"We all dream of journeys into the universe, into our inner self" "The mysterious path goes inwards;" "into night" "If I offered in one Hand:" "the gold of speculation ...the full beer-belly of a government official happiness and all the playthings of the world but in the other hand:" "...the longing for paradise and the music of our ideas then everybody would blindly choose paradise even if it were the false paradise greedy for sacrificial blood and ready to offer the best of themselves involving our hopes with the greatest cruelties for the benefit of lunatic triumphs of the human soul" "Conceiling within ourselves all erroneous conclusions the banality and baroque asceticism of mass rituals" "Long is the legend of faith its victories over us and its defeats through us" "Scenario and direction" "Co-producers" "Archive sound" "Dedicated to Henri Langlois and the Cinémathéque Francaise ...for "Film - the Music of the Future", the aesthetic of this film" "I have planned one thing, the gentleman are quite right" "We are intolerant. I have only one aim: to sweep away all the thirty parties from Germany" "They keep on mistaking me for a bourgois or Marxist politician who is today SPD, tomorrow USPD the next day Communist, the next day Trade Unionist or today Democrat and tomorrow German Peoples Party then economic Party" "They mix us up with one of their own kind" "We have only one aim and we shall fight for it with a fanatical ruthlessness until death!" "(HitIer, 1932 )" "hitler A film from Germany" "From the Cosmic Ash-Tree to Goethe's Oak and the Beeches of Buchenwald" "Ladies and gentlemen!" "This show is about a man who is guilty of everything" "Like Napoleon; a German napoleon of the twentieth century" "Or, better, an inhuman brute a man who never laughed without putting his hand before his mouth..." "42 00:14:46,852 -- 00:14:52,950 ...and who kicked his dog away if he was caught stroking the animal" "Who said: "In the beginning, everybody laughed about me" ""Not only a few are laughing and soon nobody will laugh any more"" "This show's about somebody who had nothing to lose somebody who never can be duplicated" "Ladies and gentlemen, now we're rid of the Kaiser and God, we can begin" "The song of songs" "The story to top all stories" "Let's give him his chance;" "let's give ourselves our chance" "Taboos, this show's about taboos" "Either give your audience a stunning show or stay home with your canary" "Yes, sir, cultural revolution, Art for the people" "The people's right of seIf-expression to put on a show" "There have been parades and triumphal, sun-symbolizing banners since Caesar's Rome and CaIiguIa" "Mankind in the century of the film." "AII or nothing" "The man who banished unemployment who drove the money.changers from the temple and cleansed the houses of sex and crime" "The man of the twentieth century" "The man of humble origins who came from the people, Iike every one of us, from the masses" "Hurrah!" "The devil is loose" "Knaves and trumps, perversions and racketeering" "Who could then stand aloof?" "Hit them hard, beat the devil" "A merry apocalypse, Experiment "End of the world" something about our woIfish society" "Here are the rules of the game:" "There'II be no heroes, except ourselves" "There'II be no story, only ours, our inside story" "clouded visions, with bloody orgies before the final daybreak" "No human stories, but a history of mankind" "No disaster film but disaster as film the end of the world, the great flood, the final cosmic agony" "so we've no intimate scenes about the fear and misery of the Third Reich nothing about the "cabbage trust" gangster politics of the times" "Rather, something about the faith that moves mountains and a people's leader without equal" "Summon up all our strength, your gladness and your sorrow" "( 1st May, 1933 ) ln a few hours we shall see here the biggest mass meeting ever assembled" "AII who want to see StaIingrad again, or the 20th of july plot or the lone wolf's last days in his bunker or the Nuremberg of Leni RiefenstahI, will be disappointed" "We aren't showing the unrepeatable reality nor the emotional dramas of the victims nor the factual documentary approach nor the money-spinners that trade on morality, on horror on fear, death, repentance, arrogance and rightous anger" "The German worker, centre of this celebration, has surpassed himself" "This is no left wing opportunist death-camp sex film" "This is a film for us." "It's about war and genocide" "Auschwitz as the battlefield of race war" "Who does the world hold guilty?" "And what would HitIer be without us?" "This film's about the divine spark in man about the starry sky above us and the moral law within myself" "It's about fantasies of the mind and their bloody realization" "MephistopheIes playing to a full house, which is burning" "Once again" "But how shall we?" "is it for art?" "moral philosophy, after fifty million dead?" "silence?" "Are we to remain silent?" "It concerns us." "Not the "haves" but us, the "have nots" who live in hope who put our hopes in those who will finally take some action who go along with them who went along with everything, just once, and even that was wrong" "It's