This has been a rough cold and flu season for me. Last week I contracted another cold, Friday I was feeling poorly, Saturday was pretty bad and I sent friends home early at the end of Board and Card Game Night, and Sunday I barely made it out to the Noir on the Boulevard screening of This Gun For Hire. (A very enjoyable early noir and worth seeing on a big screen.) Today I woke still feeling pretty bad off and stayed home from work.

As I gagged on postnasal drip I watched Youtube videos and took in a new documentary series on Netflix, Hitler’s Circle of Evil. It’s a ten part series that focuses on the men closest top Adolf Hitler and the parts they played in the rise of one of the world’s most murderous regimes.

What makes this series particularly fascinating is the focus on the men who supported Hitler. We have heard endless examinations of Hitler’s life, his decisions making processes, and so on, but for the rest of that ruling clique we generally are only given glimpses of the others and then only in their relationship to the dictator. In this series each man is followed along his history from his origins into the halls of power and their eventual downfall. While they all served and followed Hitler, each retained their own motivations, goals and methods all of which repeatedly brought them into conflict with one another. It is very instructive to study this sort of history. They were all NAZIs, they were all anti-Semitic, but they were all very different in personality, powerbase, and outcomes.

For those who write fiction, particularly if you have ‘evil empires’ as part of your world-building, this series is must watch research. If can help you flesh out a cardboard evil empire into a realistic and terrible construction.