It was 3 a.m. on a closed street in Budapest, and Joe Berlinger ’83 was directing his new Netflix series, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. He was re-creating Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — “the first escalation of what was about to befall German Jews,” he explains. The staging involved “hundreds of extras … smashing windows and beating up shopkeepers” when, suddenly, Berlinger noticed that the art crew had misspelled the German anti-Jewish graffiti: “Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!” meaning “Germans! Defend yourself! Don’t buy from Jews!”
“So I got up and corrected them, and I sat back down,” remembers Berlinger, who majored in German. “And even though I was re-creating something horrible, it was a moment where I felt all the strands of my life were coming together in a very profound way.”
Berlinger was in high school in Chappaqua, N.Y., when he first saw some of the Holocaust liberation footage that he later used in Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.
His family was Jewish and German, but “we had no German traditions, no real Jewish traditions at home,” he says. “We didn’t lose [any family] in the Holocaust, but when I saw that footage, I obsessed over the idea that, had I been born at that time, I probably would’ve been murdered.”
At Colgate he decided to study German: “I wanted to learn more about my past and understand the Holocaust.” Berlinger connected with Professor of German (now emeritus) Dierk Hoffman, went on the Basel Study Group, and landed his first job after graduation with the Frankfurt office of advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. While on set for a commercial, “the light bulb went off that I wanted to be a filmmaker,” Berlinger says.
“Now 35 years later, at the height of my career where I have a production deal at Netflix, I look back on my Colgate connection and upbringing,” he says.
Three other Colgate people were also involved in the making of Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. Matt Renner ’01 was an executive producer, Professor Ray Douglas served as a historical consultant, and Dan Slater ’00 helped in the development phase.
The six-part docuseries has been lauded by media, including the New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, and Irish Independent. At press time, it was in the top 10 globally and domestically for all Netflix programming.
Although the history of Hitler and the Nazis has been recounted in numerous productions before, Berlinger incorporated newly released material from the Nuremberg trials and employed modern storytelling techniques. He presents a fresh take using dramatic re-creations, colorized archival footage, and AI technology for the voice of the narrator, American journalist William Shirer (with permission from his family).
“The whole approach to the show was to have a much more immersive, cinematic experience using the language of cinema that younger viewers have come to know,” Berlinger says.
His motivation for making the material more engaging for younger viewers is to educate them about the Holocaust. “It shocks me, the degree to which people are unaware of or have forgotten this history,” he says, citing the 2018 study from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. “One in 10 millennial responders thought the Holocaust was caused by the Jews; 50% couldn’t even name just one of the 40,000 concentration camps, including Auschwitz.”
The timing is apt for a broader audience too, he emphasizes. “I wanted to reach people at a time when democracy is in trouble in this country,” Berlinger says. “We can no longer agree on the truth, and we have villainized each other. A functioning democracy is based upon people of different interests and backgrounds all coming together and deciding what’s best for the common good. But if you hate the person you are talking to on the other side of an issue and you otherize them and dehumanize them, that’s when terrible things like the Holocaust happen.”