Third Reich: The Rise & Fall

I was going to give this a 5 but am upgrading slightly to a 6 just because of the video quality. This documentary suffers from taking itself but not the material serious enough. The edits are overdone and make the documentary seem more like a twitchy horror movie similar to the Ring rather than a good informative documentary.

Another issue I have is overuse of pauses during the speech, I assume for dramatic effect, but ends up being more like a way to draw out the documentary in a lazy way. For example, a narration would begin, quoting a victim our German citizen, then there would be a pause of about 5 seconds and I've thought they moved on, then suddenly the same person is saying something more. Often the narration repeats something that was said earlier in the same delayed fashion. I've seen some other reviewers talk about all that was left out in the first half (the rise), and they've said it better than I ever could. It makes it seem like they were just enamored with his speech and promises, which they were, but there was so much more to it. I'm glad it was covered, however briefly, how much the rest of the world seemed to like Hitler, too, because we share the blame for letting him get away with murder in his rise.

I suppose I'm also a little bitter about the title, which shares a name with probably the best nazi book ever written by shirer, and as far as detail goes they are polar opposites.