Sometimes in the late hours or at strange moments one is left to wonder about the nature of life and death, the future. Watching the Nazis: A Warning from History gives one just such thoughts. What was it like to be a young German in 1934 watching this great revolution unfolding? A thousand changes imperceptible and perceptible, talk of destiny and triumph, erasing the past for a new future. It makes one wonder about the next step to take, and where it may lead one years down the line.
In this documentary we experience the various chapters in the Nazis' rise, moving forward with the Germans as each change, each new step by the Reich brings about a new world of possibilities, but still with enough retrospect to know where it's all heading. It's frightening, one feels like a blind man walking but inevitably we know the dark place we're going. The Nazis were bad, born out of chaos aided by fate, but from the day to day life of the poor German it was an evil that might've seemed good at first, and certainly an evil much more abstract than the daily struggle to survive, in the wake of WW1 and Versailles. With each chapter we watch the Nazis' rise as one of them, we're in the present and when events finally cascade we feel just as helpless as that nation held sway under evil forces along with its countless victims.
The Nazis: A Warning from History is something to see because it detaches us from the our time and let's us witness first hand how our own weakness, desperation, and bitterness can lead us to a place much worse than the one we left. The cold, evil, and unrepentant accounts of those who took part in the killings contrasted with those who knew but felt powerless, along with those who felt clever enough to ride the wave only to find themselves crushed beneath, paint a dark picture. An ugly world, shrouded in darkness where the future is an illusion disclosed by carnival frauds, and when curtain falls the people are left with the consequence of their ignorance and heartlessness.
From the infighting of the Weimar Republic, to the rise of the National Socialist party, to re-armament, colonization, war, and final defeat we are left to wonder how it all happened. Some still cling to their blame of the Germans, but with the silent knowledge that we're no longer talking about Germans anymore, we're watching humanity. As it happened before so has it happened again, and could easily yet still.
