DOWNFALL Accused of Humanizing Hitler

One of history’s most hated monsters has undergone a humanizing makeover in the German motion picture Der Untergang: Hitler und das Ende des 3. Reiches (Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich), directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.
Based on historian Joachim Fest’s best-selling Adolf Hitler biography and on the memoirs of the dictator’s last personal secretary, Traudl Junge, Downfall chronicles the last days of the German Führer, besieged inside his underground bunker while the Soviet Red Army battled the Nazi forces on the ground.
During that period, Hitler suffers psychotic delusions and goes into mad rages, but also shows courteousness and even warmth toward Junge and his wife-to-be Eva Braun.
In the film, Hitler is played by Swiss-born actor [...]