The Best Documentaries On Hitler And The Nazis

[bob7708]

I always liked "World At War", "Hitler In Color" and a few others. Does anyone know anything about this documentary? It has no reviews and was thinking abouy buying it from Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.com/Double-Headed-Eag ... PPU8JP613U

Anyone else have any more recommendations?

[Dutto1]

Hi

One of the best documentaries you can buy on DVD is The Nazis a Warning From History it was made by the BBC in the mis 1990s and is outstanding.The documentary includes many interviews with former Nazis etc and paticipants during that era.

Regards

Ron

[Mauser K98k]

The recent documentary Third Reich -- Rise / Fall is very good. It is mostly German home movies spanning from Hitler's coming to power in 1933 through the years of triumph and adulation, the creeping malaise, the growing fears of looming defeat till the final bitter end. Very poignant. Certainly a different viewpoint from what we're used to seeing on the subject.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... l#p1535985

[J. Duncan]

I appreciate the subject.

"Double Headed Eagle" is a decent documentary and has a lot of rare footage. A companion to this would be Erwin Leiser's "Swastika", which has Hitler speaking in English on the Eva Braun films using lip reading techniques. Both are good but I prefer "Swastika" over "Eagle".

"The Nazis: A Warning From History" by Laurence Rees is most excellent.

**One of the best docs I ever saw was the original broadcast of William L. Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", not the hacked up piece sold today, but the uncut version which contained interviews with his early associates like Otto Strasser and Ernst Hanfstaengl, Kurt von Schuschnigg, Hjalmar Schacht, and Erich Kempka, not to mention many clips of the famous author Shirer himself, who speaks about his experiences. TNT network rebroadcast it as a "special TV event" in 1993 which I recorded onto VHS tape. I still have it and the hacked version sucks by comparison. Truly one of the best and my all time personal favorite.

Others on my list include:

"Good Morning Mr. Hitler" featuring historian Robert Wistrich. Color. Munich in 1939.
"The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler" Alan Bullock and others.
"Black Fox: The Story of Adolf Hitler" narrated by Marlene Dietrich. old, but good.
"The Private Life of Adolf Hitler" (1960's) grainy, but has interviews with Paula Hitler and Julius Schaub
"The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler" (History Channel 6 part doc) "seducer", "dictator", "criminal", etc...
"Hitler's Henchmen" Guido Knopp and History Channel - in all, a 10 part series.
"Hitler's Warriors" Guido Knopp and History Channel. 5 parts doc.
"The SS" History Channel 6 part series. "Struggle for Power"(Röhm), "Death's head" (Totenkopf), Waffen-SS, Heydrich, Himmler, "Odessa".
"Hitler's Managers" " " " 5 part....Speer, Milch, Porsche, Krupp, ? (can't remember last)
"Hitler's Women" 5 part history channel doc. Winifred Wagner, eva braun, Magda Goebbels, Leni Riefenstahl, Zara Leander
"Hitler's Family" with historian Timothy Ryback (who wrote book "Hitler's personal library"), excellent
"The Occult and the Third reich" 5 part doc. excellent...one feels this is based on book by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
"The Nazi Expeditions" excellent..on the SS-Ahnenerbe organization..Tibet, South America, Aryan race, Nazi anthropology etc..
"Hitler: A Career" (3 hours) based on bio by Joachim C Fest. excellent.
"Gestapo" 3 part history channel doc. "ok"
"The Nazis and the Occult" which has interviews with Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Dusty Sklar who wrote books on the subject.
"Triumph of the Will" excellent Nazi doc.
"Victory of Faith" lost but found 1933 Rally - excellent Nazi doc....rare footage of Röhm, Streicher, Liebel, others.
"Ordinary Fascism" (Soviet doc. on nazis..what did Communist russia think of hitler and the nazis?)...very rare footage. highly recommended but hard to find in English.
"Germany Awake!" based on book "Nazi Cinema" by Erwin Leiser. excellent study of Nazi propaganda /feature films.
"The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" doc. on the great filmaker. excellent.

[J. Duncan]

You can find some good documentary films for purchase at link below:

www.ihffilm.com ("International Historic Films")

[Progmetty]

I still can't find a decent quality version of Olympia.
I like the BBC documentaries a lot but World at War is still the best cause it's the only one I've seen that doesn't focus on the "let's tell you how much the nazis sucked" boring perspective. I dare say it felt unbiased for the most part which was awesome.

[moodiee]

Hitler in color sounds quite interesting. Did not even know it existed.

Double headed eagle sounds good too,I wish to try and read Hitler speak English even though I have lip read. You must be very good at lip reading J Ducan.

