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Although the commercial Professor Kaplan cites was not run in the Phoenix market where I caught the first episode of "Hitler," I find it amazing that serious people could take this TV mini-drama (or "CSI-Munich" as Jay Leno called it the following night), seriously. Were an undergraduate to have given me the story line from this presentation of Hitler's rise to power on an exam, I would have flunked them. Aside from a surprisingly limber Goebbels, a Peter O'Toole as Hindenburg on Weight Watchers, and an Ernst Roehm who doesn't spend the more prosperous Weimar years in Bolivia, the series made no mention of Heinerich Bruening and his disastrous economic policies which made the Nazis' rise to political significance possible in the first place. Nor was Alfred Hugenberg, whose financing of the 1929 anti-Young Plan plebiscite gave the Nazi's money and more importantly, respectability, noted. (He could easily have been portrayed by another prominent individual with big ears and a bad haircut, Ross Perot). Worse yet, the program did not show what television as a medium can do extremely well, that is show mass manipulation in its most sinister aspects. That should not have been difficult to do. Anyone who has watched Triumph of the Will gets a sense of Hitler's extraordinary sense of crowd psychology. That is, the days of audience warmup by his underlings, followed by the man himself speaking. He starts off with stock notions that he tests on his audience, and goes on to discover what it is the audience wants to hear. Once the Fuehrer finds that magic formula, his eyes blink, he smiles quickly and proceeds to hammer that theme home until he has brought his listeners to political orgasm. Since this program ended with Hindenburg's death, I would suggest that any sequel to it feature Roseann as Winston Churchill, Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts on the Sopranos), as Stalin, Sylvester Stallone as Franklin Roosevelt and Janet Reno as Eleanor.
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