Gabe Friedman | JTA.org
Typing “Hitler” into the search bar on Netflix yields an array of Holocaust and World War II-themed movies and TV shows, many of them with one Nazi or another in their titles.
A viewer who has consumed any of that content might expect something fresh — a piece of bombshell news unearthed in newly found documents, or the use of some kind of flashy new cinematic technology — to headline the newest such addition to the streaming giant, “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.”
That kind of viewer might be disappointed. The six-part documentary — which flashes back and forth between a chronicling of the Nuremberg Trials and a chronicling of Hitler’s methodical rise to power — doesn’t offer much if anything new, content-wise.
The difference, however, is in the packaging, and that’s the framework that started the project. The series uses archival footage and audio and the standard talking-heads format. But with the help of dramatically recreated scenes from history and frequent flashbacks, it’s constructed more like a narrative thriller miniseries than a documentary.
Director Joe Berlinger — who’s well known among true-crime documentary fans for films such as “Brother’s Keeper” and his “Conversations With a Killer” series — said that the content lent itself to a gripping retelling that hasn’t been pulled off in the documentary space.
“How this has been presented in the past is just your information blabbed at you by historians,” Berlinger said. “And there’s no effort to contextualize and to humanize.”
He was motivated at the start by something more specific: a Claims Conference survey from 2020 that found disturbingly high levels of Holocaust ignorance among millennials and Gen Z.
Berlinger spoke about making World War II feel new again, his Jewish journey and how his documentary about fascism in the past dovetails with the present.
First question — is there anything new ground covered here, stylistically, historically or otherwise?
Berlinger: There obviously have been many, many series about Hitler. There are whole channels devoted to World War II, nonstop all the time. But that stuff always feels very dusty and creaky. It’s like grainy, black-and-white archival footage intercut with mediocrely shot interviews. And that’s really kind of what it’s been. We really pushed the envelope [drama-wise].
We also restored and colorized archival footage, I don’t know if you noticed that that’s fresh. I wanted that restored and colorized so that it would nicely intercut with a very high level of cinematic technique for the recreations. They don’t feel like cheesy Discovery ID or Oxygen network level of just the worst kind of recreation you’ve seen.
Why the timing now, exactly?
One of the reasons I wanted to do this is the level of ignorance about the Holocaust amongst millennials is so high. As well as just people not understanding the history. It’s to the point where what’s really scary was it used to be Holocaust denial, but now it’s moved into Holocaust affirmation, like Hitler was right. There’s such ignorance.
There was a study of millennials that the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany put out, which was one of the sparks to why I wanted to do this. It found that one in 10 thought the Jews started the Holocaust, and 50% can’t even name a single concentration camp. That level of ignorance told me that it’s time to retell this story for a younger generation.
How do you reach those millennials and younger generations in the vast forest of content?
Netflix, particularly, is a great platform because it has a huge global audience and a younger scaling audience. So how do you reach a younger scaling global audience? Well, you use the language of cinema, you know, instead of just creaky, poor production value. Talking heads intercut with just archival footage, of course, we have that. But our interviews are beautifully shot. I wanted to use kind of a stage, like you’re getting a lecture from these professors.
I also leaned into the Nuremberg Trials as kind of the present tense thread of the show. Now, there have been documentaries about Nuremberg, but structurally using the Nuremberg Trials as kind of the present tense and then flashing back and forth to tell the history felt fresh.
I do a lot of true crime. And one of the reasons I’m attracted to the trial format is that it’s got perfect dramatic structure: there’s a beginning, middle and end. There’s a search for the truth, there’s rising and falling action, there’s a protagonist and antagonist, then a resolution. So that’s why I gravitated to the true-crime form. Putting the Nazi story into this format, the murder trial format, the criminal format, I thought was a great storytelling device.
And there are certain things that are visual that communicate in ways that you can’t get from just hearing somebody talk. In episode five, it’s hair-raising, you know, we made the bold choice to recreate Babyn Yar, the “Holocaust by bullets” where 30,000 Jews were murdered outside of Kyiv. [The shootings put] such emotional stress on the German soldiers that they decided shooting is too messy — that’s what led to the decision to gas Jews and others in the Holocaust.