There are good reasons for students to learn about the madmen of history. The vices of such men contrast sharply with the heroes whose virtues we hope our citizens and statesmen might emulate; they serve as reminders of the cruelties that a flawed human nature can produce; and they can serve as warnings for where politics can occasionally descend should the better angels of our nature fail on a mass scale. Students today rightly study Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for all three reasons. This is as it should be. Indeed, conditions today are such that the need for the third reason is particularly heightened: antisemitism is growing at alarming rates; fringe fascist-sympathizers have a large following online; and the value of liberal democracy is being openly questioned all around. In such times, Hitler’s Germany can serve as a sobering reminder of just how badly things can go if we lose our heads.

　　To fulfill this mandate to educate, the creators of the Netflix documentary series, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, needed only to tell the story again, to let the narrative speak for itself. In certain respects, they do this, deploying a mix of real footage from the Nazi era, choreographed scenes with actors to fill in the gaps, and historical commentary that conveys the story of Hitler’s life and how one man directed a respectable country towards evil. But the series is handicapped by crucial flaws. Chief among these is its attempts to compare the Weimar Republic and its chief villain to contemporary American politics. Its loud dog whistles equating Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump betray a desperation of the creators that goes beyond the limits of acceptable bias in such a way as to undermine the aim of the entire project.

　　Evil on Trial is ambitious in scope, seeking to cover the whole of Hitler’s career from starving artist to failed conqueror of Europe in just six episodes. What is more, the creators add their own twist to well-trodden territory by intersplicing the narrative with recordings from the Nuremberg trials, and with journal entries and dispatches from an American journalist, William Shirer, who was on the ground during Nazi rule. Despite the series’ title, the primary focus of the documentary is not Nuremberg (which is often a distracting aside), but instead the character of Hitler himself and his transformation of Germany.

　　The first episode about Hitler’s youth is surely the best in the series. Here it does a fine job capturing how a beaten boy prone to daydreaming embarked on a path to become, in the words of one Law Liberty writer, “the most universally reviled human being on the planet today.” The showrunners are wise enough to paint a portrait of youth that is sympathetic and even respectable. Hitler was not born evil. He was a boy “with a powerful imagination” who “lived in a fantasy world.” As a young man, he went to extremes to realize his dreams of becoming an artist, living in a men’s shelter, and selling paintings he copied from postcards. Relatedly, he was a great lover of music, plunging himself into even more debt in order to see the works of Richard Wagner performed. All this sounds like the charming, if obnoxious, qualities of a harmless Bohemian.

　　The creators note, though they do not spell out, that this early artistic streak was closely connected with Hitler’s attachment to noble, even fantastic sentiments. As the taste for Wagner suggests, Hitler was unusually drawn towards the heroic; Wagner’s operas portrayed “a Germany of gods and heroes and great leaders,” that furnished a dreamy ideal for the young artist to take as a lodestar. To Hitler, the strong, mythical characters of German folklore, however fantastical, were tremendously more admirable than the busy-bodied and broken souls furnished by a democratic age. With such sentiments, it is little surprise that he volunteered to join the Bavarian army at the outset of World War I, describing the conflict in his own words as “a deliverance from the distress that had weighed upon me.” War is the place to demonstrate one’s possession of pagan virtues, and so Hitler prayed for and thanked the heavens for war.

　　If the documentary’s creators wanted to show salutary or inspiring alternatives to Hitler and his inner circle, they need only to have highlighted the virtues of men like Eisenhower, Churchill, and Roosevelt.

　　Hitler proved capable as a messenger during the war, but it did not elevate him to the status of hero. Totally devastated by World War I, Germany under the Weimar Republic was poor, humiliated, and chaotic. Such turmoil might be the optimal condition for ambitious men to rise; the impoverished, embittered, but talented Hitler was able to climb the ranks of the Nazi party and then the Reichstag in a mere decade largely through charisma and a penchant for political strategy.

　　The series does an adequate job covering all of the main bases: the initial persecution and subsequent genocide of Jews and other minorities; the shameless propaganda; the totalitarian character of the regime; and the warmongering and expansionist designs present from the beginning. But the series’ special mark throughout is its psychological treatment of the man himself.

　　In the end, the dreaming boy had become not just a political dictator, but a tyrant in the classical sense. He was prone to droning on at private functions before an audience too scared to push back; he regularly berated generals for telling him harsh truths about the war or for conveying the effects of stratagems they had warned against; the man who feverishly promoted folk mores had a flapper woman for a mistress. The list goes on.