about the biggest crisis in human existence worId-wide, with new techniques" "I warned, I Ludwig the second warned from the beginning  I warned that business, speculation films, pornography, politics were all show for the masses" "Entertainment, to make money" "But how can one, how can I, how can you and I mean this seriously be entertained by tragic events, the work of a few madmen?" "Were the perpetrators all criminals?" "Were the victims all good people?" "Masochists." "Systems." "Laws" "Lawers." "Academics" "Newspapers." "people" "A nation." "socialism." "Workers..." "madness" "And have some charity for such transgression" "But what should we be without that guilt?" "We live off the success of sorrow, don't we?" "felix culpa..." "O happy guilt!" "A sad but nice bit of business in the name of art" "But how am I to do it?" "How can anyone unsympathetic to this subject go on and make such a film?" "ShouIdn't I, shouldn't we live without this film, push aside our thougts think of something else, something more important?" "He shall, he must have his chance" "Let him be born, Iike all of us, and have a mother be permitted to learn, to love and to hate" "influenced by what and by whom?" "Why did he take this or that decision?" "And if, at the end, he must appear as he did let us allow him to begin again as we all do when we came into the world" "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world  and have no love and lose his own soul?" "Quotations...watch out, everybody:" "quotations!" "The whole western culture and the Christian God are part of this" "We're in between Jesus and Hitler" "Which brings us to the jews and the persecutors and the transactions and the whole madness of the ideas and seIf-hatred and love mixed up with them" "They all envy me for this puppet, vitally essential as it is" "But what shall I do... if it sees things, Iike the staircase of tears..." "A grandfather... who shows his grandchild the stars to distract it" "The good old stars, taken from us long ago by the smog of the cities" "A mother with her baby in her arms" "black uniformed men with skulls on their caps... all around their caps, and a machine-gun in their hands the bodies, still warm, trembling in the ditch into which they, too, must go" "Shots in the night, curses whispers beneath the night stars" "Who can hear the great curse in the stones all around?" "No sleep for the children and children's children of the guilty" "Music over everything" "Music enhances everything" "When, during the Iast war the great comedian KarI VaIentin stepped onto a Munich stage amid victory celebrations he sang, very quietly the German foIk-songs:" "In deepest cellar, here I sit;" "what is coming from the sky?" "And:" "Oh, my dear Augustin, everything's gone" "That VaIentin did not sell his famous collection of postcards to adolf hitler" "In it was the card of the child Ludwig with a beard" "He refused the offer of 100,000 Reichsmark and a life pension of a thousand marks a month ...because Hitler demanded he should stop making films" "Where, I wonder, would I find another VaIentin who would say no to such offers?" "After the war, he was informed by the then boss of Bavarian Radio that his services would no Ionger be needed, due to his lack of humor" "Then the great Valentin wept for the first time, before he died" "Weeping after HitIer had gone, that was our VaIentin" "He no Ionger had a chance to object to anything" "The people after HitIer had no more use for that VaIentin" "God always created ten who beat their breasts, lamenting and one fool who entertained them, laughing" "Which are you?" "Forward!" "forward!" "the trumpets are calling" "Forward!" "forward!" "youth knows no danger" "No matter how high the aim" "Youth will reach it" "Our flag leads us on" "We step towards the future" "We march on for Hitler, through night and danger" "With the flag of youth, for freedom and bread" "Our flag leads us on" "Our flag is the new era" "Our flag leads us on to eternity" "Yes, our flag is greater than death" "German youth!" "As we have decided to put on a show together, in democratic fashion about how he and we came to power let's go the whole hog" "Let's make it a fun show, for once, everyone can join in" "It's bound to be shocking: that man his misdeeds and us helping him" "So let's start yelling right away" "primal yelI-therapy!" "We'Il go far back into our childhood" "Back into our most secret wishes, dreams and stories" "As we have no Hitler to exhibit in a cage to spit at, kick or kiss his hands according to our individual tastes, for the fee of a few marks the way LoIa Montès, in her day could be touched in an American circus, for a dollar" "I suggest each of us plays himself acts here, in front of all, his own version of hitler as he acts him still today, at home in his little room, before the mirror or on a motor cycle... with swastika and Madonna as lucky charms on his chest, beneath his leather jacket as he drives against the wind" "Let's make it a commercial film for, after all, film has always been a commercial business" "No, please, think back, deep into yourself" "Never was there a man so loved and so hated" "Never has so