“Man or monster? That’s one of the most frequent questions film-makers dealing with the rise of Hitler have had to ask themselves. Humanise him and you risk serving up a trite explanation for the horrors he committed against the world. Treating him like the Devil risks transforming him into a symbol that undermines mankind’s sickening capacity for evil. When the documentary Swastika was first screened at the Cannes film festival in 1973 it caused such outrage that the screening had to be stopped. The reason? It was made up of archive footage of Hitler engaging in banal, normal, everyday activities such as playing with children on a holiday retreat – footage that showed a human side difficult to reconcile with his unspeakable crimes.”Read More »