Hitler's December Years

By Richard Zoglin

It is 1964, two decades since the end of World War II. The Germans won. After the failure of the Normandy invasion, a humiliated General Dwight D. Eisenhower retreated into retirement, Winston Churchill fled to exile in Canada, and virtually all Europe came under the domination of the Nazis. An Albert Speer-designed monument to the "thousand-year Reich" now dominates Berlin, the SS has become a peacetime police force, and nobody has heard of the Holocaust. But years of cold war with the U.S. -- and a stubborn guerrilla war with the Soviets in the East -- have begun to drain the German economy. Hitler, on the eve of his 75th birthday, is preparing for a possibly historic summit with President Kennedy -- President Joseph Kennedy Sr., that is.

This is the intriguing alternate world that Robert Harris created in his 1992 best seller, Fatherland. His dystopia is the setting for a tense political thriller. When several longtime Nazi officials turn up dead, the investigation begins to unravel a horrifying secret: the "resettlement" of the Jews during the war was just the cover story for another horrifying crime.

Fatherland was originally intended to be a big-budget Hollywood film. Instead it has been turned into a relatively modest HBO movie (which debuted last weekend). That fate, however, is hardly to be lamented. The TV-size budget, for one thing, has forced director Christopher Menaul (Prime Suspect) to be resourceful. Instead of a lavish (and possibly campy) physical re- creation of the new Greater Germany, he suggests it in small, swift strokes. Tour buses carrying Western reporters on their first visit since the war roll past billboards touting one-world harmony and vacations in "Paris, Germania." (There's also an ad for the Beatles; those Hamburg clubs apparently survived.) The country is repressive and regimented, but the "Heil Hitlers" have grown routine and less convincing; the bureaucrats are cynical and restive. The SS and the Gestapo are at odds, like the FBI and the CIA during Watergate. Police officers (among them Peter Vaughan and Michael Kitchen in fine supporting roles) haven't lost their morals, just some of their courage.

The courageous ones are Miranda Richardson, as an American reporter sucked into the mystery, and Rutger Hauer, as an SS officer who can't let a tough case drop. Hauer's Aryan good looks have settled nicely into middle age; he has both more solidity and more sensitivity now. The scenes between him and his young son are as touching and chilling as anything on TV all year. The film's melodramatic finish is more upbeat than the novel's, but nearly every moment is gripping, intelligent, uncompromising. It took a Nazi victory, alas, to create the first movie about the '60s without a speck of nostalgia.