much been projected by so many into one man" "This is about us, all of us" "It's about the happiness we were promised and never given" "It's about the people who elected him and sacrificed everything for him themselves and their ideas sons, fathers, friends and their image of the world" "Cities, whole countries, their conscience and their souls" "It's about the hitler within us..." "On a small budget, without sets, with slide projections and our imaginations, where everyone can join in" "The world as a circus and as a fairground side-show" "So let's give him and ourselves a chance" "Silence, please!" "The Führer will show himself just once more and then asks all to go home, as he has many conferences" "Neither the Party nor the common will spurred me on" "It was the thousands who killed themselves to escape the Depression" "Soon I shall ensure perfect order in society" "PIutocrats and Jewish elements want to dictate to the German worker!" "This is now absolutely and soley in my power" "Germany is hitler!" "hitler is Germany!" "AII those fanatical opponents, I know where they'lI be going: into misery where they have long belonged" "Perfect order in society." "I repeat: perfect order" "You can judge how I have felt since those days and how I feel now" "I am so overjoyed that fate has chosen me to complete the great union of the German people" "(HitIer, Vienna, 1938 )" "It is absolutely certain that our new community will nevermore be dissolved" "You ruthless tyrants, you servants of baal, you judges of Sodom!" "Your limbs shall wither" "Your living bodies shall decay" "The bones of your children and your children's children will fester!" "Each day shall bring you misfortune and pain shall drive sleep from your eyes" "Germany has become Greater Germany" "And shall remain so!" "Not only the genius of the Commander- in-Chief has led to victory but also providence" "Yet they don't know, all the same, that Rumpelstiltskin is my name" "The entire nation is assembled for the final roll-call to hear your great, historic statement I ask you, my Führer, to speak to us" "We want our Führerl" "German fellow-countrymen and woman" "This is the third time that I speak in a frontier town on the occasion of a plebiscite" "In 1933 it was Königsberg lt was there, on the 4th March that I urged the nation within the then frontiers of the Reich to show it's faith in me to enable me independent of parliamentary difficulties to take hold of Germany's destiny and shape it more auspiciously" "The second time I spoke in a frontier town it was Cologne on the 28th March, 1936 again an the eve of a plebiscite when I had to appeal to the German people to endorse the very difficult decision I made a decision to restore the formerly demilitarized zone to the sovereignty of the Reich" "Today I stand here in Vienna on the eve of a decision which I believe will go down in the annals of the German history" "In this town I'm the biggest sow I only sleep with Jew-boys now" "(First World War veterean ) lt was in 1915 I was blinded by a Russian grenade... ln eighteen years of darkness I was a part of the fatherland's misery" "But the German war-blind... were never defeated by their personel tragedy" "A constant will-power drove us to contribute to the fatherland" "If today a greater hope for the future shines over Germany then that bright light also penetrates our lives and gives us new strength" "This day will become the reward for our sacrifices" "Once more there'll be honesty, discipline and faith" "Let this day of spring be a symbol of a bright, beautiful Germany once more" "Fellow Germans!" "At this moment when the guns greet the day of victory with their thunderous salute I call on you as one of the millions who gave of their utmost" "Therefore, be united, close the ranks to hasten the longed-for day of liberty" "Be true to your vow:" "All for Germany, our beloved fatherland!" "(Re-enactment, "M", Fritz Lang, 1931 )" "But I can't help what I do!" "I can't..." "I can't help what I do" "The old story!" "What do you know?" "Who are you to talk?" "Who are you?" "What are you?" "You're all criminals!" "Maybe you're even proud of your safe-breaking or burglary or card-sharping" "You need do any of these things if you'd learned a proper trade, if you worked if you weren't such lazy swine" "I can't help myself" "I can't control this evil thing inside me this fire the voices the torment" "You mean you've got to murder?" "AII the time..." "It drives me through the streets, as though someone's following me" "It's me, pursuing myself" "relentlessly" "But it's still me" "Yes, sometimes it's as though  I'm pursuing myself" "I must escape" "I must escape, flee before myself" "But it's impossible" "I have to run, I must run through endless streets" "I want to escape..." "But the ghosts are pursuing me, the ghosts of the mothers the ghosts of the children, always there" "Those children those children are always there and then I...except except when I do it" "Then I see the posters" "I read the posters about what I have done" "I read and read." "Did I do that?" "But I can't remember anything about it" "But who will believe me?" "I'm forced to do it;" "I don't want