DARKNESS OVER GERMANY

Hitler - The First 100 Days

Author & Director:

Kerstin Mauersberger | Juergen Ast

Commissioning Editors:

Rolf Bergmann | Jens Stubenrauch | Dr. Katja Wildermuth | Birgit Keller-Reddemann

Duration:

30' | 45'

Producer:

Daniel Ast | Juergen Ast

Production:

astfilm productions | for RBB | MDR | WDR // ARD

The film tells the fast, frightening, but still avoidable path of Germany into Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. It tells the first 100 days of Hitler's chancellorship. A short period, but still giving answers to the always same question, "How was Hitler possible?". A story full of political tricks and brutal terror, unfounded promises and well set threats, resistance and the quick elimination of all democratic forces.

It was not the "providence", as Hitler used to say after becoming Reich Chancellor and during the weeks that followed, but a "blitzkrieg" against democracy and human-rights, with the sole purpose of holding all the power in his hands. By all available means and with a breathtaking speed - one day in a brown uniform, the other in a cut with a cylinder. Astonishing how quickly the institutions the Weimar Republic based on, permitted to be overpowered by the Nazis. And most Germans? They were caught in the web of the "national community" of the Nazis, with "Hitler salute" and Swastika.

The documentary-film tells the dramatic story of events: The day that Hitler was to become Reich Chancellor on January 30th 1933, the "Day of Potsdam" on March 21st 1933, the "boycott" of Jewish shops on April 1st 1933, the new "Labor Day" on May 1st 1933 and the public burning of books on May 10th 1933, the 100th day in power of Adolf Hitler. It tells the chronic of a conquest of power never seen before. After only one hundred days, Germany had dramatically changed. All Unions and political Parties were banned. Everyone with a different view or opinion, and especially the Jewish community, they all face degradation, threats, the loss of civil-rights, humiliation and segregation. Everyone with an "un-German spirit" faces contempt and prosecution.