Available on Netflix, the documentary “Eldorado: The Hatred Cabaret of the Nazis” highlights the rise of the Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler through the eyes and experience of the LGBT+ community of the time. An exciting film.
“Yesterday ist’s richtig!” – “This is where it happens !” in French – can be read in large, well-lit letters on the facade of the Eldorado, in Berlin, in the 1920s. While Germany was rebuilding after the First World War, this cabaret became a refuge, a space of freedom. This same freedom which will be, a few years later, trampled on by the Third Reich.
Entitled Eldorado: The hated cabaret of the Nazis, the documentary chooses this place unknown to the general public as a starting point to better trace the horrors committed by the Nazi regime against the LGBT + community.
After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Berlin is a lively, electric and, believe it or not, avant-garde city. A real sexual liberation seizes the capital. When night falls, everything is decided at the Eldorado. Men meet there, but also women, admiring the frenzied performances of the drag queens on stage.
The documentary directed by Benjamin Cantu revives this euphoria through reconstructions worthy of a cinema film. The story is told through the point of view of a handful of people with tragic fates: tennis champion Gottfried von Cramm; Magnus Hirschfeld, pioneer in sexuality studies; the actress Charlotte Charlaque or Ernst Röhm, the right arm of Adolf Hitler. They are homosexual, transgender and will each in turn become the targets of Nazi power.
netflix
Fluid, exciting and wonderfully told by its speakers, Eldorado: The hated cabaret of the Nazis recalls how homosexuality was initially very present in the ranks of Adolf Hitler’s regime. We also discover that transgender people had legal recognition to circulate freely in the streets.
The plot of the film continues until 1945. At the end of the Second World War, 100,000 men were indicted because of Paragraph 175 – article of the German penal code which criminalized homosexuality. Fifty thousand were convicted and 5-10,000 were killed in concentration camps, thus displaying the pink triangle.
Eldorado: The hated cabaret of the Nazis is a necessary documentary to forget anything of the past.
Eldorado: The Nazis’ Hated Cabaret is available on Netflix.
For further : the documentary Paragraph 175 by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman is available on the MUBI platform.