El fascismo ordinario

It is hard to draw parallels between this brilliantly narrated compilation of both Allied and Third Reich's archive films and Hollywood's productions such as "Schindler's List" or "Jakob the Liar". While the latter present limited, sanitized and artificial-looking depictions of life under the Nazi rule, Romm's "Ordinary Fascism" pulls out all the stops in its selection of documentary material to draw the viewer not only into absolute horror about fascism and nazism in the 1920s-1940s Europe, but also to a firmest of convictions that nothing of the sort should be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world.

Note the timing: the film was released in 1965, in the Soviet Union's heyday at the height of the great societal and intellectual "thaw" that followed the Stalin's death and the denunciation of Stalin's totalitarianism by Nikita Khruschev. Never explicitly mentioning any of them explicitly, the film targets tyranny and despotism no matter what form they may take; the release of such a film would have been impossible under Stalin.

A good indicator of the power of this film could be the fact that it is available in most video stores in Germany.