Reviews and comments have already identified the ample shortcomings of the
CBS miniseries and I am prompted to write just now by recent news reports,
together with the few comments on the film's use of Edmund Burke, to
indicate that the story has universal implications, despite the portrayal of
Hitler here. I agree that it is not enough for historians to dismiss a
miniseries by applying standards of written scholarly history, and it is not
so much this miniseries as its context that concern me here. A basic
criticism, echoing Bielanski, Kohler, and Bergerson is that this series did
not fully do what TV as a medium can do so well, as indicated for example in
_Triumph of the Will_, but instead opts for a Hitler that fits contemporary
fascination and stereotypes. To the list of significant inaccuracies
presented by Weinberg, I would add the film's claim that Hitler isolated the
Jews with the Nuremberg Laws, when these laws in fact followed and
recognized the social isolation of Jews by the German people, as Klemperer's
diaries for example indicate.

Following so much hand wringing about the advent of CBS' miniseries "Hitler:
The Rise of Evil, I thought it a pity that the film was not more scandalous.
The series identifies evil and its rise with one person to devise a
Hollywood-style drama of personality, in this case one who grabs power, as
billed in the CBS opening, through "fear" and "intimidation" Hitler's
popular appeal to Germany's sense of victimization and desire for national
glory and military might in response is underplayed. I could not fault the
film's portrait of Hitler's personality. But not surprisingly for a success
in this medium, the film reflects the way we prefer to see Hitler better
than the Hitler of a historical context. A TV portrait of Hitler's
personality as it played out in historical context could challenge our easy
comparisons of Hitler to our enemies.

The film's title itself ties evil and its rise to the person of Hitler
(suggesting it also disappeared with him). Since 9/11 we know better,
although Bush administration officials responded by repeatedly likening
enemies to Hitler--conveniently one who personally embodies evil and
threatens harm, as the CBS miniseries has it. There is little in this series
to challenge our frightened sense of victimization since 9/11, our notion
that Saddam Hussein of 2003 should be compared with Hitler, and our turn as
a country overwhelmingly toward the military as the solution. Just now
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one who explicitly likened Hussein to
Hitler, is demanding an explanation of the CIA for its claim that Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction, the justification for going to war. By 2003
in fact, Saddam Hussein was probably the best-controlled dictator in recent
history, while Hitler owed his rise to power and early success in war to the
fact that those around him, domestically and abroad, tolerated or enabled
him, a context the miniseries does indicate somewhat.

I thought the fear that the miniseries might portray Hitler as another one
of us was in fact partially fulfilled. This was a saving grace, not that it
makes him sympathetic or plays on the cherubic Adolph of early photographs.
Robert Carlyle portrays Hitler through 1923 as slight, even mousy, and
usually overwrought--an unlikely hero or monster. A loser looking for a
scapegoat, he taps into people's resentments like an Archie Bunker who takes
to the streets and rhetoric to find a following. Germans have been wronged,
and need to stand up for once because "we face extinction."

Hanfstaengl finds Hitler practicing speech poses and dreaming of power
alone, and charms him to tears with Wagner. Then he promises to make Hitler
popular and begins schooling him in Madison Avenue tactics of image and
advertising. The film lacks a context that would make it more challenging
for our leaders today to simply insert the image of Hitler as embodiment of
evil into our perceptions of enemy state leaders. We have rightly learned to
confront horrible regimes like those of Saddam Hussein, although we have
focused overwhelmingly on removing the person from power as the essence of
regime change. Chaos and disaffection among Iraqis, based on unfulfilled
promises, followed the coalition tanks that drove their way into the heart
of Iraq and its major cities. As Professor Martin Rees of Cambridge
University, in his book _Our Final Hour_, shows, the catalog of sundry ways
human civilization could meet its end (there's a fifty percent chance of
this by century's end in his estimation) include very few that might be
rebuffed with military force.

And yet a _New York Times_ article of May 27 revealed that in "2002,
Americans who expressed a great deal or a lot of confidence in the military
rose, to 79 percent from 58 in 1975."  This follows a "trend that has
intensified" since 9/11. During the same period those who had high trust in
Congress declined from 40 to 25 percent. A good piece on Hitler might well
have shown that the German war of annihilation under Hitler in WW II proved
the earlier German war expert, Clausewitz, wrong: war was not policy by
other means. Policy had become but the handmaiden of war.

This may be expecting too much, but the film does miss a key opportunity, in
my opinion, for describing the ways of Hitler's evil in the little-explained
aftermath of the Reichstag fire of February 1933. Hitler's politics of fear,
identifying the destruction as an act of communist terror, allowed him once
again to use legal means to undermine civil liberties and magnify police
powers. This is of particular interest in light of a just-released report by
Amnesty International, one important voice increasingly hard to hear in the
present climate, showing some evidence that our militarized response to 9/11
has made life worse for more than it has helped, undermining in some cases
human rights and democratic freedoms.

Repeatedly the Hitler of the miniseries is shown either in danger or about
to give up--and we can't help but wince at the missed opportunity and the
chance of another history. The film is, thankfully, very good at depicting a
common mechanism in the perpetuation of missed opportunities up until today:
the terror of nonconformity, backed by brutal state force. The wife of
heroic journalist Fritz Gerlach pleads with him to stop indulging his
conscience, because "this isn't about history, this isn't about politics,
it's about your life." His understandably unpopular response is "if I don't
do this I won't be able to live with myself." Those brilliant lines show
what TV can do too. As in any presentation of Hitler, this series could have
been done better--in this case if it had wanted to risk confronting popular
images, ratings, and advertising income.

Nathan Stoltzfus

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