The bestselling author of "Devil in the White City" turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler's rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

The Gleiwitz case reconstructs in detail the 1939 surprise attack by a Nazi unit on the radio station in Gleiwitz, a German town on the Polish border. This attack was blamed on Polish forces, thus served as Hitler's justification for marching into Poland and starting WWII. It shows how facts and opinions can be manipulated and how people are made to accept lies, murder and war. To depict fascism, director Gerhard Klein and his Czech cameraman, Jan...

Hamburg, Germany 1934: An executioner is needed. Teetjen (Erwin Geschonneck) makes the biggest mistake of his life. Because his butcher shop is facing bankruptcy, he agrees to execute a group of political prisoners for the Nazis. Once this becomes known, Teetjen's life falls apart. The Axe of Wandsbek was the only DEFA film made by Falk Harnack, a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter who was interested in exploring the involvement of the middle class...

Documentary on Hitler's desire to recreate Germany in the artistic style of classical Greece and Rome by banning all modern art and exterminating anyone who did not conform to his ideal image of patriotic Aryans.

Explores the various factors which led many of Germany's young people to pledge their loyalty and support to the dictator and join the Hitler Youth during his rise to power.

Monika Hertwig, daughter of Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow Concentration Camp, meets with Helen Jonas, Goeth's maid, for the first time in an effort to come to terms with her father's legacy.

"In The Hitler Years: Disaster 1940-1945, Frank McDonough completes his brilliant two-volume history of Germany under Hitler's Third Reich. At the beginning of 1940, Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. Despite Hitler's grand ambitions...

What if you found out that your grandfather--the man who had been a demanding, magnetic presence throughout your childhood--was a Nazi SS officer? This is the confession that Martin Davidson, already into middle age, received from his mother upon his grandfather Bruno Langbehn's death, and this is Davidson's exploration, using the skills he honed as a documentary producer for the BBC, of the truth behind this dark family secret. As Martin dove into...

The story of an apolitical working-class family that nevertheless gets drawn into collusion with Nazi policies. Rotation was awarded the Golden Leopard at the 1954 Locarno Film Festival and is ranked by film critics as one of Germany's 100 Most Important Films. Rotation portrays a German family and its support for Hitler during the Nazi period. The apolitical mechanic Hans Behnke considers joining the Nazi party to improve his financial standing....

"A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen. Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In [this book], Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. To say...