Netflix will debut Joe Berlinger‘s six-part docuseries “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial,” about the Third Reich, on June 5.
Through the framing of the Nuremberg trials and eyewitness testimony of American journalist William L. Shirer, the series explores the rise and fall of Hitler and his enablers who were fueled through propaganda, censorship and a campaign of antisemitism.
Berlinger (“Paradise Lost,” “The Ted Bundy Tapes”) is in year four of a multi-year deal with Netflix. The director describes himself as a “culturally and ethnically Jewish man” who grew up in a “very secular home.” The Oscar nominee says that he owes his path to filmmaking “to my obsession with German history.
“When I was a teenager, I was exposed to some of the Holocaust liberation footage that’s in the show,” says Berlinger. ” And like any young person who sees that footage, I was absolutely horrified. After seeing this footage, I became obsessed with the idea that had I been born in that era, I would have been rounded up and murdered. So I wanted to understand how such evil could have ever taken place, to such a degree that I became a German major in college and fluent in the language. That led to an opportunity to work for an American ad agency in their Frankfurt office, where I found myself on TV commercial sets – that’s where I fell in love with filmmaking.”
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The six-hour series, which will focus specifically on the Eastern Front of World War II, uses re-enactments and talking heads to tell the history of the Third Reich with a narrative structured around the Nuremberg trials. Berlinger says that the inclusion of Shirer, a journalist, in the series sets it apart from other World War II docus.
“We knew we didn’t want it to be talking heads over grainy black and white newsreel,” says Berlinger. “We found an eyewitness in the form of William L. Shirer – as one of the only American journalists in Germany at the time, Shirer had a front row seat to Hitler’s rise to power. And having poured his firsthand experiences into numerous literary works, not only did we find ourselves with a personal lens through which to see this historical moment but also felt now more than ever it was important to bring his words to life.”
The series came about in part because of a 2018 study from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, in which they discovered that two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is.
“This is the right time to retell this story for a younger generation as a cautionary tale, and on a global scale,” says Berlinger. “In America, we are iin the midst of our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking at the door and a rise in antisemitism. By dissecting what happened in Nazi Germany, hopefully what viewers will see is just how precious democracy is, and how easily it can be attacked from within, and how important it is to protect.”
Watch the exclusive trailer.
