Uncle Adolf

The drama dwells on the two women in the Fuhrer's life - portraying his indifference to Eva Braun and his obsession as the drama would have it, with his niece Geli Raubal.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KIRSTY WARK:
Ken Stott said it was the most challenging role yet. Was it worth it?

JOHN HARRIS:
No, it really wasn't. I once met someone from the Daily Mail who told me that once a week they have to have a piece about Hitler, and the placing of this on ITV schedules comes from a similar place. People think there is an insatiable British appetite for Hitler. What bothered me about this is, if on ITV you have X hours per year for a bit of 20th century history, then we are really paddling on the fringes of irrelevance here. It was completely lost here. On occasion, this was a man who was the chief motive force behind the Holocaust. We ended up worrying about his personal peccadilloes, whether he was a pervy uncle. I got very cross. They tried to build political gravitas by making out that the roots of some of Hitler's political nastiness lay in the roots of this relationship. Never mind Prussian militarism. Maybe the fact that all the Jews got gassed might have been partly down to the fact that his niece shot herself. I mean, really!

KIRSTY WARK:
There were two things. Was the writer, Nigel Williams, attempting to do some psychological profiling and investing more in the relationship than there was there, in which case it seemed wrong. Secondly, if it wasn't, why was it done anyway? The whole thing about the niece's relationship, if you read historians like Kershaw and Bullock, it's nothing like this.

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
Exactly. They have made something completely up which doesn't make any sense anyway. They have chosen the most banal possible interpretation. The interesting thing about the story is that nobody knows why Geli Raubal killed herself and why she died.

KIRSTY WARK:
This was in the mini series as well.

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
Exactly. She could have been killed by Hitler, his henchmen or his enemies - there is a fascinating story. I was thinking she is almost like Marilyn Monroe. How did this dead woman get into this bed? Instead of which they choose the most cliched explanation, which is that she shoots herself in the heart out of love or something, and we are meant to be shocked.

JOHN HARRIS:
Even worse because she was sleeping with a Jew.

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
We were meant to be shocked by the fact that Hitler would have had her boyfriend beaten up. They do this insane crosscut between his pious speech about family and the beating up of the boyfriend, as if the slaughter of six million Jews wasn't the first hint.

ADAM MARS JONES:
All done to the music of Siegfried's Rhine Journey. There was a construction problem here, which is that it's not told from Geli's point of view, or from anyone else's. Eva Braun could be an interesting character. There is a very extraordinary scene, one which did have a sort of fascination, where Eva Braun seems to have had her own suicide attempt, and by virtue of that convinces the Fuhrer that she somehow has taken on the niece's aura. That was fascinating in a weird sort of way, but we can't have him still thinking about her 12 years later as if six million deaths hadn't happened in between.

KIRSTY WARK:
This film is split between the relationship between the young niece and then the final two weeks in the bunker. When John says there is the danger of wall-to-wall Hitler and there will obviously be a fascination, does drama have an extra responsibility?

ADAM MARS JONES:
Certainly. I think the recent documentaries like Hitler, A Warning From Germany, show there is real stuff to be found out about the mechanism of early Nazism, which this sort of skates over, because by the time we see Hitler, he is already to all intents and purposes the Hitler he became.

KIRSTY WARK:
There was the titillation as well?

SARAH CHURCHWELL:
Yes, humanizing Hitler by creating this kind of tabloid, sleazy sex shocker. Hitler, pervy uncle who fancies niece - their notion of humanizing Hitler, which is already problematic, is to have this incredibly distasteful scene where we apparently seem to watch Hitler having an orgasm, which I could have lived my whole life without seeing.