Hitler: The Rise of Evil

Hitler: The Rise of Evil
Written by	John Pielmeier G. Ross Parker
Directed by	Christian Duguay
Starring	Robert Carlyle Stockard Channing Peter O'Toole Peter Stormare Thomas Sangster Liev Schreiber
Music by	Normand Corbeil
Country of origin	Canada
Original language	English
Production
Producers	John Ryan Ed Gernon Peter Sussman
Editors	Sylvain Lebel James R. Myers Henk Van Eeghen
Running time	179 minutes
Original release
Release	18 May 2003 (2003-05-18)

Hitler: The Rise of Evil is a Canadian

The film's subplot follows the struggles of Fritz Gerlich, a German journalist who opposes the rising Nazi Party. The quotation disputably attributed to^[2] Edmund Burke is displayed at the beginning and end of the film, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Plot

The opening is a montage of Hitler's life from 1899 to 1913, when he left

Hitler returns to a revolutionary Munich in 1919 and, still employed by the army, is assigned to report on the newly formed political parties in the city. After attending a meeting of the German Workers' Party, he is recruited by the party's leader, Anton Drexler, to organize its propaganda activities and give increasingly popular speeches that harp on the themes that Germany has been betrayed by the leaders who surrendered in the last war and that Communists and Jews are sapping the German spirit from within. After meeting the wealthy art publisher Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler is encouraged to refine his image and create a symbol for the party, which he does by adopting the swastika. Hanfstaengl also puts Hitler in contact with the city's influential figures, including the war hero Hermann Göring, and the militant Ernst Röhm, eventual organizer of the paramilitary SA, who Hitler had met previously but was unable to afford him and his men. In 1921, Hitler forces Drexler to resign and takes over as leader of the renamed National Socialist Party.

In 1923, the Minister of Bavaria,

Arrested by the authorities and tried for treason, Hitler manages to use the trial to his advantage, winning over the audience and the judge with his courtroom theatrics, with only Gerlich and the prosecutors unmoved by his speeches. Consequently he is awarded a lenient sentence in Landsberg Prison, where he writes his memoirs (later published as Mein Kampf). In 1925, Hitler goes to the countryside to escape from politics and is joined by his older half-sister, Angela, and her daughter, Geli Raubal. When he returns to Munich, Hitler takes Geli with him.

Eschewing revolution, Hitler now demands that the party follow a democratic course to power. That declaration puts him into conflict with Röhm, but Hitler's demand for complete subordination of the party to himself as Führer (Leader) wins the approval of most others, including an impressionable young agitator named Joseph Goebbels. During the late 1920s, the party's political fortunes improve due to Hitler's speeches and the stock market crash ruining the economy, with the National Socialists gaining more and more seats in the Reichstag with each election. Alarmed by the party's growing popularity, Gerlich continues to write articles in opposition to Hitler and, when the paper's editor fires him, forms his own newspaper called The Straight Path.

Meanwhile, Hitler forms a relationship with Geli but eventually, distraught by his overbearing control on her life, she commits suicide, after which Hitler forms a relationship with Eva Braun.

In 1932, Hitler becomes a German citizen and runs for president against the incumbent, Paul von Hindenburg. Although he is unsuccessful, the party becomes the largest in the Reichstag shortly after, which emboldens Hitler to demand that he be made Chancellor of Germany. Though Hindenburg despises Hitler, the former Chancellor Franz von Papen helps bring that about in January 1933. Later, the Reichstag building is set on fire, allegedly by a communist, and Hitler uses the incident to have members of the Reichstag award him dictatorial powers, which include suspension of civil liberties such as freedom of the press. As a consequence, Gerlich's newspaper is shut down and he is arrested by the SA and sent to a concentration camp.

Germany now becomes a police state, and Hitler crushes all his opponents, both inside and outside the party, which sees Röhm being arrested and the SA greatly reduced. Röhm is later sentenced to death along with others like von Kahr and Gerlich, and the rest of the SA is absorbed into the Reichswehr army. After Hindenburg's death in August 1934, Hitler combines the office of president and chancellor into one, finally making him the ultimate ruler of Germany.

Cast

Production

Originally, Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw had been on board as a consultant in the production of Hitler: The Rise of Evil. Alliance Atlantis, which had purchased the rights to adapt Kershaw's celebrated biography had wanted to make it more dramatic, but Kershaw found the production's liberties so historically inaccurate regarding Hitler's life that he ultimately chose to have his name removed from the project.^[3]

Executive producer Ed Gernon was fired for comparing the climate of fear that led to the rise of Hitler's Nazism to

The New York Times said: "The filmmakers worked so hard to be tasteful and responsible that they robbed their film of suspense, drama and passion", but commented positively on the performances of Peter O'Toole, Julianna Margulies, and Liev Schreiber.^[7]

David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle gave it a positive review, praising Carlyle's performance as "brilliant".^[8]

The German magazine Der Spiegel called the film a "soap opera" and "flat melodrama with invented key scenes - Hitler for stupid people."^[9]

See also

• Adolf Hitler in popular culture
• Beer Hall Putsch
• Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Hitler: The Rise of Evil.

• Hitler: The Rise of Evil at AllMovie
• Hitler: The Rise of Evil at
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