A Film to Endure

Mein Kampf (Minerva; Columbia).

Adolf Hitler, like most nightmares, is a pleasure to forget. Nevertheless, the world in 1961 has apparently gained what might be called an anesthetic distance from the monstrous paperhanger, and has suddenly decided to re-examine the great plague he personified. The Eichmann trial is making headlines, and William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich has been steadily topping the bestseller list. Now a Swedish Jew named Erwin Leiser has compiled from captured German film--newsreels, Nazi propaganda pictures, Wehrmacht battle films, secret police footage--this calm, fair, objective and appalling picture history of Hitlerism. Exhibited in Germany, Mein Kampf shocked and humbled its audiences (TIME, Sept. 5). U.S. moviegoers will be shaken too. Memorable moments:

P: A frightfully adorable snapshot of little Adolf in rompers.

P: A silly-sickening newsreel of Reichs-kanzler Hitler at his first Cabinet meeting, bowing obsequiously to Von Papen, making cheesy smiles and cute little wriggles of politeness, playing Alphonse to Goering's Gaston over who sits in what chair and, in general, looking like a whey-faced, flabby postal clerk ill at ease in the company of his betters.

P: Frame after frame full of German men and women radiant with uncritical adoration of the man who, by 1945, had caused the deaths of 50 million people.

P: Some footage on the Warsaw ghetto, excerpted from SS training films, that is just about as gruesome as any ever put through a projector. Reduced to less than 200 calories a day, Warsaw's Jews shrivel up to skin and bone, huddle 13 to a room, lie covered with ghastly sores on beds of rags, fall dead by the hundreds on the streets every day. The corpses lie covered with flies till the corpse crews find them, fling them on carts, dump them down a chute into a mass grave.

P: An aerial photograph of Auschwitz extermination camp that takes the breath away with its immensity: mile on mile of barracks, a metropolis of death.

P: A tour of the same camp, where the camera intimately inspects unnatural mountains of shoes, toys, spectacles, human hair.

P: The last film record of der Fuehrer: a brief ceremony, conducted a few hours before his death, in which he congratulates a-starry-eyed troop of embattled adolescents, loyal to the last. He looks strangely peaceful, almost happy.

P: A sequence, shot while the starvation was at its postwar worst, that shows a well-dressed, obviously cultivated man, his coat laid neatly aside and his sleeves rolled tidily to his elbows, squatting on a main thoroughfare in Berlin and hacking savagely with a butcher's knife at the bloated corpse of a horse.

P: A glimpse of Goering at the Nuernberg trial, head thrown back, laughing and laughing and laughing.

To see this film, to endure it, may well seem to men of conscience a social duty and a moral obligation. Surveying his work, Editor Leiser was reminded of Rabbi Akiba, who in the 2nd century was burned alive by the Roman tyranny. According to legend, the holy man was bound to his funeral pyre and then said quietly: "Even this is good. Even this has meaning."

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