The Bunker (Société Production de Française, France 2, Time-Life Television Productions, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon’s “feature” was The Bunker, an intriguing movie dealing with the last three months or so in the life of Adolf Hitler, which he lived in the so-called Führerbunker, built in the sub-basement of the Reich’s Chancellery, the seat of power in Nazi Germany and the only one of the monumental buildings Hitler’s pet architect, Albert Speer, designed for him that actually got built and used. The Bunker was a TV-movie made in 1980 and released in 1981, and Hitler was played by Anthony Hopkins — who gave a Los Angeles Times interview to promote it in which he said his biggest acting challenge was to work out a voice for the private Adolf Hitler. Plenty of films exist of the public Hitler — footage of his (in)famous party rallies in which he cultivated a carefully built-up speaking style (he described it in Mein Kampf) starting with a slow rumble and gradually building in intensity into the full-throated screaming and frantic arm gestures we’ve all seen in the Nazi newsreels and the clips from them included in just about every documentary on Hitler, the Nazis or World War Two. But Hopkins decided that Hitler wouldn’t have talked that way in offices or small rooms with just his friends, his aides or his girlfriend Eva Braun, and his big challenge was to work out a voice for the more private, intimate Hitler. According to reports on the film’s imdb.com page, Hopkins got so immersed in the role of Hitler he started being very domineering arouud the house and treating his wife as if she were a errant Gauleiter instead of his partner and equal. Hopkins’ voice as the private Hitler was mostly believable — I liked the way Hopkins, presumably supported by director George Schaefer, lapsed into the public Hitler voice and gestures whenever he got angry with someone — though occasionally he sounded surprisingly like the rather mincing voice Charlie Chaplin used in his Hitler parody, as “Adenoid Hynkel, the Pfui of Tomania,” in his 1940 film The Great Dictator.

I hadn’t seen The Bunker since it first aired on TV in 1981, when another TV station almost immediately followed it with the 1962 biopic Hitler (with Richard Basehart, of all people, as der Führer), a rather silly movie that was more about Hitler’s love life (in particular his 1920’s affair with his niece, Geli Raubal, whom he reportedly had killed when he thought she was getting too clingy) than his crimes against humanity. The Bunker was surprisingly effective drama even though it had its problems, notably its treatment of Albert Speer (Richard Jordan), who became an “in” figure worldwide once he finished the 20-year prison sentence he received at the Nuremberg trials and published his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, soon after his release. Speer had a major late-in-life career as a sort of Hitler-explainer in the seemingly endless series of documentaries about the Third Reich, partly because he was one of only two figures close to Hitler who wrote first-hand about his experiences (Joseph Goebbels, in his posthumously published diaries, was the other) and partly because he was the only important Nazi who had ever expressed any degree of remorse about his conduct or his support of this barbaric regime. The Bunker was made at or pretty near the height of “Speer-mania,” which explains why screenwriter John Gay (adapting a history by James P. O’Donnell) went out of his way to portray Speer as the voice of reason in the Nazi inner circle. 

Speer not only levels with Hitler about the sorry state of what was left of German war production — including the fact that, especially once the Allies had cut off the Ruhr district from the rest of Germany, even if they could get planes and tanks to the front they had little or no fuel for them — he also directly tries to talk Hitler out of his plan to destroy the entire German infrastructure, including entire cities and towns as well as factories and farms, on the ground that by losing the war the German people had proven themselves unworthy to survive. In fact Speer knew better than to try to talk Hitler out of anything; the real Speer agreed to Hitler’s face to carry out the scorched-earth policy but then sabotaged it behind the scenes — which is the main reason why at Nuremberg he got a 20-year prison term instead of a death sentence. (More recent historians have exposed Speer as just as rotten and inhumane as the rest of the top Nazis; one documentary shown on YouTube pointed out that the remodeling plans for Auschwitz that turned it from just another concentration camp into a death machine were in Speer’s own hand — and had that been known when the Nuremberg trials occurred, he would almost certainly have been executed.) The Bunker is at its saddest depicting the decision by Joseph Goebbels (Cliff Gorman, almost totally miscast — unlike the other principals he makes no attempt at a German accent) and his wife Magda (Piper Laurie — did that poor woman ever make a movie in which her character didn’t kill herself at the end?) decided not only on a murder-suicide themselves but also to kill their six children by feeding them poisoned sweets. Apparently Goebbels’ suicide, like Hitler’s, was motivated by his determination not to let himself or anyone in his family be captured by the Allies — especially the Russians (a number of the lesser figures in the bunker spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to sneak out of Berlin and get behind the British or American lines, figuring that at least the Americans and British would treat them as prisoners of war while the Russians would just summarily kill them — this is one aspect of the script for The Bunker that is historically accurate) — and exhibited publicly, alive or dead, as a war trophy.

The film ends with a red-orange flame consuming Hitler’s dead body after his murder-suicide with his wife (of several hours — on his last day Hitler decided he wanted to marry Eva Braun at last, and they had to scrounge up a civil clerk who had the power under Nazi law to marry people — and there’s a grimly funny bit in the marriage ceremony in which, according to the Nazis’ racist legislation, the clerk asks both Hitler and Braun to certify that they are of pure Aryan blood and they have no hereditary diseases), because he wanted to be cremated to make sure his body would not be found by Soviet troops … only they found it anyway: the Germans tried to burn Hitler in an open pit and they didn’t have enough gasoline to heat the body to the temperature needed to cremate it, so Hitler’s corpse was charred but enough of it survived that the Soviets took it back to Russia and autopsied it (and incidentally confirmed that Hitler had only one testicle). I hadn’t thought about The Bunker in years but it was an interesting movie even though it was a bit of a slog — let’s face it, one can only take so much of a movie about a homicidal maniac, especially one who’s losing whatever level of sanity he ever had (though my reading of the historical record is that up until 1942 Hitler was a rational, though evil, person and it was only around then, probably provoked by the German defeat at Stalingrad, that he went totally off the rails and turned from being a rational man pursuing an irrational agenda effectively to someone totally insane, until at the end he was insisting that a miracle would save Germany and the war could still be won, and calling on his generals to send in huge divisions to defend Berlin that either had been significantly reduced by war casualties, couldn’t get to the home front in time or no longer existed at all) — and of course in 2019 it’s impossible to watch a movie about Adolf Hitler (or Stalin, or Mao, or any other dastardly dictator) without cherry-picking the dialogue for any bits the screenwriter inserted that seem now to presage Donald Trump. There were certainly plenty of those, including Hitler’s incessant demands for “loyalty” from his staff members (though Hitler actually looks pretty good in his willingness to return that loyalty; unlike Stalin or Trump, he did not suddenly banish people from the inner circle for trivial reasons) and the repetitiveness of his speech (at one point he denounces Hermann Göring as “a drug addict” again and again and again — he’s pissed off at both Göring and Heinrich Himmler for having offered the Allies peace deals behind Hitler’s back), though the most relevant aspect of The Bunker today is its whole exposure of what unlimited power does to the people who wield it, especially if they do so in a state of total secrecy and isolation from the population they are supposedly serving. It’s a chilling reminder of how dictatorships rot from the inside and yet more confirmation that Hitler’s great enemy Winston Churchill was right when he said, “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others.”