How Hitler's generals ignored orders and spared Paris

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s macabrely horrific and spellbinding film Downfall, which depicts Adolf Hitler’s final deluded days in his bunker, has created two curious legacies. Firstly, on a straight cinematic level, it brilliantly conjures Hitler’s paranoid, claustrophobic and psychopathic mindset as his killing machine collapsed.

Secondly, and inadvertently – through the YouTube phenomenon of pranksters purloining the great scene, where an enraged Hitler screams at his generals, to superimpose their own subtitles on Hitler’s rant, ...