Also in 1962 came Richard Basehart in Hitler, not a particularly successful film.
With such a diverse cast as Rutger Hauer, Randy Quaid, Trevor Howard, Blythe Danner, Robert Vaughan and Mort Sahl, the TV movie Inside the Third Reich (1982) is not only faithfully based on Speer’s book—and quite exceptional, all around—but stars Derek Jacobi as one of the best Hitlers. With even a larger cast and more than triple the running time, another TV movie, The Winds of War (1983), featured Günter Meisner as Hitler, with, as I remember, an aptly emaciated appearance.
Besides being Hitler’s number one nemesis, Winston Churchill was a great prophet of his day. He had warned, time and time again during his so-called “Wilderness Years” of the 1930s, about the threat of Hitler. Ironically Churchill has said somewhere, probably in a radio address (my research draws a blank), something to the effect that the “Nazi jackal would be tracked to his lair.” It was, in fact, another version of a lair, the bunker, that the tyrant, cowering and mad, ended his life by his own hand, April 30, 1945.
Those flames in the opening credits of Hitler: The Last Ten Days are appropriate to the horror of Adolf Hitler. In an enthralling Discovery Channel documentary on the rise and fall of this madman, there were frequent references to the Nazi fascination with fire—beginning with the burning of synagogues and the torchlight parades, then the burning of books, the bombing of Warsaw, London, Rotterdam and Stalingrad, the crematories and, finally, the conflagration that consumed the Nazis themselves, most horrific in the fire bombings of Hamburg and Dresden.
For those unfamiliar with “Brünnhilde’s last aria,” as Speer refers to it, that music is better known as “Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene”: Brünnhilde salutes the dead Siegfried and rides her horse into the flames of a funeral pyre.