to, but I must" "Who knows what it's like to be me?" "I must do it!" "I don't want to, but I must!" "I must do it, I can't stop it!" "I must do it, but no one will believe me!" "Sometimes he, too thought his wiIl-power was cut off and he was being punished for whole generations of his ancestors people and stars but he had to go through with it" "And when he woke up suddenly in the night and thought he had seen it the new man he yelled and foamed at the mouth and he had to be calmed and washed, but no one was allowed to speak of it" "He proceeded with unbelievable harshness against himself" "Against any softening of his inner feelings and against his desire for enjoyment and gentleness which of course existed in him as in any other human being but was unimportant in his struggle in the seIf-imposed mission of a life that has marked this century" "Just as he did not allow his mother to caress him because it interfered with his love for himself and for his chosen, purer mother the German people whose love he craved" "And how he condemned everything in the end in the bunker of his failure when, resigned to his fate... he surrendered to Eva's servant- girl love and married her" "He cursed poland which would never belong to him and for which the english entered the war" "And on his embittered lips a curse on France and england and their inevitable decline predicting the end of European power so so closely linked with the destruction of Germany divided between East and West governed by oil interests and bureaucratic states by bribed politicians, whoever and wherever they are finally only as an aged HitIer ailing since StaIingrad, knowing that not only the war was lost but also the sacrificing of millions of enemies as he considered the Jews and the war opponents was in vain suffering the tortures of hell for years, to end a living corpse" "A corpse with a trembling arm and breath summoning his last strength surveying a world which was not worthy of him" "Here is a special bulletin on the Army High Command communiqué" "The Army High Command reports an astounding German victory over France after a mere six week campaign" "There has been a cease-fire since 01.35 today ( 25th June, 1940 )" "The only one who will acknowledge him.. ." "...will be a black african ruler, quite mad respected by all, in the United Nations ranting against Jews quite openly and received without demur by the catholic Pope" "Thirty years after his death his end in petrol and ruins, burned by his servants and drivers" "Madness is his legacy, and that is only the beginning" "AII of us, standing around helpless before this man, created in God's image, even he?" "hitler like us" "A part of us, in us?" "In all of us?" "( charles de gaulle, 22nd June, 1940 )" "Our reunion with aour allies restores freedom to the world and greatness to our country" "(Winston churchill, 21st October, 1940 )" "Many lie in graves besides their fathers who fell in the Great War" "They testify to a silent heroism they are the symbol of hundreds of thousends of riflemen, tank crews pioneers, gunners, sailors, marines, airmen men of the Waffen-SS and all other fighters who have joinedthe armed struggle for our freedom and future and for the eternal greatness of the National Socialist Reich" "(HitIer, Reichstag, 19th july, 1942 )" "(RolI-caII of Nazi martyrs at a comme- moration of the Munich putsch of 1923 )" "AII are rogues, including me" "But if we are, Iet us be the greatest" "And I'II see to it: in a hundred years every word that each of us says will be in a film" "The part you play in it is up to you" "I'lI make you into legend, into myth" "Through your death, if necssary" "Yes, you can laugh down there but try to follow my example:" "conquer the world in twenty-three years und change it from top to bottom" "I'm the devil incarnate yet a human being who laughed at Mickey Mouse, just as you do" "culture?" "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol" "That's the art for the people that we want" "Our cultural revolution is for a more popular art, an art of the people" "Art is an exalted mission which demands fanaticism" "No people lives longer than the documents of its culture" "We pay with our lives for art" "Everything is going to be out in the open" "Let's have some peace and quiet" "Yes, we are the beasts of prey of mankind" "But why don"t you give us the rights of the fox and hyena amongst people the Ione, ravaging wolf in the society of wolves?" "With our own marks of race, recognizable, pursuabIe fighting for our hungry brood, the Iive-aims of our kind fair game, without the right to live, but not to be tortured not disowned or sold by the traders in so-caIIed morality" "Exterminate us, but don"t exploit us commercially, if you want to be better than the morality with which we have always characterized you" "We aren't ghosts; you're supposed to be afraid when you see me" "So be afraid" "They were afraid when they saw me" "I taught them, because I am a schoolmaster  I taught them to eat of the tree of knowlegde once more to gain a new innocence and that will be the end of the world" "And it was the end of the world" "Who will ask, in five hundred years if