Of the extraordinarily fine offerings at this year’s DOCNYC 2020, The Meaning of Hitler, from directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker stands out in illuminating the continued fascination with dictatorial psychopaths epitomized by Adolf Hitler and extending to the Nazis of World War II. Leading off on the topic, novelist Martin Amis,who has grappled with the Holocaust era in several books, wastes no time comparing Donald Trump to Hitler: noting, neither had problems with lying.
Taking off from Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 German bestseller of the same title, the film features interviews with many experts and provocateurs including Deborah Lipstadt, Yehuda Bauer, Saul Friedlander, Sir Richard Evans, Francine Prose, and Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, Nazi hunters who famously brought Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” to justice. Exploring Hitler’s meaning takes the filmmakers to Hitler’s bunker in Berchtesgaden, to the memorial site that once was the death camp Treblinka, and to the forest at Sobibor where 250,000 were murdered without a trace.
Said Petra Epperlein, “The interview was conducted two years ago. We did not want to talk about Trump but Amis was adamant in comparing him to Hitler. Lying is the most obvious and dangerous thing you can do. Many people just believe what he says because he is the president of the US.”
Added Michael Tucker: “How so many Americans are still for him is unbelievable. One of the hallmarks of embracing totalitarian rule is embracing a fantasy. That goes beyond lying; people are living in an imagined reality.
“In our film, Yehuda Bauer says, that’s what Hitlerism is. A battle between light and dark, and human nature: either you have compassion for other people or you don’t. The death of empathy is a hallmark of fascism. How can you not care? It is shocking, but there’s a whole group of people for whom 240,000 Americans dead does not matter. A subscriber to the Q’anon cult was just elected to Congress. Believers in conspiracy theories in our government should terrify all of us!
“We have a new film in the can; we drove across America, 12,000 miles, looking at America in this strange time. The pandemic is happening in the backdrop, as is the run-up to the election. It’s no surprise to us that Trump has a solid base. In a world where people choose to live in the dark, whatever we do is not going to matter, but whatever we can do to bolster a dialogue to make our democracy stronger is really important.”
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