I have yet to see Downfall, though my dad has, and he loved it.

Downfall is brilliant. I'm not much of a war movie aficionado (I usually prefer stuff like Jarhead and Full Metal Jacket) but Downfall does so many things that I love-- it's meticulously historically accurate, presented in the style of cinema verite, it humanizes traditionally demonized figures without excusing them one iota, it features, seriously, every third or fourth German actor I've ever liked, and it has a wonderful pall of bleakness over it: from the start, it's clear that everyone is fucked-- most of the characters spend the film saying, "Shit! I've spent so long mindlessly following orders I've forgotten how to disobey them, even when they're clearly both suicidal and pointless."

I found Tom Cruise's statement about his Hitler-killing fantasies a tad deranged.

I missed that.

One of the things that people do wrong with Nazis, particularly in what-if-Hitler-had-won-the-war speculative fiction is lose sight of how hideously dull and bureaucratic living in a totalitarian state is aside from the odd midnight raid for dissidents to ship off to the death camps. I mean, can you imagine what it would be like to live in a place where someone like, say, John Ashcroft controlled everything you were allowed to read and all the music you were allowed to listen to?

There's a fairly good book called Fatherland by Robert Harris (who also wrote the superior WWII-connected espionage thrillers Enigman and Archangel) which tackles the what-if-Hitler-won question without accidentally glamorizing the Nazis. It's set in the sixties and, since the Jews have all been gotten rid of, Hitler has shifted to blaming all of societies problems on the perfidious influence of gays. Society has gradually liberalized, though it's still frightfully uptight-- jazz music, for instance, is allowed, but only special jazz "purged of negroid influences" which, according to the book's description, sounds lifeless and staid, possessing none of the dynamism of proper jazz.

For some reason those details stuck in my head after I read the book.