Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil
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Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil is a 1985 TV film about two German brothers, Helmut and Karl Hoffmann, and the paths they take during the Nazi era of Germany. The movie was directed by Jim Goddard and starred John Shea, Bill Nighy, Tony Randall, David Warner and John Woodnutt.
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[edit] Plot
Helmut and Karl Hoffman are two brothers who grow up in the depression of the Weimar Republic and witness the coming to power of the Nazi Party and the establishment of the Third Reich. Karl is enthusiastic about the Nazis and joins the SA as soon as he can, Helmut is reluctant and thinks the Nazis are simply another political party.
Helmut, who is a university student in Munich is eventually talked into joining the SS by Reinhard Heydrich. Helmut is commissioned an SS officer right before Hitler comes to power, whereas Karl has already been an SA member for a good year before. Karl is distressed due to tensions between the SA and the SS and claims that the SS is trying to make it look like that the SA is the “party’s garbage collector”.
The entire first half of the film leads up to the Night of the Long Knives, in which Karl is arrested and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp and it is up to Helmut to get him out. Using his connections in the SS, Helmut gets Karl freed but Heydrich cautions that Karl had better behave himself or else Helmut would find himself “running short of friends".
The film then moves into World War II, glazing briefly through Crystal Night without much discussion and then focuses on Helmut becoming involved in the paperwork of the Holocaust. In many ways, his character is similar to Eric Dorf in the Holocaust mini-series. Karl meanwhile becomes an anti-Nazi and is drafted in the Wehrmacht. He actually becomes a Wehrmacht Officer later.
Helmut eventually becomes an SS-General, but is extremely disillusioned with the SS by the end of the film. Karl deserts from the army around the time of the assassination attempt against Hitler(The 20 July Plot specifically.) and wanders Germany seeing the war torn rubble of several German cities. Helmut then deserts from the SS as well, but is killed by an Orpo patrol while fleeing Berlin. The film ends with Karl and his lover Mitzie (who at one point also slept with his brother Helmut) standing in the ruins of Stuttgart learning that Helmut, their parents, and Karl’s younger brother are all dead.
[edit] Cast
| Actor/Actress | Role |
| John Shea | Karl Hoffmann |
| Bill Nighy | Helmut Hoffmann |
| Lucy Gutteridge | Mitzi Templer |
| David Warner | Reinhard Heydrich |
| Warren Clarke | Becker |
| Michael Elphick | Ernst Röhm |
| Stratford Johns | Uncle Walter (bartender) |
| Robert Urquhart | Albrecht Hoffman |
| José Ferrer | Prof. Ludwig Rosenberg |
| Carroll Baker | Gerda Hoffman |
| Tony Randall | Putzi (comedian) |
| John Normington | Heinrich Himmler |
| Derek Newark | Theodor Eicke |
| Paul Brooke | Gen. Josef Biegler, SA |
| Colin Jeavons | Adolf Hitler |
For the full cast list, see the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).
[edit] False portrayal of the Katyn massacre
The movie shows the Katyn forest massacre as being caused by the Nazis, when currently it is even acknowledged by the Russian government that the Soviet NKVD were the perpetrators and a document signed by NKVD leader Lavrentiy Beria ordering the deaths of the Polish intelligentsia was released by them in the early 1990s.
