German film shows Nazis winning war

A FILM that shows Germany as the winner of the Second World War and Hitler preparing to celebrate his 75th birthday is about to go into production.

ATROCITIES Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler ATROCITIES: Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler

Leading German film company Universum Film has acquired the rights to Robert Harris’s best-selling novel Fatherland and is set to start shooting a German-language version of it.

The book was first dramatised 14 years ago in an American television version that starred Miranda Richardson and Rutger Hauer.

Last night Mr Harris said: “If they get a good director it could be much more effective in German, performed by German actors, with subtitles, than in English.

“After all, the German film industry appears to have undergone a renaissance – The Lives Of Others won the best foreign language film at last year’s Oscars.”

The story is about the discovery of a hushed-up state secret – the Holocaust.

When the novel came out in 1992 it was an instant best-seller – but not in Germany, where it failed to find a publisher.

“That was as a result of the subject matter,” explained Mr Harris.

“All the German publishers turned it down and it wasn’t until a Swiss publisher bought the German-language rights and imported it into Germany that it became available there in German.

“It has since gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.”

Ironically, the company making the new version used to produce Nazi propaganda films.

Universum became Germany’s leading film studio in the Twenties, making the landmark Fritz Lang film Metropolis.

However, after Hitler took power in 1933 it churned out a series of propaganda films, some shockingly anti-Semitic, and in 1942 it was nationalised by the Third Reich.

After the Second World War the studio was so associated with the Nazi regime that the company name was wiped from film credits.

In 1991, however, Universum was re-established as a leading producer of German television programmes and it is now part of the Bertelsmann multi-media corporation.

The latest production of Fatherland follows a wave of successful German films confronting the country’s troubled past, including The Lives Of Others, Downfall – chronicling Hitler’s last days – and Goodbye Lenin.

Mr Harris hopes the film will match the quality of those productions but admits he has no control over the outcome.

“The company has bought the rights so they can pretty much do anything they want with the story,” he said.

“I have no control over the project but I’m obviously keeping my fingers crossed.”

Historian Nigel Jones, author of Countdown To Valkyrie, about the failed 1944 bomb plot by German officers to kill Hitler – also the subject of a film starring Tom Cruise – said: “It is no coincidence that many of the best modern films about the war, such as Das Boot and Downfall, are German. Most Germans have long since confronted their Nazi past honestly and courageously.”

Meanwhile, cameras are due to roll next week on a film version of Mr Harris’s latest thriller, The Ghost, featuring a former Prime Minister with parallels to Tony Blair.

Pierce Brosnan stars as the politician, with Olivia Williams as his wife. Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer employed to pen his memoirs who discovers some shocking revelations about Britain’s “special relationship” with America.

The film is being directed by Roman Polanski and, by coincidence, is being shot in Berlin.

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