Customer Reviews

Hitler's Henchmen Set 1 [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is an excellent series, with a lot of hard-to-find footage and a wealth of data on the main people in Hitler's entourage. If you don't mind spending the money, then you won't be disappointed when you add this to your collection. The series focuses on the henchmen, not on Hitler himself. It does cover the relationships between the Fuhrer and his immediate subordinates.

I'd say this is reasonabe value for money.

The most evil Nazis other than Hitler were Himmler, Eichmann, Hedrych, Mengele, and Ilse Koch. It is true (with the exception of Himmler and Hedrych) that they were not high ranked Nazis, but the were worse than the others. Mengele and Koch were people who loved killing more than any of the other Nazis. Eichmann bragged the most about the deaths of 6 million jews. in fact he once said that he would leap into his grave with a smile because he was responsible for the deaths of so many Jews. Though the one who should be in there mostly is Hedrych because he was the 2nd most powerful SS and the mastermind o the Final Solution. He rivals with Hitler and Himmler for the most responsibility for the Holocaust. I have a lot of books about evil people and those guys are in almost all of them and none of the ones in this movie are in any of them except Himmler. For those who want to learn about Heydrich, I recommend HEYDRICH: The Face of Evil by Mario R. Dederichs. For Ilse Koch, I recommend The Beasts of Buchenwald: Karl & Ilse Koch, Human-skin Lampshades, and the War-crimes Trial of the Century (The Buchenwald Trilogy) by Flint Whitlock. For Eichmann I recommend Biography: Adolf Eichmann - Hitler's Master of Death (1997). For Mengele, I recommend Josef Mengele: The Final Account Starring Josef Mengele (2007)

This covers the "big dogs" - the top 5 or 6 nazis we always hear about. That leaves us with another half million nazis & collaborators who were just as bad or worse. I'm still looking for a network tv documentary aired around about summer of 2007? My neighbor from across town is standing next to Hitler in one photo. He had always said he was forced labor at Sobibor camp, but there he stood in german officer's uniform. I have a few questions for him next time I see him!!!

I found this series of videos very informative and interesting. I watched the whole series in 2 days and if I didn't have to work, I may have watched it without getting off the couch! You get just the facts here with what I found to be very good B&W film from the vaults of history. I found the film clips to be of good quality too. Let's learn about history so this kind of thing never happens again!

This hilariously tacky series seems to be made in the style of those cheap crime programmes you get in the States and reducies the Reich to the level of neighbourhood car thieves. Furtive camera angles, often in black and white to get that 'sinister' touch and dated music that seems to have been lifted from a library special effects tape (case broken). It's either a plinkety-plonk avante-guarde-a-clue piano or a sort of momentary discordant key hit on an old moog. Occasionally some drums will bang portentiously in the background and some odd tinkling erupts half-heartedly. Then there's the titles that pop up like that cheapo tv series 'Tales From The Darkside', red like an old Hammer Film. Are they trying to tell us something? One scene has a narrator talking over a shot of a wooded road and suddenly the letters SS fly at the screen surrounded by black and a DAN-DAN! Scream? I thought I'd never start. There are a lot of 'reconstructions' of events using actors (half a face or just an eyeball) and my favourite bit is when a room full of Nazis are listening through headsets to the phone lines where a fiendish plot to overthrow the Reich is overheard. Slowly the Nazi turns to the camera and then leans over to pick up a phone. His brow furrows. "I-MUST-WARN-DA-FUHRER!" Oscar, that man. Is this some sort of parody about the banality of evil? You expect Boris Karloff to appear through the door to thunderclaps.

The series seems endless and every episode has the same format. Follow a thug (bashing us over the head these are bad dudes like, y'know, the sopranos) through the war until it ends with the same footage of the war being lost. In fact you see so many shots of Hitler walking along that row of boys with a trembling hand hidden behind his back that you actually start to feel sorry for the guy. This repetition soon makes you want to tear your roots out. Not content with squeezing the Jackboots till the pips squeek, the company follows it with Hitler's Holocaust, Warriors, Children and women. But don't stop there, ZDF, why not Hitler's dogs, Hitler's laundry and Hitler's rose bush at Berchtesgaden? There's life in the old dog yet. Amazingly, this was made by Germans but they seem to have lost that panache in presentation they once had at the Nuremberg rally. Germany needs to find some pride in itself again and hire someone to add a bit of colour to the shoddy proceedings. Does Leni Riefenstahl still have an agent?

My in-laws are Holocaust survivors and say this account is very accurat

This very expensive set of videos greatly disappointed me. It was not done by serious scholars. After 50 years you would think something thought out and deeply felt could be done on Hitler and the Third Reich. HISTORY CHANNEL only seems to want to exploit it on a very cheap, lowbrow level.

This very expensive set of videos greatly disappointed me. It was not done by serious scholars. After 50 years you would think something thought out and deeply felt could be done on Hitler and the Third Reich. HISTORY CHANNEL only seems to want to exploit it on a very cheap, lowbrow level.

These videos are a real disappointment. HISTORY CHANNEL insults the intelligence of the average man by putting them out as serious history. The photography is especially poor and obviously not much thought was put into the project.