synopsis:

In the dead of a November night in 1942, SS officers escort a group of young women through the woods to Wolf's Lair, adolf Hitler's headquarters in Eastern Prussia. They are candidates for the post of personal secretary to the Führer. Among them is 22-year-old Traudl Junge, a fresh-faced girl from Munich. Traudl is chosen for the job and she is overcome with joy at the thought of serving beside hitler.

BERLIN, APRIL 20, 1945: Hitler has retreated to a bunker system under the German Chancellery. Traudl Junge is asleep in her room, deep beneath the ground. She is awakened by tremors from artillery fire: The enemy is getting closer. Albert Speer encourages Hitler to stay on the stage until the curtain closes, but other top Nazis turn to Eva Braun, hitler's partner, to persuade Hitler to leave.'der untergang' uses multiple characters to show the chaos of a country coming apart at the seams, from Hitler's henchman under the streets of Berlin, to the soldiers and civilians fighting and dying as the Soviet Army ravaged the city above.

Above ground, the Hitler Youth – including 13-year-old Peter – are fighting on and idealistic SS doctor Schenck wanders amid official detritus, ignoring Himmler's orders to attend a makeshift field hospital outside Berlin. Eva Braun holds a dance to celebrate Hitler's birthday, which is interrupted by an artillery shell. Hitler emerges from the bunker to give medals to Peter and the children. General Mohnke, who has ordered the western displacement of Hitler's troops, arrives at the bunker expecting to be shot but is charged with defending Berlin.

Hitler is forced to admit the war is over but Traudl decides to stay. Hitler rants about Goering's attempts to take charge and gives Traudl and the other women suicide pills provided by Himmler. Traudl types up Hitler's and then Goebbels' last wills. Speer begs Hitler to surrender, admitting he has been ignoring his orders for months. Hitler and Eva Braun are married in the bunker and Hitler orders his body to be burnt before the Russians arrive. The final days of the Third Reich pass with the guards staying drunk.30 April 1945. Hitler helps to put down his dog and takes advice on how to kill himself. He shoots himself and Eva while taking the suicide pills, and his body is burnt. Magda Goebbels murders her six children in their drugged sleep and her husband shoots her and himself, their bodies too being burnt. Traudl makes it through the Russian lines with young Peter to safety.

about this movie:

'der untergang', starring Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes, Juliane Köhler, Heino Ferch and Christian Berkel, offers a bewildering checklist of real-life Nazi personnel, sacrificing narrative economy, emotional engagement and authorial perspective in favour of a trainspotter's notion of historical comprehensiveness.

Ganz succeeds brilliantly as hitler with this gift of a role, haunting the mind for days afterwards with his shuffling, ingratiating Führer, the only element with a resonance beyond limpid historical reconstruction: stricken with Parkinson's disease, screaming at his generals to deploy battalions long since fallen, eating pasta and sorrowfully looking away as his dog Blondi is put down.

When writer-producer Bernd Eichinger read the galleys of historian Joachim Fest's book 'Der Untergang', he knew he had found the dramatic key to a film he had wanted to make for decades, but never thought possible due to its scope. Fess' book focuses on the final days of the Reich, and Eichinger saw that the horrifying epic of Hitler and his people during his twelve years in power was reflected in those last twelve days in the bunker. "The final days tell us a lot about how the mass fanaticism functioned in the regime's earlier years and how it continued to reign until the bitter end," says Eichinger.the making of this movie was quite controversial, especially in germany. a lot of people protested against the idea thet hitler is portrayed as a human-being. many others, however, said that it must be accepted that hitler, after all, was a human-being. that is what makes the facts of world war II as horrible as they are. according to them, it is much easier to portray him as a monster and refuse to realize what human-beings are capable of.