February 24, 2005 - How exactly does one broach the subject of making a film about the greatest villain history has ever seen? A villain so evil he makes the ones of storybooks and movies appear mild in comparison. Sure, Hitler and Nazis in general have often been portrayed as faceless villains on film and in stories, but writer/producer Bernd Eichinger and Oliver Hirschbiegel had plans to do something entirely different: They set out to make a film that would be about the last twelve days of Hitler's life told largely from his own perspective. It would be based on two books, The Downfall by Joachim Fest and the memoirs of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, entitled Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary. One of Europe's most famous actors, Swiss born Bruno Ganz, would play the great dictator.

Downfall chronicles the harrowing final twelve days of the life of Adolf Hitler (Ganz) . As his dream collapsed around him, Hitler remained convinced of a last hope, almost until the very end when he cowardly took his own life. The story begins with Hitler interviewing a group of young women. One of them is to have the honor of serving the "furor." A 22-year-old Munich-born girl named Traudl Junge (Alexander Maria Lara) captures Hitler's eye, and he hires her for the position. The story now shifts to 1945, when Hitler's dream of world domination has been all but abolished. He has retreated to a bunker system which lies under the German Chancellery. Above ground, a small group of soldiers refuse to give up, as well as the Hitler youth which includes a young boy named Peter (Donevan Gunia), who has very proudly destroyed two Russian tanks. Back in the bunker, Hitler's celebrates his 56th birthday with his men and his mistress, Eva Braun (Juliane Kohler). His men urge Hitler to leave Berlin, but he refuses. As the downfall continues, the group largely flees for Berlin. Those who stay, including Hitler, Braun, his Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes) and his sociopath wife Magda (Corrina Harfouch), plot the suicides of themselves and their families.

	-Newmarket Films Ganz as Adolf Hitler

What is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Downfall is that director Oliver Hirschbiegel does not succumb to the temptation to demonize Adolf Hitler. He lets Hitler's actions and his delusional ideals speak for themselves. Where another director may have succumbed to the temptation to show flashes of Jews being gassed or of Hitler ranting and raving as we've seen in his public speeches, Hirschbiegel takes the novel approach of portraying Hitler as a very fallible, very human man. When you really think about what happened and come to the core of what Hitler was, it's actually much more frightening to realize that he wasn't the devil incarnate, he was not some mythic beast sent from hell, he did not have superpowers. Hitler was a very charismatic leader and a very smart strategist. He was callous, cold and calculated and, perhaps most frightening of all, he came closer than anyone could have ever possibly imagined to his "pure Aryan race."