“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated”.

In the opening sentence of the statement of the Nuremberg Trial, one conducted against the peace of the world, a moral message was sent out by the Allies, to bring justice to some of the worst horrors humanity has ever seen.

What makes it significant is that everyone involved in it represents the sinister influences that still continue to lurk long after their bodies have returned to dust.

Adolf Hitler, and all men who helped him in his evil mission were all living symbols of racial hatred, terrorism, violence, cruelty, arrogance and power. It’s not about just a handful of evil people doing horrible things but how one man could convince a large majority of ordinary men to do it.

It’s about deceiving millions with a machinery of propaganda. It’s about abusing power.

The reason this docuseries (recreated with a visual storytelling) is important for ALL to watch is because it is time to retell a story that people seem to have forgotten.

According to the director, it was also to reach the millennials and a younger generation because of their high level of ignorance. What is scary is that for some there is a total holocaust denial. And even if some agree that it happened, what is scarier, frightening, terrifying and bloodcurdling is that they think that Hitler was right.

His book ‘Mein Kampf’, which is loaded with a cocktail of chilled hateful ideas of his plan for German conquest, has now become the bible for the haters and the Autocrats. This is dangerous.

Driven by ambition and ruthlessness, Hitler wasn’t loyal even to his own people. He betrayed them often, because ultimately what mattered to him was to secure his own political survival. By being brutally decisive, he tapped into the myth of being the kind of leader that placed himself above politics and did only what was right for Germany.

Adolf Hitler had a knack for attracting the footloose, purposeless nationalists. It didn’t matter if they were young or old but they had to be idealistic enough to devote their free time and their entire personalities to help Germany.

Hitler was also adept in changing narratives and although most of us would call him a lunatic, his blinded followers saw him as a man with a deep rooted national conscience.

He knew that even in a lunatic fringe of politics, you cannot attack directly but play with the minds of people and dismantle the system from within. He also knew that power can be built only if you put as many people in positions of influence.

With the help of the media, he crafted a mythical larger than life image of himself and projected himself the ultimate saviour. He pretended to be constantly busy, without any time for a regular marriage; because he was married to the nation.

He also eliminated any organisation that opposed him or posed a threat of becoming a seedbed of disagreement. He took a lot of credit where no credit was due, by exploiting existing plans for public work schemes.

This was in fact one of the most potent symbols of Nazi propaganda about combating unemployment. When one gamble paid off, it strengthened his ego and so he continued to gamble.

And he cultivated politics, not through debate but through violence, believing and making others believe that he was fulfilling one of the biggest injustices of history.

What is shocking is how the Germans never realised they were getting tricked and all their individual liberties were being taken away, one by one by one. I mean, how can people in the modern age, follow or seemingly become devotees of one man?

Perhaps because when for the ‘forgotten’ ones that always felt were dealt a bad hand, a leader comes, who taps into that fundamentalist disillusionment and projects an image of ceaseless activism, they get charmed. Even when violence is spread to attract headlines, the people are pleased that at least someone is doing something to keep the unruly ‘others’ in check.

He even made a film on himself, which was the greatest example of the Hitler myth showing him flying above the clouds and landing in Nuremberg. Much like Christ descending as the Son of God onto humanity!

As a spiritual shepherd, his communication with his ‘herd’ of sheeples was uncanny. They were always spellbound by his speeches believing everything, even the most foolish nonsense.

All his moves were calculated, like a man playing chess for even as he kept feeding the flames of hatred, he also projected himself as the only one who could save Germany.

And all his ideas worked especially since he had a coterie of evil geniuses who handled everything. In order to harness Hitler’s strength, the public image needed to be massaged and who could do it better than the media? They knew that all media is good media, and all coverage is good coverage.

Even if in the liberal circles it was considered a hostile coverage, at least people were talking about them. They were in the news and that’s all that mattered.

When Hitler came into power, he started the ball rolling but by a sleight of hand. He created a façade of an economy that made it look as if Germany was tremendously prospering.

Instead the truth was that a lot was done on borrowed money or by printing notes. In order to pay it back he had to plunder the resources of the countries he went about conquering.

War, for Hitler, was a fundamental human activity, the motor of history. This is what he drove and believed would determine the rise and fall of a nation. He actually thought that only by conquering nations, one particular race would rise up to the pinnacle.

It wasn’t just a lament that war was necessary. It was what the lunatic in him actually desired. The ideological and the racial struggle for Hitler were the two sides of the same coin.

The unparalleled nightmare of Hitler’s reign, was dumping all Jews into ghettos in concentration camps and forcing them into a kind of slave subservience. His aim was to kill as many as possible and make the survivors a peasant class that would serve the Germans.

What is shocking is that even after everything was over, all the defendants actually believed that what they did was something glorious. With flimsy excuses and paltry evasions, they thought that the mass murders somehow elevated them to a higher moral sphere. No one stood up and pointed out to him that this was wrong!

What is also tragic is that even now, with the kind of divisions and the tremendous intolerance we have for each other, it feels like the world has forgotten the Holocaust.

And that is why the slogan ‘NEVER AGAIN’- a phrase to denounce fascism was coined by the liberated prisoners who had been to hell and back is so important. In future our efforts should be to work for a better world where there will be no more wars.

I just finished watching and it was so creepy to know that the unspeakable acts were committed by a human being. A sick, diseased maniac but a human being nonetheless! And it is important for us to know how this crazy man came to power so that it can be prevented from happening again.

Nargis Natarajan is a writer, author and novelist residing in Bhubaneswar. Views expressed are the writer’s own.

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