"A small masterpiece of scholarship and imagination" (Variety), this documentary links the roots of Hitler's extermination campaign to Nazi aesthetics and art. That Hitler was a failed painter is well known; what writer-director Peter Cohen does, however, using rare and newly unearthed archival footage, is to examine Hitler, the artist and art enthusiast, in light of the political philosophy he shaped out of the very same petit-bourgeois values that "framed" his third-rate postcard art. An obsessive combination of cleanliness, kitsch and sentimentality informed the vast art collections Hitler amassed (indeed, among his closest advisors were many similarly inclined former artists). These same obsessions dictated the study and practice of medicine in Nazi Germany, and this was linked to art in the "Degenerate Art" campaign which is astutely observed and described in the film. The eradication of "Degenerate Art" and artists was a step in the process in which mentally disabled individuals became the first official victims of the Nazi re-definition of the term euthanasia. Cohen's film benefits from the Nazis' compulsion to record Hitler's every move in home movie/newsreel fashion; a remarkable moment is his early-morning tour of the Paris architectural sights on Day 1 of the Nazi Occupation. Cohen draws a clean, devastating line from Hitler's grandiose architectural pretensions to the idea of extermination, on the one hand, and global war, on the other, as the ultimate artistic expression.