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Even as the steel doors and cement corridors shake under artillery fire and his closest advisors urge him to leave the city, Hitler continues to rave about his glorious plans for Germany and the world. While Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) tries to dance her fear away and generals discuss the best way to kill themselves, Hitler rants about pincer movements and imaginary armies. He sees traitors everywhere, and it gives him just one more reason to order exterminations.

In his merciless personal philosophy, compassion is a sin and the weak deserve no pity. In the end, he abandons even the German people: Hitler's stubborn refusal to surrender to the Allies was meant to punish the country that had failed his plans.

Hirschbiegel shows the immediate results of this hatred in terrible detail; the dying in the streets of Berlin is plentiful, tragic, graphic, and pointless. Even while the draftees of the Volksturm, the old and very young, are getting mowed down by the advancing Red Army, unrelenting Nazis string reluctant cannon fodder up on lampposts, in an effort to ?restore order.?

The film?s ultimate innocents are the children of Magda Goebbels (Corinna Harfouch) and her gaunt, cruel husband Joseph (the very spooky Ulrich Matthes.) The group of blonde and adorable children, smiling and increasingly frightened, has been brought into the bunker to die. Finally, the individuals who engineered the Final Solution are brought face-to-face with the wrenching discrepancy between their professed ideals of purity and the reality of the death perpetrated on their orders.

?Kadavergehorsam? is a word coined to describe the kind of loyalty displayed over and over again in ?Downfall.? It translates as ?a corpse?s loyalty,? and in May of 1945, the streets of Berlin were littered with loyal corpses. By focusing entirely on the vanquished reaping what they sowed, ?Downfall? breaks new ground for a war film. It goes further in trying to answer some of World War II?s elemental questions: how was any of this possible? In the movies, Nazis are often cartoons: from ?Raiders of the Lost Ark? to ?Schindler?s List,? their evil was always a given. In ?Downfall,? they are just as evil, but there are added dimensions to their villainy: Hirschbiegel shows us failed evil, hopeful evil, selfish evil, suspicious, obsessive, deluded and schnapps-drunk evil.

In the end, just like in Hollywood, the villains are broken and destroyed, but here, their destruction is not a pretty sight. ?Downfall? is no Götterdämmerung. Hirschberg?s vision does not afford the Nazis even a hint of redemption, and not for a moment does he glorify the murdererous warmongers on screen. They are never anything more than criminals who acquired tremendous power and abused it. Their miserable end is repulsive, wasteful and banal. A muffled bang and a slump on an ugly basement carpet-?that?s how Adolf Hitler stole away from his monumental crimes. His flaming dirt-hole funeral is devoid of all vainglory.

?Downfall? is not only terrific cinema, it is also a history lesson, a gripping psychological study, and a dire warning. Power married to unwavering belief in destiny and one?s own superiority combined with utter lack of compassion can lead to unprecedented catastrophe. The true face of war is neither triumphant victory nor noble defeat: there is only sorrow and death.