　　Young Hitler’s ambitious and Spartan persona could have been a potent primer to excel at any idealistic cause. Instead, his severe character and moralistic love of heroism and perfection found an outlet in the hyper-nationalism of the National Socialist Workers’ Party. Hardly the venue for refining noble inclinations, the Nazi party did not correct but rather catalyzed Hitler to take his childhood fancies to insane conclusions. Once he became the indispensable man of the party and then of the country, there was nothing to prevent him from believing that he had become one of the heroes of his youth, a mythical demigod in the flesh.

　　The series, then, offers both classical and classically liberal lessons about tyranny. On the one hand, it shows the potential danger of a soul too attracted to heroic nobility to recognize the goodness or superiority of alternative lives. Such souls can make vicious tyrants. At the same time, it offers a testimony to the liberal mantra that power corrupts: The Hitler in Vienna and the Hitler in the bunker are two different people. Both lessons are well worth internalizing and passing on to our youth. The problem with the documentary, however, is that this analysis of Hitler is not its primary focus.

　　There are plenty of superficial reasons to stop watching Evil on Trial. The first is somewhat theatric in nature. The actor who portrays Adolf somehow makes a caricature of the histrionic Führer in a way that is distracting. A petty but glaring detail is that the actor is simply too skinny to portray Hitler whom William Shirer describes as “chubby.” But one can forgive an actor for over-playing such a role—Kenneth Branagh overacts in everything and yet still makes decent films on occasion. There are more serious flaws with this series.

　　Making a documentary that compares a current candidate to Hitler smacks of crass politicking, detracting from whatever quality historical insight it otherwise might offer.

　　First, once the series reaches World War II, it focuses on Germany’s Eastern Front during the war in order to capture both Hitler’s lunacy in opening the front and the absolute devastation that the Germans caused in Eastern Europe. The problem with focusing on the East is that it ends up casting the Soviets as heroes rather than the devils whom the allies felt it necessary to support. There is not a word spoken of the brutality of the Soviet troops once they reached Germany and Berlin in particular; nothing is said about the mass rapes perpetrated by the Soviets. If the documentary’s creators wanted to show salutary or inspiring alternatives to Hitler and his inner circle, they need only to have highlighted the virtues of men like Eisenhower, Churchill, and Roosevelt who demonstrate the courage liberal democracies are capable of producing in times of crisis. Casting the Red Army as saviors is about as bad as The Birth of a Nation portraying the Confederates as honorable sentinels defending Southern virtue.

　　But even the focus on Eastern Europe is somewhat understandable. After all, of the 75-80 million deaths in the entire war, an estimated 40 million died on the Eastern front. A still more troubling flaw in the show is its in-your-face alarm bells that the United States is now Weimar Germany, a weak state primed at the ready for a new Hitler to emerge. The show and its interviewers never explicitly name Donald Trump, but they frequently refer to him. Hitler’s mountain retreat in Bavaria is “like a Mar-a-Lago.” Hitler sought to “Make Germany Great Again.” What is more, he was a master of “fake news” as opposed to just “propaganda.”

　　These comparisons are intentional. The creator, Joe Berlinger, explained his motivation by pointing to “our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking on our door.” Such comparisons undermine the show, and suggest its creators failed to draw appropriate lessons from Weimar. Indeed, the creators borrow pages from actors in the Weimar Republic. Fascists and communists in those days engaged in the worst sort of rhetorical astrology, predicting apocalypse should the other side win. With so much at stake, each could and did justify political violence, paving the way for Hitler to emerge as a defender of order.

　　More importantly, the comparison between Hitler and Trump so misses the mark as to raise the question whether the creators did in fact understand the psychology of Hitler after all. If they did have a good grasp of him, then it means they are so indoctrinated by the worst progressive takes on Trump as to be dismissed out of hand. Say what one will about our forty-fifth president. He may be a crude man who likes to see his name on big buildings, but he is not a Wagner-loving warmonger hoping to usher in a new dawn for the perfect human race. Moreover, making a documentary that compares a current candidate to Hitler smacks of crass politicking, detracting from whatever quality historical insight it otherwise might offer.

　　If we wish to use history’s examples as instructive maps for the present, it would behoove journalists and educators (and documentary makers) to refrain from twisting the present to fit into history’s categories. To suggest that Trump is Adolf Hitler is about as helpful as suggesting that Kamala Harris is Joseph Stalin. Precisely because such comparisons are grossly inaccurate, they cheapen the utility of these historical examples whose lessons should be always kept in the back of our minds. Like charges of racism or xenophobia, frequent misapplication of the “fascist” label will only incline audiences to roll their eyes when we need to deploy the word to confront an actual racist, xenophobic, or genocidal maniac.