Oughts from the Aughts: Downfall (2004)
My favorite underrated gems from the 2000s, explained in under 2010 words
You can’t unring a bell.
You can’t push a rope.
You can’t earnestly experience something once it’s become a meme.
This normally isn’t an issue for me, except when it comes to the 2004 German film Downfall.
This is a movie everyone should watch. It’s astoundingly acted, devastatingly relevant, and Oscar-nominated. Yet most people only know it for that scene.
Hitler’s generals inform him that the Soviets have encircled Berlin. Upon learning that the counterattack he ordered is impossible and defeat is imminent, Hitler, evocatively embodied by Bruno Ganz, flies into a terrifying, unhinged rage. This furious rant and depraved meltdown is the emotional climax of the entire movie. It should have won Bruno Ganz and this movie an Oscar.
If only Americans understood a single word of German.
Instead, this scene was quickly re-subtitled to become about everything but World War Two: getting banned from Xbox Live, Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift, Trump losing the 2020 election , disliking The Last Jedi, and the Dallas Cowboys losing in the playoffs (again).
While some of the parodies are comedic gold and some are Youtube excrement, the popularity of the Downfall meme turned this weighty movie into an internet punchline, letting humor accelerate what the passage of time was already doing: rusting over grave warnings from a dark chapter of history.
World War Two is your dad’s favorite war for a reason. It’s logistically fascinating, tailor made for those obsessed with maps, models, and machinery, and the last war that feels morally clear, neatly wrapped up with victory parades and the bad guys vanquished.
If we’ve been missing key lessons from it, we certainly can’t blame this on a lack of films.
While we’ve gotten a zillion movies, TV shows, and video games documenting the heroism of our boys on Omaha beach and Iwo Jima, nobody was demanding a claustrophobic look inside the concrete tomb of Hitler’s bunker. War movies usually focus on the glory and triumph of the winning side. Yet this one dives into the smoldering embers of the losing side to reckon with the cost and consequences of authoritarianism.
It’s a difficult but important story to tell.
What works so well about director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s approach is his fearless, narrow focus. By containing the story to the streets of Berlin, crumbling under Soviet bombardment and the interior of the Fuhrerbunker, echoing with Hitler’s outbursts, he forces us to confront fascism not on the battlefield where myths are forged, but in the rooms where illusions collapse. This strips away the spectacle of war and leaves us with only its haunting echoes.
One of my favorite scenes is when Hitler meets with his architect, Albert Speer. They survey a gleaming model of Germania, Hitler’s grandiose re-design of Berlin. Hitler speaks of a Reich that will last thousands of years as Soviet artillery roars like angry beasts creeping steadily closer. One man dreams of monuments to permanence; the other knows, but cannot say, that this man’s dreams have created nothing but nightmares.
The contrast between Hitler’s fantasy and the carnage outside is as stark as the bunker meltdown that follows. Yet the quiet denial here feels more chilling than the shouted rage that comes later. When people urge him to leave Berlin, Hitler deflects and turns to Speer, who says:
“You have to be the one on stage when the curtain falls.”
Hitler stays in Berlin while Speer eventually escapes.
His departure is one of this movie’s best shots. Emerging from the bunker’s fluorescent claustrophobia, he pauses on the steps of the Reich Chancellery garden. The camera lingers as he looks back at the once-ornate government building, now strewn with rubble, lit by the glow of a city in flames. It’s a clever moment of visual irony: an architect surveying not monuments of his design, but the wreckage his work enabled.
If Heino Ferch’s Speer embodies the delusions crumbling around Hitler, Bruno Ganz captures the delusions inside him. What makes his performance so captivating and terrifying isn’t just the history it revives but the psychology it reveals. Few movies render delusion with such weight and texture.
The most famous scene — the one endlessly recycled into memes — is devastating in its original form. It powerfully shows a narcissist unraveling as reality punctures his fantasy. Confronted with his failures, Hitler claims he conquered Europe single-handedly, blames his generals for incompetence, then wishes he’d murdered them all like Stalin. Above all else, he is incapable of accepting responsibility. If the war is truly lost, then it must be everyone else’s fault. History’s top villain is, in this moment, reduced to a petulant child.
This brutal scene underlines that Hitler’s role was less mastermind than myth-maker. His hateful ideas fueled the Reich, but its fleeting victories came in spite of his leadership, not because of it. His cries of betrayal and his insistence that only loyalty to him could stave off defeat deftly expose the hollowness at the core of his cult of personality, the fatal flaw in putting all your faith in a strongman leader.
The cuts between Hitler’s mania and the hushed crowd outside show in a few minutes what some documentaries or books take hours to unpack: that evil like this persists not through genius, destiny, or grand design but through conformity, bureaucracy, ignorance, and complacency. It makes us wonder: how many times in history has a petty, vindictive man — having banished or killed everyone but the sycophants and yes-men — flown into a rage when forced to face the ruin he created?
This is why Downfall is such a horrifying but necessary watch. Showing the realtime implosion of a fascist regime challenges you to stare into the abyss of evil and see a human face staring back at you.
