The last two or three days of Hitler's life in the Bunker are portrayed from a variety of viewpoints: Oskar Werner, a captain from the German army in the Baltic states, there to ask Hitler for reinforcement; Herta Angst, a 13-year-old trooper raised to defend the city, one of fifty survivors out of 5000; Erik Frey, one of the generals who worked out the details of the plan to dynamite the tunnels, flooding them and the thousands of civilians sheltering there; and the occupants of the lesser ranks, sitting in the commissary, dancing, getting drunk, while Albin Skoda, driven mad by the spectre of failure and the amphetamine cocktails supplied him by his doctor, swings between paranoia, mania, and the depths of depression.
It's a movie about madness, and the habit of obedience, which is madness in and of itself, a warning by director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, that echoes through current events, with one character stating that the encirclement of Berlin and its inevitable destruction is part of some years-long plan .... or so Goebbels will claim the next day. It's a tirade against the cult of personality and the tyranny of individuals who can order the deaths of thousands of wounded, women, and children while moaning about the unfairness to the tyrant. It might have been produced this year, with a different tyrant or would-be tyrant in the center of the storm. Skoda gives a great performance, if you can stand looking at him.
With that title and subject, Pabst could reasonably have called this his last film and retired. He was, after all, 70 years old. But he directed three more movies over the next couple of years before calling it quits. He died on May 29, 1967, three months shy of his 82nd birthday.