Fräulein SchuItze or FräuIein MüIIer was unhappy after they have considered my work?" "Who asks, when admiring the pyramids of the Pharaohs how many slaves perished beneath the stones?" "We live by old, living traditions" "I am so frustrated, so very frustrated" "My friends have invited me to one of those big meetings" "He spoke as he always spoke" "There was a brawl, bottles were thrown, chairs, eggs" "My jacket was wet and stained" "suddenly he, a stranger, stood before me and gave me his jacket" "I stood before him in his jacket like armour, burning around me;" "he had chosen me out of thousands" "It was his choice and it was right, as he always chose rightly" "later I helped him conduct his war, as only I couId organize it his war minister and an artist, as he was" "That's how I met him and I stuck it out with him to the end" "I don't know either, what made me choose him" "Did I choose him, or did he choose me?" "It had to happen one way or the other" "Did I choose him, or did it happen the way I told you?" "Yes, that's what we make of him:" "adolf the degenerate Punch" "mineral water instead of beer vegetarian food instead of roast pork Sieg heil instead of gobbledegook and Sieg Heil, that's German progress, Punch as leader" "Yes, the leader as Punch" "It's the vengeance of hell that they live on as clowns" "adolf must yodeI, keep on yodeIIing" "And Eva must dance for ever." "At the October festival" "The children will laugh at immortal Punch and Judy the big number, that is the first stage of punishment in hell's ante-room" "The clown as Hitler in us" "If the ideas and ideals of the masses demand it we are always good, I can vouch for it" "Let mediocrity rule the world; against individuaIists it's implacable, ice-coId" "The Hitler of the simple man in the street, that's me" "But he, the boss, must never go inside god does not tolerate him in hell, he would burst it" "Perhaps because he's too big" "Lost, he's looking for a new place between heaven and hell and that means Earth again" "In which disguise?" "Made immortal through us, in us?" "I'm a workman's son, yes sir, and what's more  I'm a workman's son who's strictly Roman Catholic" "Strictly Catholic, with an academic education at our universities" "And do I Iook like a German, eh?" "But I shall plant time-bombs of hero worship and understanding and rebirth of national socialism" "They will exIode in a hundred years, or sooner, or later" "As long as man and democracy exist, anyway, in eternally new disguises" "That is the secret of my message the propaganda of steely romanticism" "When we depart, the whole universe shall tremble" "Nobody will ever be worthy of us despite all democracies and dictatorships of the masses everywhere" "people keep saying that none of it is true, that I'm not real" "Some say I'm a monster, others talk of the endless nuIlity of my deeds the bolsheviks always say I'm a man of the plutocrats and the plutocrats always lump together the red and brown plagues" "None of them understood anything" "What did we have in common with Marx, or Krupp of the declining upper class?" "Some say none of it is true, others speak of me as a god, not as a human" "As if it had neverbeen achieved, the rise from nothing the people's community of workers by head and workers by fist" "That's what they all wanted" "The fantastic explosion of the war the victory over France and the whole of Europe millions dead, concentration camps, the bombing I initiated ...the methods of incineration, euthanasia and the catastrophes" "So friends and foes try to erase me" "But everything was only invention what a wealth of fantasy and that's why I Iove KarI May, the honest writer" "We're dealing with the rise of the new man of the masses his outstanding leader-figures and the survival of man, whether they want it or not" "This is about the hitler of the simple man" "And what is this man like, whom they elected from their ranks?" "He encompasses Volkswagen and concentration camp WoIfsburg and Auschwitz, Bayreuth and UFA and ObersaIzberg" "(10th May 1933) All German transmitters calling" "We are at the Opernplatz, Unter den Linden, Berlin" "The Berlin districts German students' organization with the Action Fighting Committee Against the un-German Spirit is at this moment burning books of immortal and destructive content" "You will hear the fire-slogans of Berlin's students" "Then Minister Dr. Goebbels will speak" "Against the soul-destroying over-estimation of the sex-life and for the nobility of the human soul I surrender to the flames the writings of the Sigmund Freud school" "Against the falsification of history and degradation of it's heroes and for respect for our past..." "Against the literary treason to our soldiers of the World War for the education of our people..." "Against the arrogant debasement of the German language for the preservation of the most precious gift of our people..." "Against insolence and arrogance for the respect and appreciation of the immortal spirit of the German people devour, O flame, the writings of Tucholsky and Ossietsky" "Students, German men and women" "The era of Jewish intellectual sophistry is now over. ( Goebbels)" "End of Part One"