Downfall does not ask you to like Adolf Hitler. It asks you to watch him die, and to keep watching the people in the room with him.
Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film covers the last days of the Third Reich inside the Führerbunker, from Hitler’s 56th birthday on 20 April 1945 to the surrender of what remained of his military. Bernd Eichinger wrote and produced the screenplay, working from historian Joachim Fest’s Inside Hitler’s Bunker and Until the Final Hour, the memoir of Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge. The film is a German-Austrian-Italian co-production, shot on location in Berlin, Munich and Saint Petersburg between September and November 2003.
Trailer, via Imprint Films.
Bruno Ganz was not the obvious choice
Bruno Ganz was Hirschbiegel’s first choice for Hitler. He was reluctant. Friends advised against it. He took the part anyway, telling the production that the subject had “a fascinating side.”
What Ganz built from there is the film’s whole argument. He studied the Hitler and Mannerheim recording for four months to mimic the dictator’s conversational voice and Austrian dialect. Watching newsreel footage in Die Deutsche Wochenschau, he decided Hitler had Parkinson’s disease and visited a hospital to study patients with it. He auditioned in makeup for half an hour before Hirschbiegel was convinced.
The result is not a monster performance. It is a sick man’s performance, and that is harder to sit through.
Traudl Junge opens the film in 1942
Alexandra Maria Lara plays Traudl Junge, chosen by Hitler in November 1942 at the Wolf’s Lair. She read Junge’s book during filming and called it her “personal treasure.” Before she was cast, André Heller’s documentary Im toten Winkel had shaped how she saw the woman.
Around her, the film stacks the bunker with people who each fail to stop what is coming. Heinrich Himmler cannot persuade Hitler to leave Berlin and goes off to negotiate with the Allies in secret. Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, also fails, then fails again when he begs Braun to leave the city. SS doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck stays in Berlin against Operation Clausewitz, granted permission to look after civilians. A Hitler Youth named Peter Kranz denounces his own father for urging him to desert, then gets the Iron Cross from Hitler, who calls him braver than his generals.
Albert Speer, the armaments minister, argues against the scorched-earth policy. Hitler tells him the German people are weak and deserve death.
Helmuth Weidling gets promoted for showing up
The military men in Downfall are not cowards and not heroes. They are men who keep reporting for duty while the city above them comes apart. Hitler forbids the overwhelmed 9th Army to retreat and orders counter-attacks by Felix Steiner’s units and Walther Wenck’s 12th Army. When General Helmuth Weidling learns he has been sentenced to death for allegedly moving his command post, he goes to the bunker to clear himself. Hitler is impressed and promotes him instead.
That is the film’s sharpest observation about the regime: it rewarded obedience right up to the last hour, and the reward was command of a ruin.
April 1945, a nation awaits its… Downfall
Eyewitness accounts built the bunker
Hirschbiegel used survivors’ memoirs and eyewitness accounts to rebuild the look of 1940s Berlin, and the film’s texture shows it. The bunker is concrete and bad light. The Chancellery party Eva Braun throws gets broken up by artillery fire. The outside world arrives as noise, then as rubble.
Downfall premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 14 September 2004 and drew controversy for putting a human face on Hitler and his circle. That criticism was always a little misplaced. Showing a dictator petting his dog or speaking softly to a secretary is not sympathy. It is the point that every atrocity in the film was committed by people who could hold a normal conversation.
The numbers behind Downfall
- Film: Downfall (German: Der Untergang), 2004
- Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
- Writer and producer: Bernd Eichinger
- Runtime: 155 minutes
- Genres: Drama, History, War
- Principal photography: September to November 2003, Berlin, Munich, Saint Petersburg
- Premiere: Toronto Film Festival, 14 September 2004
- Gross: over $92 million
- Metacritic: 82/100
- Score: 8.2/10
The middle stretch repeats itself
The film runs 155 minutes and uses almost all of them on interiors. That is a deliberate bet, and it mostly pays. The bunker becomes a pressure chamber where the audience waits alongside the staff for a man who has already decided everyone around him should die with him.
Where Downfall stumbles is in its patience. The middle stretch repeats the same beat — someone asks Hitler to see reason, Hitler refuses — and the repetition starts to feel like a history lesson rather than drama. The Peter Kranz thread, with its Iron Cross and its denunciation, carries more weight than some of the general staff scenes that surround it.
What Ganz and Lara carry
Ganz is the reason the film survives its own length. His Hitler is frail, courteous, and utterly certain, and the gap between those things is the horror. Lara’s Junge gives the film its only real innocence, and the ending belongs to her, not to the men in uniform.
Downfall is a German film about Germans, made by a German director from German sources, and that is what separates it from the earlier Hitler pictures Ganz watched in preparation. It does not explain the man. It shows the room, the staff, the orders and the boy with the medal, and lets the audience do the accounting.
8.2 of 10.
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