Richard Ingrams' Week: We can still learn so much from studying

Inspectors have decreed that there is too much emphasis on Hitler in the teaching of history in schools.

They have a point, of course. There is a ghoulish fascination with the Fhrer which can become an unhealthy obsession. It does not do to dwell too much on all the horrors and atrocities for which the Nazis were responsible.

All the same I would argue that studying the rise and fall of Hitler can be beneficial if it is viewed as a kind of grotesque parody of the story of all political power maniacs.

Having recently watched on DVD the brilliant German film Downfall (starring Bruno Ganz and Juliane Khler, right), a highly realistic picture of Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker, I was again reminded how much we can learn from the events of 1945.

It is not just a vivid confirmation of Lord Acton's famous dictum that power corrupts. Almost to the end Hitler believes that help is at hand and that some dramatic upturn will save the day for him. He remains blissfully unaware of the fact that the longer he clings to power the worse it is going to be for him and everybody else.

Meanwhile his subordinates mutter behind his back but they are so mesmerised by his fading charisma that no one dares to do anything about it. Instead they soldier on, each man giving his leader insincere pledges of loyalty while plotting to be his eventual successor. Blinded by power themselves, they are quite incapable of seeing that there might be no future for any of them by the time the Fhrer bows out.

Of course it all happened a long time ago, but the story can still provide an instructive lesson for schoolchildren, helping them to understand the political events of their own time.

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