History Film / Fatherland

* NoCelebritiesWereHarmed: Though all Nazis named in the film indeed existed, the character of Martin Luther got the given name Franz in the movie to avoid connotations to the other Martin Luther, the Protestant religious reformer. Joseph Kennedy also makes an appearance.

** The plot hinges on getting Joseph Kennedy to review evidence of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust in the belief that he will cut ties with Hitler and Germania once he learns the truth; The same Joseph Kennedy who was a devout Catholic and well-known anti-semite. In the 1930s he stated ''"Well, they brought it on themselves."'', when referring to the systematic persecution and violence against the Jews by the Nazis and German people leading up to the war. While he never wanted the Jews exterminated as a race, the real Joe Kennedy would likely have dismissed and buried the evidence of the holocaust for the sake of political and economic convenience.

-->'''Gestapo agent:''' ''(consulting file)'' [[SarcasmMode Do you often sleep with men you barely know?]]
* {{Blackmail}}:
--> '''Xavier:''' I was thinking of asking [[PaedoHunt internal affairs...]]

--> '''Anna von Hagen:''' Will you finally do something about your Jews as we did with ours?
--> '''Charlie:''' What did you do?
--> '''Anna von Hagen:''' We put them into cattle cars and shipped them east. ''Always east!''
--> '''Charlie:''' To the Ukraine, you mean, to the resettlement camps.
--> '''Anna von Hagen:''' Yeah, to [[UnusualEuphemism resettle them... in the air!]]
--> '''Charlie:''' Excuse me?
* GovernmentConspiracy: In-universe, the biggest one in history.

* HeroicBSOD:

* HeroicRROD: The Eastern Front veterans in the house of the blind.
--> '''''Fellow inmate:''' [[ShellShockedVeteran It's true! You must be blind of an eye apple to see!]]''

--> ''(March and Charlie arguing about which side committed more war crimes during the war)''
--> '''Xavier:''' You dropped it on Japan '''''twice'''''.
* IntrepidReporter: Charlie.
* JoggersFindDeath: Not just death, but he's also a witness to the crime, which leads to his own death.
* IWasQuiteALooker: Implied, though not explicitly stated, by Anna von Hagen.

* MakeItLookLikeAnAccident: The death of [[KnightInSourArmor SS cadet]] [[HeKnowsTooMuch Jost Jr.]]
--> '''Jäger:''' He was training at the gym, he fell, broke his neck.
--> '''Xavi:''' No witnesses!?
--> '''Jäger:''' No witnesses. The instructor said, [[MemeticMutation he loved gymnastics]].
--> '''Xavi:''' I want an autopsy!

* NotSoDifferentRemark:
-->'''Charlie:''' You threatened to drop the atomic bomb on Great Britain.
-->'''March:''' You dropped it on Japan, twice.
-->'''Charlie:''' We were fighting for our lives.
-->'''March:''' So were we.
* OhCrap: The moment Xavier realizes that all the men who attended the Wannsee Conference have been murdered.
* OurPresidentsAreDifferent: Joseph P. Kennedy is President.

* PunchClockVillain: Played completely straight with the ordinary police officers.
* PuttingOnTheReich: The city of Welthauptstadt Germania, formerly known as Berlin. [[FridgeHorror Nuff' said.]]

* SecretPolice: The Gestapo is anywhere out there to fetch you.

* WhiteDwarfStarlet: Anna von Hagen.
* YouKilledMyFather: [[spoiler: Or rather more like "I didn't know what I was doing when I phoned the Gestapo".]]

* DeathByAdaptation: In the book, Winston Churchill is still alive in 1964 and living in exile in Canada. Here he is said to have died in 1953.

A 1994 MadeForTVMovie produced by Creator/{{HBO}} and based on [[Literature/{{Fatherland}} a 1992 novel by Robert Harris]].

In 1964 -- within an [[AlternateHistory alternate timeline]] [[AlternateHistoryNaziVictory where the Nazis won]] UsefulNotes/WorldWarII -- Hitler invites U.S. president Joseph P. Kennedy (JFK's father) to his 75th birthday celebrations, hoping to reach a détente that will help them finally win the ongoing war against partisans in Russia.

** The plot hinges on getting Joseph Kennedy to review evidence of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust in the belief that he will cut ties with Hitler and Germania once he learns the truth. This same Joseph Kennedy was a devout Catholic and well-known anti-semite. In the 1930s he stated ''"Well, they brought it on themselves."'', when referring to the systematic persecution and violence against the Jews by the Nazis and German people leading up to the war. While he never wanted the Jews exterminated as a race, the real Joe Kennedy would likely have dismissed and buried the evidence of the holocaust for the sake of political and economic convenience.

** The plot hinges on getting Joseph Kennedy to review evidence of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust in the belief that he will cut ties with Hitler and Germania once he learns the truth. This is the same Joseph Kennedy was a devout Catholic and well-known anti-semite. In the 1930s he stated ''"Well, they brought it on themselves."'', when referring to the systematic persecution and violence against the Jews by the Nazis and German people leading up to the war. While he never wanted the Jews exterminated as a race, the real Joe Kennedy would likely have dismissed and buried the evidence of the holocaust for the sake of political and economic convenience.

