JUST when you thought there was nothing new to be said about Adolf Hitler, along comes the four-part series Hitler: The Lost Tapes (Channel 4, Saturday) to prove your assumption is largely right.
’d never suggest for a moment that television should stop commissioning documentaries about the Nazis. On the contrary, we’re probably more in need of them now that at any time in the last few decades.
In an era when right-wing extremism is on the rise again around the globe and, according to a recent survey, more than half of Americans don’t even know how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, it’s imperative that the world never be allowed to forget what happened.
It should just stop commissioning ones like this, which is yet another example of the narrow, near-fetishistic obsession with the minutiae of Adolf Hitler, from his sexual orientation to his drug-taking to his flatulence-inducing diet (all of which have been given the documentary treatment), that risks obscuring the bigger, more important historical picture.
When it comes to television, it’s always going to be springtime for Hitler anyway. Broadcasters know there’s a ready-made audience who just can’t get enough of the stumpy Austrian corporal, no matter how thin or dubious the material.
The Lost Tapes is far from the most facile of Hitler-themed documentaries out there, yet it still splashes around near the shallower end of the pool.
The “tapes” of the title presumably refer to the four hours of home movies Hitler’s mistress and later wife Eva Braun shot of him and his highest-ranking officers relaxing at his Bavarian retreat.
The footage was believed lost for close on three decades. None of it, however, shows up in this first episode.
Instead, the focus is on 1,3000 newly digitised photographs of Hitler, many never before seen, taken by photographer Heinrich Hoffman, who ultimately proved to be just as important to the Nazi propaganda machine as Joseph Goebbels or Triumph of the Will director Leni Riefenstahl.
One contributor says that Hoffman, a cheerful, booze-loving character and the polar opposite of the abstemious, clean-living Hitler, was a superb photographer, every bit the equal of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa. It’s just a shame he was also a rabid fascist.
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Many of the rare images of the young Hitler shown in this first hour aren’t actually the work of Hoffman; they were captured by various others whose names have been lost in the mist of history.
What all of them have in common, though, is that Hitler, whether as schoolboy, soldier or civilian, whether in formal or casual pose, is always on the edge, always slightly removed from everyone else, every inch the sullen, angry loner with something to prove to the world.
The always engaging historian Guy Walters, looking at a school photo, amusedly observes that, of all the kids in the picture, Hitler – at the end of a line, naturally, and with a face that already seems strangely old – looks like “the kind of nasty boy no one likes”.
The first photograph Hoffman ever took of Hitler was an accidental one. The failed painter and future Fuhrer is just another 25-year-old face in the crowd at a political rally in 1914.
Hoffman was accused of later giving it a bogus historical significance by tinkering with it to place Hitler nearer the front.
The aim of the series is to contrast the public image of Hitler, carefully cultivated by Hoffman, with the reality of his “inner life”, documented in Braun’s footage.
This raises a question: why the hell should we give the smallest damn about what Hitler was like in private?
The closest the opening instalment gets to anything like a minor insight is through a set of Hoffman’s photographs, never before seen, of Hitler rehearsing various poses in order to determine which would work best when he was addressing a mass gathering.
To modern eyes, he looks ridiculous: like a particularly frenzied Shakespearean ham actor or some crazed interpretive dancer.
These prove that Hitler was a narcissist. Well, big deal. All dictators, as well as would-be ones, are narcissists. Tell me something I didn’t know.
HITLER: THE LOST TAPES 2/5
