Music For Thrd Reich In Colour

Movie Review: The Colors of the Prism, the Mechanics of Time

The Third Reich (DVD Review)

That you can read here , but this two disc documentary varies from all of those because the focus on the war is from the German people’s viewpoint.  And that doesn’t necessarily mean from the Nazi point of view either, since many Germans were opposed to Hitler and his policies.   This documentary covers a lot of the how and why the German people allowed Hitler to seize power and eventually lead them to ruin. focuses on the home-front and what life was like there.

With no experts or firsthand accounts, the film relies upon a mix of German military and civilian letters from a variety of people from different walks of life including novelists, journalists, Nazi party members, school teachers, military men, prisoners, and ordinary civilians who saw their way of life change before their eyes.  Counterbalancing these account were the comments made by American journalists Ernest Pope and Meyer Levin I found the observations made by both the German and the American journalists the most informative and interesting, although hearing all of the different views from such a wide swath of people provided a very comprehensive picture of life in Germany.  These letters, combined with newsreels and propaganda films really help non-Germans understand how a society could allow a sociopath like Hitler achieve as much of his destructive impulses allowed.  Many factors played into preparing the Germans into be willing to accept the Nazis including their historical conditioning to follow orders.

First they followed their Emperor William I and then William II whose reign ended after the German Revolution followed the events of World War I and led to the formation of the Weimar Republic.  Germany’s disastrous loss in World War I, resulted in being severely punished by the terms of their surrender under the terms agreed upon in the Treaty of Versailles.  Not only did Germany have to pay reparations to the victors to the tune of 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion, £6,600 million) in 1921, which is roughly equivalent to US$ 385 billion in 2011, a sum that many economists at the time deemed to be overly excessive, (Germany made its final $94 million payment on October 4, 2010!).  On top of all that, Germany also had to turn over a lot of their natural resources such as steel, coal, intellectual property (e.g. the trademark for Aspirin), and agricultural products as well.   Combined with the loss of their land (territory both theirs and others that they had taken), the final result of the Treaty was a shattered nation left with an insane amount of debt, anger, desperation, and humiliation which makes a deadly combination as the world would find out later.

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