What the post-war future holds for Russia: Drawing on the case of post-Nazi Germany (RU/ENG sub)

May one compare Putin to Hitler? Or Russia’s modern regime to Nazi Germany? How did Germans, who destroyed millions of lives and unleashed World War II, manage to turn their country into a thriving democracy? And, most importantly, does the future hold something similar for Russians after Putin and what will they go through on that path? Psychology has the five stages of grief model. A patient, who has just found out their fatal diagnosis, at first denies the inevitable. Then they go through the stages of anger, bargaining, depression, and only then they accept their fate. In the case of Germany, an entire nation is such a patient. It took decades for German society to heal. In search of a recipe for Russia, we went to Germany to talk to people who witnessed the changes and those who still feel their responsibility for their ancestors’ crimes. 🔵 Russian version of the movie: ▶️ 🔵 Timecodes 00:00 The five stages of grief 00:49 How Hitler came to power 03:18 “How could one stoop so low in the urge to terrorize people?” 05:10 “Would I be immune to the nationalistic madness?” 06:37 Why Germans trusted Hitler and the Nazi propaganda 08:01 Bernhard Schlink, the author of “The Reader”, on his father 09:32 Anti-Semites and racists believed that jews were to blame for everything 11:00 May one compare Putinism to Nazism? 13:15 Russians and Ukrainians on May 9 in Berlin 15:46 What the anniversary of the end of WWII is like in Germany 17:10 Germans felt victimized after the war 18:16 First trials of Nazi criminals 19:42 Why did many Nazis avoid being punished? 21:04 “The Nazis came. Where did they come from? Mars?” 24:01 A place of horror, murders, and suffering 25:44 Why Germans didn’t want Nazi criminals to be put on trial 27:13 “What were you doing during the Third Reich period?” 29:10 The feeling of “secondary guilt” 31:28 What compensation was paid for slave labor during the war 33:06 “I’m ashamed to be German” 36:06 Kneeling Chancellor and an exhibition of Wehrmacht’s crimes 38:03 “Talking about uncomfortable past is never easy” 39:50 “Everybody knows that their grandfather was probably a Nazi” 40:21 The Brown House, the Honor Temples, and an elite place in Munich 43:36 What they tell about Nazi crimes in German schools 46:39 “You should try to understand why people did that” 49:13 Modern Germans are not like what Hitler imagined them to be 51:13 “Germany had to become much smaller for the peace in Europe” 53:05 A dictator’s fate 🔵 Crew Film by: Anna Pindyurina, A.P. and IStories’ team Cinematography and video editing: Gleb Limansky Executive producer: Roman Anin 🔵 Special Thanks to United States Holocaust Memorial Museum German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, Future” Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum our interviewees and everyone who made this film possible