Even in the Nazis he saw gray

German screenwriter and producer Bernd Eichinger died Jan. 24 at 61.

He’ll be perhaps longest remembered for Downfall, the controversial film that told the story of the fall of the Third Reich partly from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.

He defended his approach against critics who saw his tale as sympathetic: “There is no such thing as telling the truth and not taking everything into consideration. Otherwise you are a Stalinist with one view of things. You burn what doesn’t fit your position or put it into the archives because you want to show only bad and good. When I wrote this script, for me the important thing was to show the gray.”