321 Downfall

Matt and Mark enter Hitler's bunker this go 'round as we review Downfall, the intimate depiction of the Third Reich's final hours as it finds itself ruling over a dramatically smaller and smaller piece of Germany. While this is Hitler's story, it's also the story of the evaporation of national socialism into nothing. Like all imagined ideology, when there's no one left to believe in it, it becomes not only irrelevant but absurd. This is more the story of the knowing citizens of Germany during Nazi rule, here from the viewpoint of Hitler's personal secretary, and the creeping compromises and guilty admissions that are self-excused in a disingenuous way. Morality was not mutated into the grotesque during Hitler's Germany, it was merely suppressed. Download: 321 Downfall