Tear Jerker / Downfall (2004)

• During the scene where Eva types a letter to her sister, we see how the war is faring in the streets above the Führerbunker. The scenes show the German people and soldiers being crushed under the Russian advance with no dialogue other than Eva narrating the contents of her letter as she writes it. The Volkssturm child soldiers seen earlier in the film - the same ones who refused the suggestion from Peter's father to flee - are being overrun by the advancing Soviet forces, in no small part due to their lack of weapons and training. As the majority of them flee the area Inge - the young girl with long blonde hair in twin braids under her oversized soldier's helmet - hands the young officer a pistol and shouts at him to shoot her, presumably well aware of what brutal fate awaits her at the hands of the Soviet soldiers. She gives him a farewell salute, and the officer hesitates. The girl shouts something at him, and he swallows hard and shoots her in the chest. She collapses and then he staggers in a daze, obviously overwhelmed at what he's done before shooting himself in the head shortly after. When Peter wakes up the next day, both of them are buried in rubble, barely visible. Neither of these characters look old enough to be serving in an army, let alone having to defend their home streets when they should have been told to evacuate to a safe shelter long before the fighting reached them.
• During a scene where Weidling tries to convince Hitler that the Battle for Berlin is lost and that they need to attempt a breakout while they still can, he declares briskly that thousands of soldiers have already fallen, to which Hitler callously replies, without flinching, "But that's what the young are for." His persistence that they need to think of the civilians is overruled and when Hitler leaves, he and the remaining generals get into a heated exchange about the futility of their situation. Eventually, Burgdorf goes into a tirade where he admits that Hitler surely knows the situation is for nothing but that they cannot surrender as he, and many others, remember the humiliation of Germany after World War I and are willing to die rather than be humbled by defeat a second time. It really reveals how so much pain and hardship can ultimately be attributed to a perceived attack on the "German pride" of the military staff, completely oblivious to the terrors that war inflicted on the people in both wars.
• Blondi's death as a test of the effectiveness of the cyanide capsules that Hitler and Eva plan to take. The doctor places the cyanide capsule into her mouth and another man forces her mouth shut. She whimpers for a few seconds, obviously distressed, then suddenly falls silent as the paralysis takes hold and drops to the floor. Even Hitler can't bear to watch, turning his head away in grief. When he turns back into view his face is almost drained of all colour. To hammer it home, in the very next scene Eva confides to Traudl that all Hitler could talk about recently were dogs and vegetarian food, and Hitler's obvious affection for Blondi in the opening scene underscores the whole thing.
• Magda Goebbels spiking and later murdering her children to, in her view, spare them from living in a post-National Socialism world. The younger children obediently drink the "medicine" but her eldest daughter Helga, perhaps seeing something in her mother's expression, becomes afraid and refuses to drink. Eventually her mother and the doctor force her to drink it while she sobs the whole time and her younger siblings watch in silence. The real heartbreaker occurs when Magda returns and slips a cyanide pill into each sleeping child's mouth and forces them to bite down on it. Each child whimpers and convulses slightly before going limp, and by the time Magda's finished your gut feels like someone's lined it with lead. The scene is made all the more wretched by Joseph Goebbels standing meekly outside the whole time - a father just standing by and doing nothing to stop the murder of his children is utterly heartbreaking to watch.
  • The extended version includes a deleted scene where Helga's attitude is shown further. In Traudl and Eva's last moment with the Goebbels children, after Eva claims that everyone was going to cry that day, Helga approaches Traudl with a worried expression, but unable to say anything. It plays her helplessness even more.
• 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 die having done nothing to stop the Soviets or even hold them up for a while.
  • Peter’s whole story arc is one of the saddest. He eventually comes to his senses and returns home upon seeing that the war is lost. He later helps elderly Germans escape the Nazi kill squads. Then, Peter returns home after learning that Berlin has surrendered...only to find that said kill squad has arrived first and killed his parents.
• Hitler's reaction to learning Speer has been sabotaging the Nero Decree order. The normally explosively angry man snaps a pencil and...quietly asks Speer to leave, a Single Tear running down his cheek. Learning even his best friend has turned on him forces the delusional madman to realize he has nothing left.
• Elderly German citizens are executed in the streets because they were unable or unwilling to fight.
• The utter despair in faces of German civilians and soldiers during the surrender announcement.
• The beginning and ending footage of the real Traudl Junge, expressing her regret for not seeing Hitler for the madman he was. She explains that she was naturally horrified by what was revealed at the Nuremberg Trials, but took comfort that she didn't know about the Holocaust or the other German atrocities. But then one day, she was walking in Munich when she saw a memorial plaque for Sophie Scholl, a German student who was executed for speaking out against the Nazis. She saw that they were born in the same year and that Scholl was executed the same year she was hired to be Hitler's secretary. It was only then that Junge realized that she could very well have found things out for herself.