'Hitler and the Nazis' review: Netflix doc recounts Third Reich's horrors for a new generation

Even with the vast and ever-growing library of books, feature films, documentaries and TV series about World War II, even with such powerful reminders as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, there is a legitimate concern that as the decades pass, the heroics of the Allied powers and the atrocities of Hitler and the Third Reich will be lost to time. In 2018, a study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 41% of all respondents and 66% of millennials didn’t know what Auschwitz is.

A moment here to let that sink in.

That study is one of the reasons the skilled documentarian Joe Berlinger (“Paradise Lost,” “The Ted Bundy Tapes”) directed the riveting and essential six-part Netflix documentary series “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.” Expertly weaving in archival footage, dramatic re-creations, interviews with esteemed journalists and historians and audio recordings from the Nuremberg Trials (many of which have only recently been made public), Berlinger paints a stunningly effective portrait of Hitler’s rise to power, the mass murders and other horrors committed by the Third Reich — and the stunning testimony at the trials of some of Hitler’s most vile and unrepentant henchmen.

The series also benefits greatly from its reliance on the reportage of the late William L. Shirer, one of the few American correspondents who was reporting from Germany during Hitler’s rise to power and in the early stages of the war. (Shirer’s epic, 1,250-page book “The Rise and Fall of Third Reich,” was published in 1960 to great acclaim and best-selling success and is still hailed as an important work.)

Through the use of AI technology that enables Shirer to “speak” as narrator, as well as dramatic re-creations in which Balázs Kató portrays Shirer, we get the visceral feeling of being at Shirer’s side as he covers Hitler and the war from close proximity. (As is the case with most dramatic re-creations in documentaries, the actors portraying Shirer, Hitler, Göring, et al., don’t speak their lines. We see visuals of them re-creating scenes, while actual writings and recordings provide the dialogue. It’s an effective technique that sidesteps sensationalism.)

“Hitler and the Nazis” toggles back and forth on the timeline, alternating between a chronological study of Hitler’s rise to power and a number of pivotal events in World War II to the 1945-1946 Nuremberg trials. Shirer was the classic intrepid reporter, going to great lengths to get scoops — but he also was an impressive wordsmith, e.g., his description of Göring in the courtroom: “At first glance, I scarcely recognize him. His faded Air Force uniform, shorn of the insignia and of the medals he loved so childishly, hangs loosely on him. And gone is his own burliness, his old arrogance, his flamboyant air. How a twist of fate, I marveled, could reduce a man to size.”

(Another poignant touch: Much of the score was created from the compositions of Holocaust victims, with Ira Antelis and Serj Tankian from System of a Down reorchestrating the material.)

The series is filled with unforgettable passages, as when we see how hundreds of German-Jewish refugees aboard the German liner St. Louis were turned away in Cuba and then denied entrance to the USA and had to return to Europe, or when we hear about the mass executions of innocent men, women and children and see actual film footage and photos documenting these atrocities. When the French agreed to surrender in 1940, Hitler insisted the armistice be carried out on the Compiègne Wagon, the same train carriage in which the Germans surrendered in the 1918 armistice, and that the carriage be taken from a nearby museum and placed in the exact same location as in 1918. Bearing witness to this moment and broadcasting it back to the USA: William Shirer.

At the Nuremberg Trials, after U.S. Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson delivers his powerful and famous opening statement, the despicable likes of Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer plead not guilty and either feign ignorance of the depths of the horrors committed by the Third Reich, or blame it all on Hitler, who of course by that time had committed suicide. They are cowardly to the end.

Shirer reflects on being in Germany in 1939, when the war started: “The Germans seemed so strong then, that a lonely American on the streets of Berlin wondered whether the forces of democracy, of decency, would ever rally in time. Now, one’s thoughts turn to the future, to put our minds and our hearts to work on a better world, one in which, above all, there should be no more wars.”

Humankind is still working on that. In the meantime, “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial” is a timely reminder that anyone in present day who embraces even a trace of the Third Reich’s ways is either an ignorant fool or a racist and antisemitic hatemonger.

Or both.