Catching up with Hitler

Have just watched the Ger­man film “Down­fall”, about the last days of the 3^rd Reich, set in Ber­lin in 1945, mostly in Hitler’s bunker, as the Rus­si­ans advance on and sur­round Ber­lin. Superb per­form­ances — utterly con­vin­cing, and based on eye-witness testi­mony. Pretty hor­rific things going on but even so I won­der if it was san­it­ized — not a lot about the atti­tude of the Rus­sian troops to Ger­man women, for example. Inter­est­ing that after 60 years there’s a lot of interest in Ger­many spe­cific­ally about what happened at the end of the war — when I was last there there were quite large win­dow dis­plays in the book­shops fea­tur­ing a num­ber of books about the imme­di­ate after­math of the war. Also read some inter­est­ing art­icles by W.G. Sebald in “The New Yorker” about the end of the war and the destruc­tion of so many Ger­man cit­ies and towns by sat­ur­a­tion bomb­ing. He noted that for years after the war the Ger­man people almost wiped the scale of the destruc­tion out of their consciousness.