Pro-Hitler Propaganda? See the film "Adolph Hitler: the Greatest Story NEVER Told"

Adolph Hitler

I get on these kicks.  My latest is World War II.  I watched the whole series "The Unknown War," on Hulu Plus, made in the 1970's for television, and narrated by Burt Lancaster.  It contains a lot of interesting facts about the war in the east, but is way too complimentary to Stalin and the Soviet Union for my tastes.  The major fact I took away from the series was that the Russian soldiers, partisans and civilians fought heroically against the Nazis with seeming indifference to their own lives.  They were virtually unstoppable.  Hitler didn't win a single major battle -- or if he did, the Russians soon came back and retook what was lost, like they did at Sebastopol.  The Russians liberated their homeland with incredible effort and sacrifice -- that I do not doubt.  They even kept going and liberated several other east European countries as well.  Unfortunately, when the war was over, they didn't leave.  One totalitarian power was substituted for the other.  Burt Lancaster seemed not to notice.

After that I came across another film with an incredible title:  "Adolph Hitler:  the Greatest Story NEVER Told."  It is a Nazi apologia, and almost six hours long.  You can watch it for free on the internet here.  I'm sure you have the time and will get right on it.

Now I believe in watching such documentaries with an open mind, but not a gullible one.  I decided to sit through the whole thing to see what I might learn.  I did indeed find it interesting.  I learned something about why those Russian fighters were so adamant about winning.  There were NKVD squads in back of the line of infantry, and anyone who retreated would be shot.  Furthermore, anyone who surrendered was automatically considered a traitor, and either shot or sent to a forced labor camp.  The film discussed one Russian nurse who was captured by the Nazis, and when the Russian troops liberated her prison camp, they arrested her.  For surrendering, she was given six years in the gulag and exiled to Siberia for life.  

This pro-Hitler film made a good case for Hitler in the early part of his career.  The World War I Treaty of Versailles was grossly unfair to Germany, saddling them with total blame for the war, onerous reparations and stripping away part of German territory and ceding it to other countries.  Sudentland was one, incorporated into Czechoslovakia in 1919.   Likewise, the Polish Corridor, the port city of Danzig, had been given to Poland, separating Germany geographically from its province of East Prussia.  Hitler, as well as the majority of Germans, hated the Treaty of Versailles and felt they had been royally screwed.  (I agree with their position.)  The Treaty resulted in high unemployment, raging inflation and poverty for millions of Germans.  An unjust peace bore the seeds of a new war to come.

Hitler wanted to unite all Germanic peoples under the protection of Germany, and he wanted German territory returned.  He invaded Czechoslovakia to take back the Sudentland, peacefully annexed German-speaking Austria (and most Austrians approved).  The allied powers fumed a bit but did nothing.  Finally, there was the Polish Corridor and Danzig, and the Poles were mistreating the Germans living there.  He invaded Poland to get back these territories and to protect Germans there, and frankly, I can see his point.  However, this automatically resulted in Britain and France declaring war on Germany.  Germany offered to negotiate, but Churchill would have none of it. [Update:  I have subsequently learned that Hitler was concerned with more than the Polish Corridor and Danzig.  His SS troops committed atrocities against Polish civilians and murdered a lot of Jews.]

The film describes some bad behavior on the part of the Allies, alleging that German POWs were deliberately starved by Eisenhower, who refused to feed them, killing many thousands of men.  I find this hard to believe, and will need to read some corroborating accounts before I do.  Ike never struck me as one to commit war crimes. [UPDATE:  I have looked into this claim and have decided it isn't true.  See my follow up post here.]

The film claims that Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union was actually a preemptive strike, that Stalin had been moving west, gobbling up small countries, and that he planned to invade Europe.  Hitler beat him to the punch.  True story?  It is indeed plausible, considering the expansionist nature of Stalinism, and several other authorities tend to corroborate this claim.  What Burt Lancaster didn't mention, quite a few Russians welcomed the Nazis as liberators from Communism, and many joined the Nazis to fight Stalin.  The Cossacks were one such group.  Now another case of the Allies acting badly: after the German defeat, the Cossacks surrendered too.  British troops lied, telling the Cossacks they were to be moved to the west by train, away from Russia.  After boarding the trains, the Cossacks were then sent east, back to Russia, where they were all executed.  They would never have boarded the trains had they known the truth.  The Allies were therefore complicit in mass murder.  

The hardest part of this film to swallow is the story of the Jewish concentration camps.  It claims there were no death camps, no Holocaust, and presents testimony of one or two Jewish survivors to that effect.  It also presents the research of a Jewish scholar who studied the Holocaust, and claims he can find no reliable evidence that it happened - no written orders, no buildings that could have served as gas chambers.  Okay, we are entering the Holocaust Denial Zone, and my antennae shot up.  

So how did all those millions of Jews die?  What caused those huge piles of dead bodies at Auschwitz and Dachau?  They died of Typhus (yeah, right). There was a lot of that going around, I guess, but the German guards were strangely immune.  Zyklon-B, the chemical allegedly used to gas Jews to death, was really only a disinfectant, for sanitizing buildings and clothes against the Typhus epidemic.  [Update: This claim is refuted by the fact that Zyklon-B has no effect on an anaerobic bacterium like Typhus.  It only kills aerobic organisms, like humans.]  Sure, they burned the bodies, but only to prevent the spread of the disease.  Hogwash.  There were many Jewish survivors of the camps who witnessed such atrocities.  Further, I remember seeing documentaries that claim the Nazis kept meticulous records on the numbers they killed.  What happened to those?  The film doesn't say.

Other than gas, the Nazis simply shot a lot of Jews, and had the foresight to photograph and film a lot of it.  None of this was mentioned or explained in the film under discussion.  

I would like to see more research on the Holocaust, what records do exist to prove it.  Of course, there was Auschwitz commander Rudolph Hoss, whose testimony at Nuremberg described the gassings, but according to the film, he was beaten and his family threatened unless he lied about it.  This doesn't ring true either.  For what possible purpose could the Allies have in fabricating such monstrous atrocities?

The film ends by praising Adolph Hitler, claiming he was a truly great man.  I remain unconvinced [I am being sarcastic].  Call me a skeptic.  Note:  A rebuttal of Holocaust Denial can be found at this link.  I have read through this website, and it refutes convincingly the Holocaust denial elements of "Adolf Hitler, the Greatest Story NEVER Told."

UPDATE:  I have been watching a lot of documentaries about the Third Reich, and there is no doubt that Hitler was a lunatic. Several German plots to assassinate him failed.  Hitler was an evil man who had not an ounce of empathy for other humans.  Once he took power, he executed leaders of other political parties, a beloved German general whom he saw as a potential rival, and many of his own followers in "the Night of the Long Knives."