May one compare Putin to Hitler? Or Russia’s modern regime to Nazi Germany? How did Germans, who destroyed millions of lives and unleashed World War II, manage to turn their country into a thriving democracy? And, most importantly, does the future hold something similar for Russians after Putin and what will they go through on that path?
Psychology has the five stages of grief model. A patient, who has just found out their fatal diagnosis, at first denies the inevitable. Then they go through the stages of anger, bargaining, depression, and only then they accept their fate. In the case of Germa
...ny, an entire nation is such a patient. It took decades for German society to heal.
In search of a recipe for Russia, we went to Germany to talk to people who witnessed the changes and those who still feel their responsibility for their ancestors’ crimes.
🔵 Russian version of the movie:
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🔵 Timecodes
00:00 The five stages of grief
00:49 How Hitler came to power
03:18 “How could one stoop so low in the urge to terrorize people?”
05:10 “Would I be immune to the nationalistic madness?”
06:37 Why Germans trusted Hitler and the Nazi propaganda
08:01 Bernhard Schlink, the author of “The Reader”, on his father
09:32 Anti-Semites and racists believed that jews were to blame for everything
11:00 May one compare Putinism to Nazism?
13:15 Russians and Ukrainians on May 9 in Berlin
15:46 What the anniversary of the end of WWII is like in Germany
17:10 Germans felt victimized after the war
18:16 First trials of Nazi criminals
19:42 Why did many Nazis avoid being punished?
21:04 “The Nazis came. Where did they come from? Mars?”
24:01 A place of horror, murders, and suffering
25:44 Why Germans didn’t want Nazi criminals to be put on trial
27:13 “What were you doing during the Third Reich period?”
29:10 The feeling of “secondary guilt”
31:28 What compensation was paid for slave labor during the war
33:06 “I’m ashamed to be German”
36:06 Kneeling Chancellor and an exhibition of Wehrmacht’s crimes
38:03 “Talking about uncomfortable past is never easy”
39:50 “Everybody knows that their grandfather was probably a Nazi”
40:21 The Brown House, the Honor Temples, and an elite place in Munich
43:36 What they tell about Nazi crimes in German schools
46:39 “You should try to understand why people did that”
49:13 Modern Germans are not like what Hitler imagined them to be
51:13 “Germany had to become much smaller for the peace in Europe”
53:05 A dictator’s fate
🔵 Crew
Film by: Anna Pindyurina, A.P. and IStories’ team
Cinematography and video editing: Gleb Limansky
Executive producer: Roman Anin
🔵 Special Thanks to
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv)
Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, Future”
Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism
Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum
our interviewees and everyone who made this film possibleShow more