Albert Speer

Explores Leni Riefenstahl's artistic legacy and her complex ties to the Nazi regime, juxtaposing her self-portrayal with evidence suggesting awareness of the regime's atrocities.

The unbelievable second career of Albert Speer: How did a man in charge of 12 million slaves become “the good Nazi”? A cautionary tale about his 1971 attempt to whitewash his past with a Hollywood adaptation of his wartime memoir, “Inside the Third Reich”.

With the help of Hollywood, top Nazi Albert Speer tried to unscrupulously whitewash himself of his crimes in the 1970s. Speer gave long interviews to Hollywood author Jack Neuman and mimed the "good Nazi". After his release from 20 years in prison in Spandau, Hitler's former architect and armaments minister earned a lot of money with books about his time at the side of the dictator and his years in prison. However, a Hollywood feature film about his life was still missing. Speer received Neuman at his villa in Heidelberg.

Hitler's biography told like never before. Besides brief historical localizations by a narrator, only contemporaries and Hitler himself speak: no interviews, no reenactment, no illustrative graphics and no technical gadgets. The testimonies from diaries, letters, speeches and autobiographies are assembled with new, often unpublished archive material. Hitler's life and work are thus reflected in a unique way in interaction with the image of the society in the years 1889 to 1945.

This portrait that goes against the grain depicts the Führer as a lazy, isolated leader, cut off from reality, incapable of governing without his "apostles". They are Hitler's essential ministers, advisers, rivals, courtiers. They hate each other, and the Führer puts them in competition, often to get the worst out of them. The portraits of Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer but also Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and Doctor Joseph Mengele trace the rivalries, hatreds and predations that punctuate the entire frightening epic of Nazism. This documentary is composed of a selection of archive images and testimonies from descendants and specialists of this period.

Adolf Hitler spent over 1,000 days on the Obersalzberg, his mountain holiday refuge near Berchtesgaden. It was there he made his decisions about war and destruction. The producers, through special permits, explore the abandoned concrete tunnels in search of the relics of history of Hitler’s mountain and to tell almost forgotten tales of the people who lived there, high up in the shadow of power.

Everyone knows the public archive footage of Hitler. But most of it is silent. What was he saying? Special computer technology enables us for the first time to lip-read the silent film.

In 1945, 160 German cities lay in ruins and the loss of millions of lives, billions in material assets and countless cultural treasures was mourned throughout Europe... With the question “How could it happen?”, the film goes back to the year 1914, when the “primal catastrophe of the 20th century” took its course with the First World War.

In September 2001, respected German historian Lothar Machtan dropped a bombshell on the world of Hitler studies: Hitler was secretly homosexual. His highly acclaimed and explosive book "The Hidden Hitler" ignited a storm of controversy. With information from the bestselling book, award-winning filmmakers Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato and Gabriel Rotello explore areas of the Führer's private life.

Five Jewish Hungarians, now US citizens, tell their stories: before March 1944, when Nazis began to exterminate Hungarian Jews, months in concentration camps, and visiting childhood homes more than 50 years later. An historian, a Sonderkommando, a doctor who experimented on Auschwitz prisoners, and US soldiers who were part of the liberation in April 1945.