WHO WAS HITLER? The question may seem ludicrous, given the vast outpouring of books, television programmes and films about the man. Amazon offers no fewer than 32,000 books about the Nazi dictator; only Jesus has more literature devoted to him, while Stalin merits half as much. We have learnt, variously, that Hitler was a vegetarian teetotaller, a racist demagogue, an opera nut, a drug addict, a bore, and possibly homosexual. And yet this most massive of 20th-century figures has always seemed to me strangely cardboard: a manic, air-pawing ranter in flickering black-and-white propaganda movies, a one-dimensional monster and, finally, a caricature, a goose-stepping Basil Fawlty, the Führer as freak, an abomination with a funny moustache. Whatever else he was, Hitler wasn’t quite real, or human. That is how most popular culture has chosen to represent Hitler in the postwar years, as an extraordinary, unrepeatable symbol of the purest wickedness.

Sixty years after Hitler’s death, that comforting approach has now been directly challenged by a new German film that portrays the Nazi dictator, for the first time, as a realistic human being, an undertaking as daring as it is dangerous. Der Untergang (The Downfall) chronicles Hitler’s last 12 days in the bunker, based on witness accounts and diaries. Played by the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, the 56-year-old dictator trembles from Parkinson’s disease and hides his shaking hands behind his back out of tattered pride. The bitter tirades as his army disintegrates before the Soviet advance are interspersed with moments that veer close to sympathy: he weeps; he is gentle and charming towards his female staff; and tender to Eva Braun, marrying her the day before their suicide.

Alec Guinness portrayed the same historical moment in the 1972 film The Last Ten Days, as did Anthony Hopkins in The Bunker in 1981, but both films were careful to stick closely to the Hitler-as-monster formula: the Hopkins character was not far off being Hannibal Lecter in a Nazi uniform. Der Untergang, by contrast, has broken new ground by depicting Hitler as a complex individual, by giving, in the words of Der Spiegel, “a real face to the absurd drama in the concrete ghetto”.

Inevitably, the new film has prompted fury among those who believe that attributing human characteristics to the architect of the Holocaust desecrates the memory of his millions of victims. Enraged that Hitler could be depicted eating chocolate cake and being kind to his pet dog Blondi, The Daily Mail demanded to know: “Is Germany finally forgiving Hitler?” The reverse is surely the case, for by moving beyond the cartoon image of a deranged villain, Germany may finally be condemning Hitler for what he was: a human capable of grossly inhuman acts. Trying to understand Hitler is not the same as explaining him, let alone excusing him.

A Hitler who is simply a mad aberration was easier for Germans to live with; as the historian John Lukacs has observed: “The simplistic affixing of the abnormal label to Hitler relieves him, again, of responsibility”. But a Hitler who was, in some ways, quite normal, even sympathetic, is more truly disturbing than the overdrawn image of a mass-murdering demagogue. The enduring fascination of Nazism for some people lies in the grandiosity of its perverted vision; puncture that grandiosity, by making its progenitor believably human, and the macabre allure begins to ebb.

The tongue-twisting German term Vergangenheitsbewältigung, meaning coming to terms with the past, was recently nominated as the most beautiful word in the German language. It says much about Germany’s successful postwar introspection that a process once too painful to contemplate is now a subject of celebration. By looking Hitler in the face, and honestly depicting what was there, that catharsis may finally be nearing completion, transforming the ogre into a petit-bourgeois obsessive, addicted to cream cakes, a man capable of charm, and horrific brutality.

The contrast with earlier, blunter attempts to depict the Führer on screen is telling. In Hitler: The Rise of Evil, he is shown in one reconstructed scene beating a small dog, an event that probably never happened but that neatly fits the preconceived pattern. How much more shocking it is to see Hitler fawning over his dog as the nightmare he has created reaches its climax outside. Acknowledging that ordinary-seeming humans are capable of staggering inhumanity — what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil” — is key to understanding not just Nazism but Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and a school occupied by Chechen terrorists.

It seems only fitting that film should be the medium to portray the miserable, isolated and faintly banal end of Hitler’s life. Josef Goebbels himself died convinced of the power of movies. In March 1945, as the Red Army closed in on Berlin, Hitler’s propaganda chief believed that one last rousing epic, Kolberg, might yet inspire the German people to resistance and victory. “Do you want to play a role in that film which will let you live again in 100 years? ” Goebbels asked his staff. “I can assure you that it will be a tremendous film, exciting and beautiful, and worth holding steady for.”

Sixty years later, Hitler does live again in film. The result is neither exciting nor beautiful, but a courageous exercise in demythologising and closer to the truth than any before it: a lonely grey-haired man with trembling hands, eating chocolate and dispatching non-existent troops to fight an unwinnable war, insisting to the last that the German nation has shown itself “unworthy of him”, a fantasist in a concrete coffin.

It was by seeing their victims as something other than human that the Nazis were able to go about their murderous work. Portraying Hitler himself as human may signal his final defeat.

Contribute to the Debate at comment@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• How to stop the Queen picking the next PM
• To save the planet, strike a deal with Big Oil
• Bankers think it’s all over. Time to think again