This also explains the biggest pushback it got. Some felt that it humanized Hitler too much. As A.O. Scott noted in his NYT review:
“To play Hitler is to walk into a paradox. Sixty years after the end of World War II, he continues to exert a powerful fascination: we still want to understand not just the historical background of German National Socialism, but also the psychological and temperamental forces that shaped its leader. At the same time, though, there is still a powerful taboo against making him seem too much like one of us. We want to get close, but not too close.”
My take is that Downfall dares to humanize fascists without sympathizing with them or excusing fascism. Humanizing the people involved is ultimately more revealing and damning than portraying them as mustache-twirling caricatures. The true terror of Hitler isn’t that he was a monster, but that he was a man, proof that human beings are capable of monstrosity.
Nazi Germany would be a much less threatening part of history if we could simply dismiss everyone involved as sociopaths or brainwashed, but this film makes clear what every autopsy of this hideous ideology has found since: that fascism thrived not through mass hypnosis, but through paperwork, procedure, and normal people convincing themselves they were just doing their jobs.
The most horrifying moments of Downfall show where this warped sense of duty leads, most sickeningly in Magda Goebbels poisoning her six young children. Watching her oldest daughter try and refuse the “medicine” is nauseating and grimly faithful to history. This scene is one of the films bleakest and most powerful, showing us how regimes like this destroy indiscriminately, ultimately killing their most loyal servants and innocent children alike.
We see this mirrored in the film’s depictions of the Volkssturm, a poorly armed and untrained militia of teenagers and old men pressed into service in the twilight of the war. Goebbels is so convinced by his own propaganda that he throws children under the treads of Russian tanks rather than admit defeat. As unbearable as seeing Goebbels’s daughter struggle against a death she doesn’t want is watching children in uniform march toward a death they believe they do.
Watching Hitler and Eva Braun’s last moments is unsettling and pathetic in equal measure. The contrast between the enormity of the evil committed by these people and the frail, cowering, smallness of their final forms is stark.
History reminds us that authoritarian ends are usually squalid: Hitler’s corpse doused in fuel and dumped in a ditch, Mussolini strung up in a town square, Qaddafi dragged bleeding from a drainpipe. The fantasies these men sold— eternal glory, restored empire, a thousand year future— dissolved into rubble and ridicule.
Cinematic depictions of fascism are just as important because they don’t just inform us — they haunt us. They show not only what happened, but how it felt.
Most do this indirectly, refracting fascism through something else to help us understand it. Starship Troopers seduces us with slick propaganda that makes total war feel justifiable. Pan's Labyrinth uses magical realism and fairy tales to reframe resistance. JoJo Rabbit turns Hitler into a child’s imaginary friend so we can see indoctrination at its most absurd and most insidious.
Downfall strips all this away and stares unblinkingly at fascism for 156 harrowing minutes. It’s the most thorough commitment to this subject matter I’ve ever seen on screen. Besides The Zone of Interest, few filmmakers have attempted anything like this.
This movie is scarier and more compelling than most horror movies I’ve seen, and all the more so because these insane events actually happened.
Hitler pushes phantom divisions across a map, insisting he can still win the war. Eva Braun hosts a drunken party while shells rain on Berlin. An SS doctor detonates grenades to kill his own family rather than face justice. Teenagers are handed panzerfausts and sent to defend rubble against Russian tanks, praised for their sacrifice as they march to certain death. There are even moments of dark comedy. A German officer reports to the bunker to be executed for desertion because of a bizarre misunderstanding. Instead of being shot, he is put in charge of the city’s defense. He replies: “I think I’d rather be executed.”
All of this makes legible the moments when even Nazi Germany’s innermost circle realized the madness of what they had signed up for. This reckoning is mirrored and heightened in the modern viewer, who more fully understands both the horror they inflicted on others and the horror they brought down on themselves.
The obvious and unforgivable costs of Nazism are the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalingrad. Less obvious, especially to Western audiences inclined to dismiss or vilify all Germans, is the way the German people were destroyed by the very delusion they embraced. The point of unflinchingly showing this isn’t shock value and certainly isn’t to elicit pity for Nazis. It’s to reveal fascism’s inevitable betrayal. This regime wasn’t just murderous to outsiders, but cannibalistic towards its own.
We hear this in some of the film’s most important and least-parodied scenes. When Speer urges him to consider the survival of Berlin’s civilians, Hitler says “in a war such as this, there are no civilians.” When confronted with how many of his young officers have died, he coldly counters, “but that’s what the young are for.” We then see it in the teenage Volkssturm soldiers shooting themselves instead of surrendering to the Russians and the SS hanging fleeing German civilians as traitors.
The most urgent warning about fascism isn’t how seductive its beginning feels, but how bleak its ending is. A society built on hate will always collapse inward, consuming those who once thought they were safe. It will break its promises, slaughter its followers, and devour itself in order to survive. It will promise truth and deliver lies, promise freedom and deliver incarceration, promise order and deliver chaos.
What begins in slogans, banners, and parades ends in blood, rubble, and ashes.
As authoritarianism resurfaces at home and abroad, Downfall reminds us that the only thing this kind of regime can reliably deliver is its own self-destruction.