** The plot hinges on getting Joseph Kennedy to review evidence of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust in the belief that he will cut ties with Hitler and Germania once he learns the truth. This is the same Joseph Kennedy who stated ''"Well, they brought it on themselves."'', when referring to the systematic persecution and violence against the Jews by the Nazis and German people leading up to the war. While he never wanted the Jews exterminated as a race, the real Joe Kennedy would likely have dismissed and buried the evidence of the holocaust for the sake of political and economic convenience.

** The plot hinges on getting Joseph Kennedy to review evidence of UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust in the belief that he will cut ties with Hitler and Germania once he learns the truth. This is the same Joseph Kennedy who stated '"Well, they brought it on themselves."'', when referring to the systematic persecution and violence against the Jews by the Nazis and German people leading up to the war. While he never wanted the Jews exterminated as a race, the real Joe Kennedy would likely have dismissed and buried the evidence of the holocaust for the sake of political and economic convenience.

* FilmOfTheBook: ''Literature/{{Fatherland}}

* NotSoDifferent:

* ReleasedToElsewhere: The Nazis covered up the Holocaust by claiming to have resettled the Jews in Ukraine. Possibly the creepiest admission of this trope occurs when an American journalist visits an extremely antisemitic German woman who proudly reveals that her late lover Reinhard Heydrich had "resettled them in the air" (ash, you see).

* ReleasedToElsewhere: The Nazis covered up the Holocaust by claiming to have resettled the Jews in Ukraine. Possibly the creepiest admission of this trope occurs when an American journalist visits an extremely antisemitic Nazi woman who proudly reveals that her late lover Reinhard Heydrich had "resettled" them ''in the air'' (ash, you see).

* LaResistance: This is what becomes of the Soviet Red Army, continuously waging a [[ForeverWar guerrilla war well into the 60s]], still led by the [[BadassGrandpa 85 year-old Joseph Stalin]]. They are secretly supported by the United States.

* LiteraryAgentHypothesis: In-universe with the last surviving attendant of Wannsee, Franz Luther.

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler: March dies and Charlie is arrested by the Gestapo, but Kennedy got the proof of the Holocaust and cancelled his alliance with Hitler, whose regime later collapsed, as opposed to the novel, where Xavier manages to find the torn-down remnants of Auschwitz right before being killed by the Gestapo and Charlie only manages to board a plane back to the US with the documents before the end.]]

%%* CrapsackWorld

%%* FilmOfTheBook
%%* ForensicDrama

%%* GovernmentConspiracy: In-universe, the biggest one in history.
%%* HeKnowsTooMuch: The Movie

%%* JoggersFindDeath

* YouKilledMyFather: [[spoiler: Or rather more like "I didn't know what I was doing when I phoned the Gestapo".]]

* HistoricalDomainCharacter: Wilhelm Stuckart, Josef Buhler, Arthur Nebe and Odilo Globocnik (Globus) were all real Nazis. Martin Luther was renamed Franz Luther to avoid confusion with the Protestant reformer. Hitler and Joseph Kennedy both appear briefly at the end. Reinhard Heydrich and Joseph Stalin are mentioned but never seen.

* EarnYourHappyEnding: [[spoiler: March dies and Charlie is arrested by the Gestapo, but Kennedy got the proof of the Holocaust and cancelled his alliance with Hitler, whose regime later collapsed.]]
** [[spoiler: As opposed to the novel, where Xavier manages to find the torn-down remnants of Auschwitz right before being killed by the Gestapo and Charlie only manages to board a plane back to the US with the documents before the end.]]

* HollywoodCostuming: The film: the 1960s Nazi uniforms are all [[WTHCostumingDepartment obviously very out-of-place stock WW2 film props]], which implies in-universe that the uniforms didn't change in the slightest for ''twenty years''.
** Also, for some reason, every single outside shot seems to feature at least two separate groups of uniformed soldiers/paramilitaries/policemen/Hitler Youths walking by in the background, giving off the ([[TheThemeParkVersion very cartoonish]]) impression that in a 1960s Third Reich, one third of all Germans would only go outside in some kind of uniform.

* OhCrap: The moment Xavier realises that all the men who attended the Wannsee Conference have been murdered.

* ReleasedToElsewhere: The Nazis covered up the Holocaust by claiming to have resettled the Jews in Ukraine. Possibly the creepiest admission of this trope occurs when an American journalist visits an extremely anti-Semitic Nazi woman who proudly reveals that her late lover Reinhard Heydrich had "resettled" them ''in the air'' (ash, you see).

** Winston Churchill died in exile in Canada in May 1953. [[DeathByAdaptation This differs from the novel]], which states that Churchill is still alive in April 1964.

A dead body is found and Xavier March (Creator/RutgerHauer), a good-natured police investigator, takes on what appears to be a simple murder case. Together with American IntrepidReporter Charlotte Maguire (Miranda Richardson), they start digging deeper and discover that high ranking Nazi officials are being killed to protect the [[EmpireWithADarkSecret biggest secret of the war]], the [[DontExplainTheJoke Final Solution]], which has been kept hidden from the public for twenty years. March and Maguire's activities soon come to the attention of the Gestapo, meaning they must get the last evidence of the Final Solution to President Kennedy before it is lost forever.