Complete Monster: The Greifkommandos are a gang of thugs who take great pleasure in lynching alleged deserters on trumped-up charges of treason and throwing their lot in with the Soviets. The brutality of the executions, often done in front of the victims' families, is such that their actions are among the darkest in an already grim, if ripe for parody, film about the end of World War II just based on the fact that to them, the cruelty is the point. In their key moment of sadism, they apprehend two elderly civilians and beat them up, and when confronted their commander shoots the two men and taunts Schenck and Müller about their inability to stop him, only backing down from killing them as well because he knows just as well as they dothat even if he does, he wouldn't be able to enjoy beating the shit out of innocent civilians anymore, to put it lightly. It's telling how disturbing they are that their scenes are almost never used in parodies, and also that in a film that humanizes Hitler and his inner circle without excusing their historical crimes, the Greifkommandos are the only characters without any redeeming or humanizing qualities whatever.
Crowning Music of Awesome: Given the subject matter, the score is sporadic and woefully depressing, but Stephan Zacharias's work is absolutely wonderful, setting and reflecting the mood of the film perfectly. Der Krieg Ist Aus and Hoffnung Am Ende Der Welt in particular may be capable of inducing Manly Tears.
Fegelein is also portrayed as this in the film. He's a Nazi, an opportunist, a deserter... and a young man who just wants to live, unlike his lunatic fellow men determined to die for a crazy ideology.
Memetic Badass: Hermann Fegelein: Hitler's Greatest Enemy!
The director of the film said that he likes the parodies, and he "couldn't get a better compliment as a director". He also said that they fit the movie's theme: "The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality. I think it's only fair if now it's taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like." But while the director may have supported the videos, the studio went on a DMCA takedown spree, causing people to make Hitler rantsabout the videos being taken down.
This has extended to the rest of Hitler's inner circle and bunker staff, who have slowly gained personalities beyond just being the target of Hitler's rants. Notable characters include Gunsche, Jodl, Burgdorf and Krebs.
Moral Event Horizon: Just in case you were actually thinking about sympathizing with the poor, broken-down old Hitler, he starts boasting about his multiple genocides and treats the surviving Germans with contempt.
Joseph and Magda Goebbels, of course, displaying some very unusual attitudes toward family values...
The most obvious examples are when the viewer first sees children trying to hold back the Soviets and the notorious scene when Hitler snaps after learning that Steiner's counterattack has failed.
Towards the end of the film, there's a string of suicides. Most of them are off-screen, but there's a lovely close-up where one character shoots himself very suddenly in the face in the middle of a makeshift hospital.
Also, Ernst-Robert Grawitz uses grenades to kill himself and his family during an otherwise serene dinner. And that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as cruelty to kids in this film goes...
Tear Jerker: When Magda Goebbels gets her children to consume a spiked drink so she can slip them some cyanide later, her eldest daughter Helga knows that something is amiss and won't drink. Eventually, her mother forces her to drink it while she sobs the whole time, leaving the scene positively heartrending.
Which was worse? The fact that Helga realized what her parents were doing and struggled enough to cause deep bruising, or the fact that the younger children just drank the sedative without knowing what it was?
The German citizens evoke sympathy as well. A father pleads with his son's Hitler Youth unit to save themselves, but they refuse. To add insult to injury, the man's own son calls him a coward.
And since the father was on the Eastern Front, he at least tries to get them to use a less obviously exposed position to fight. They ignore him and all of them die having done nothing to stop the Soviets or even hold them up for a while.
Elderly German citizens are executed in the streets because they are unable (or unwilling) to fight.
Watch It for the Meme: It must be something of a Periphery Demographic of the Hitler Bunker clips who thinks "Wow, a subtitled German film about the last days of World War II - I gotta see this!".
A parody clip is fairly popular in Greece, due to a satirical TV show.
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