dutch audience was very good informed as to the course the German history had taken in theses last twelve days, but seemed to lake specific information what Eichinger and Ganz a.o. intended by making this movie.

As a German, being interested in my history for decades, I had the chance to get bocou info prior to the movie being released on German TV. Some of the infos were talk shows f.e. having Eichinger, the producer, and Bruno Ganz make comments as to why the movie was produced and what kind of difficulties Ganz ran into while shooting the different scences as Hitler.

Maybe for our none German members of the forum the following might be interesting to know:

Correctly Fregatte points out that the movie was based on the written memories of Traudle Junge but is also relied in terms of researching the historical facts on the book from Joachim Fest, one of the most imminent German historians on Hitler, “Die letzten zwölf Tage der Reichskanzlei”, which was published about a year after the memories of Junge. Both authors restricted their comments and/or reporting mainly as to what happened in this period of time to Hitler and the people around him some ten to fifteen meters underground while this location was shelled and attacked permanently by the Russian forces.

As to the question in one of the talk shows how did Ganz and Eichinger knew how Hitler spoke in daily life when he was not giving speeches and was screaming etc. they let us know that they found in one of the archives a tape taken by the Finish security service in secret in 1943 when Hitler visited and talked to the Finish head of State Mannerheim. And indeed you could hear a daily life speaking Hitler, so to speak, which then was copied by Ganz very well. Btw in order to learn the mixture of Austrian/German accent of Hitler Ganz had an Austrian actor teach him for a couple of month to get the right “tone” of Hitler’s voice, which I think he did extremely well while acting as Führer.

Anyway we talked after the show with some of the Dutch people and they voiced more or less the same criticism as one could read in the New York Times or Washington Post recently that it was a craftsmanship made movie and Bruno Ganz gave an “excellent” portray of Hitler but any hints as to what terrible things were happening outside the “bunker” like the real senseless dying of soldiers and civilians on all fronts etc. although H know for a long time the war was completely and defiantly lost, could make the movie smack of trying to kind of clear H by way of showing him like a human being in daily life but not as the terrible criminal he really was. When giving them the o.m. mentioned info they seemed to understand better what the movie – makers were up to after all.

What irritated me most was seeing for the first time for a couple of hours a “real” H in “living color” after watching him in all this years in black and white only, because in most of the scenes you couldn’t tell who is the actor or who is H.

You all have a nice Eastern season.
Sincerely Yours
Volker Erich Kummrow