German filmmakers who made a major film about Hitler had to shoot it in secret because of “resistance” in Germany to dramas “in which Hitler is in the center of attention, fearing that the public will begin to identify with the main character,” writes The Guardian.

The film, entitled “Führer und Verführer” (“The Fuhrer and the Demagogue”) was rejected for public funding in Germany, but was instead shot in Bratislava. To ensure the accuracy of the film, Thomas Weber, professor of history at the University of Aberdeen and world-renowned scholar, was appointed as a consultant.

“We can tear off their masks and see them as they really were”

He said there was an understandable concern about humanizing the demagogues responsible for one of the darkest chapters in human history. “For this reason, there is almost no film about Goebbels, Hitler and other demagogues in which they are not comic figures or appear only as secondary characters in supporting roles.” The 2004 drama The Fall focused on just one “snapshot” of Hitler’s life – his last days.

Weber added: “If we are to stand up to the demagogues of our time, film and television productions must abandon their longstanding, though quite understandable, reluctance to focus on Hitler, Mussolini, Goebbels and Stalin.” “We can only remove their masks and see them for who they really were and how they managed to succeed if we put them at the center of the film.”

He argued, for example, that the photographs and films used in most documentaries about the Third Reich tend to use Nazi-produced propaganda material and therefore unwittingly reproduce Goebbels’s propaganda.

The new film focuses on the information war in which Goebbels, perhaps the greatest mass manipulator in history and the father of fake news, created sensational images of flag-waving crowds and anti-Semitic films that prepared the public for the mass murder of Jews.

The Führer und Werführer, which hits theaters next year, stars Fritz Karl as Hitler and Robert Stadlober as Goebbels.

The director of the film is Joachim Lang, who stated: “The film presents criminals as people with all the trappings of evil. Only a fictional form allows you to get closer to the heroes and their lying depravity.”

The film takes the viewer behind the scenes, forcing them to be more attentive to the power of images and strategies of manipulation as it follows Goebbels as he creates his deceptions and distortions of reality in the concept and repetition of speeches.

The drama becomes even stronger as it interweaves fictional scenes of the main characters and their Nazi henchmen with archival footage and testimonies of real Holocaust survivors. Among them is 101-year-old Margot Friedlander, whose parents and brother were killed in the Auschwitz death camp.

After the preview, it seems that the survivors were deeply affected. One of them was silent for a few minutes, then hugged the director, telling him that she wished a film like this had been made ten or 20 years ago to stop the rise of populist radical right groups.

Lang said that the study of the past is even more important when far-right parties are in power, when acts of anti-Semitic violence are on the rise and when the crimes of the Third Reich are increasingly trivialized: “For me, the phrase Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, with which our film opens and ends, is fair: ” It happened, so it can happen again. This is the essence of what we have to say.” (Source: News.ro)