I like to watch Hitler's body guards,I also like to Read and watch Hitler's 3rd Reich

[J. Duncan]

In "Swastika", what the producers did was take Eva Braun's home movies and put english voice overs onto the film footage of Hitler, making him "speak", when in reality those films were silent pictures. They were somehow able to get lip readers to transcribe what Hitler was saying and then dub in the english voice overs, making it appear as if Hitler was speaking in English...the voice even sounded a lot like Hitlers. Amazing stuff for early '70s. There were two recent documentaries about Hitler's voice. One concerned these Eva Braun movies and the other was about what Hitler said to Marshal Mannerheim on a secretly recorded conversation in Finland. It's a secret recording of Hitler's "real voice" as he was talking in ordinary conversation (instead of the shouting "Fuehrer" of the speeches).

[pacifritz]

J. Duncan: I remember the Shirer adaptation: the version I watched had some early use of 'colorized' Third Reich film,--the rallies, etc----- that was an early, less impressive version of colorized archive film we enjoy [well' some of us!] today.....this was the first time I really noticed proper attempts to colorize archive WW2 film.


I also recall a relatively recent documentary in which Hitler's silent speech at the Eagles' Nest was deciphered: Eva Braun was complaining about what to wear [ or something banal,] and Adolf retorted:


'You're complaining about that----imagine MY problems!'



---or words to that effect.

[Progmetty]

Erwin Leiser's "Swastika", which has Hitler speaking in English on the Eva Braun films using lip reading techniques.

In "Swastika", what the producers did was take Eva Braun's home movies and put english voice overs onto the film footage of Hitler, making him "speak", when in reality those films were silent pictures. They were somehow able to get lip readers to transcribe what Hitler was saying and then dub in the english voice overs, making it appear as if Hitler was speaking in English...the voice even sounded a lot like Hitlers. Amazing stuff for early '70s.

I've seen SWASTIKA multiple times since you recommended it sir. It has an outstanding amount of great footage uninterrupted by story telling or interviews and I appreciated that a lot.
But I really think the lip syncing is fabricated. What drives me to think so is that so often the people we see on the period films are not facing the camera when they're talking yet the voice over continues like it can still figure out what the person with their back to the camera are saying. Also so often on the people we see on the period films of bigger distance from the camera making it visually impossible to lip read. These two factors got me doubting SWASTIKA when it comes to the lip reading feature.

[J. Duncan]

Glad you liked it...you are probably correct on the lip reading feature (this is what the advertisers say at ihf films). What makes me think so is the comparison with what is said on this film and what is said on the "Hitler's Voice" documentary, which did scientific analysis of Hitler's lip movements using computer technology. I think in "Swastika", Leiser just used his imagination. Nevertheless, the effect is "wunderbar". I like how they began with a cosmic atmosphere, a floating swastika through space (like the phantom zone in Superman) and showing a certain planet at a particular point in time. The Wagnerian score made it even more surreal.

[murx]

Worth to be read because quite free of postwar propaganda and rewriting of history is W. Shirer's: Berlin diary, the Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941". It contains to my knowledge the only reports of the Polish and French campaigns by a foreign journalist having joined the German side. However it also contains interviews with Czech and Polish leaders shortly before the war and a description of the feelings and emotions of the German people before and after war broke out. Shirer was a newspaper correspondent in Paris (which he describes before and during the occupation) andf then became one of the first Radio correspondents reporting daily live from Berlin and other cities (Vienna during the "Anschluss", Prague before WWII, Danzig during WWII, from Compiegne by chance during the signature of the French/German armistice, was invited to have a look on the brand new ships and submarines of the German navy from which he also reported live from a Christmas party and has interesting details from Paris and Warsaw. He was very close to the Nazi leaders and met Hitler on several occasions, the chacterization also being worth to be read).
His "Raise and Fall of the 3rd Reich" fell out of my hands after he said in the first sentences that he was using the 800 tons of seized documernts from the 3rd Reich. Even the worst pieces of paper are under copyright protection and the intellectual property of the authors or the legal descendants and reports based on stolen documents should not be suppoorted.

Another character study of Hitler is found in Hans Baur's memories, who was Hitler's private pilot and was in Hitler's company from the election campaigns until the last day in Berlin. Those memories were obviously published under different titles. The one I have : Hans Baur, I was Hitler's private pilot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Baur

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Diary

[bob7708]

Murx. What did you think of Hans Bauer's book on Hitler. Was it insightfull in a lot of ways? I am condidering buying it.

[bob7708]

Hi

One of the best documentaries you can buy on DVD is The Nazis a Warning From History it was made by the BBC in the mis 1990s and is outstanding.The documentary includes many interviews with former Nazis etc and paticipants during that era.

Regards

Ron

Yes Dutto. "The Nazis, A Warning From History" is one of the best documentaries on the Nazi regime around.

[bob7708]

Hi

One of the best documentaries you can buy on DVD is The Nazis a Warning From History it was made by the BBC in the mis 1990s and is outstanding.The documentary includes many interviews with former Nazis etc and paticipants during that era.

Regards

Ron

Yes Dutto. "The Nazis, A Warning From History" is one of the best documentaries on the Nazi regime around.