Richard Cohen comments on "Downfall"

This column out today from M. Cohen at the Washington Post

"The extraordinary film "Downfall" is about the last days of Adolf Hitler in his underground Berlin bunker."

He expresses my sentiments better than me. A whole people's madness.

"One man's madness, barbarity, charisma, boldness, courage and hatred -- all qualities of Hitler -- are easy enough to explain and to find. But a whole people's madness is a different story. That says more about us, and about what we are capable of, than anything about Hitler. And when the people are the people of Beethoven, when they provided the Jews among them with comfort and even riches before murdering them, when you could go by bike from the Weimar of the sublime Goethe to the Buchenwald of the cruel SS, then you are talking of the inexplicable. This quality of the Germans during the Third Reich, this quality of the Chinese during Mao's Great Leap Forward, this quality of the Cambodians or the Rwandans or -- in 1937-38 -- the Japanese in Nanking, resides in us all. This, really, is the great lesson of "Downfall" and of history itself."