Blondi's death sets the next segment of the film into motion: she's quickly joined by her master and his newlywed bride, and then in the most chilling scene in the film, the Goebbels' children, whom Magda Goebbels first coolly slips a Mickey, and then one by one, after they're asleep, puts a glass cyanide capsule between their teeth and squeezes their jaws closed, before she and Joseph blow their own brains out shortly afterwards.
While Hitler and Goebbels are two of history's most evil men, their women were also warped in their own unqiue ways: Downfall depicts Eva Braun as being almost as manic-depressive as Hitler (although given to more subdued mood swings rather than Hitler's alternating boiling rage and zonked-out depression); and there is no more evil mother than Magda Goebbels.
(Somewhat astonishingly, this book, which I found at the top of a Google search when double-checking how Magda spelled her full name, claims that her fascination with Buddhism lead her to believe that killing her kids would be fine: they would all be reincarnated back to a better life.)
Risky, Somewhat Anti-Climactic Ending
As I said, all of these elements are well known, and most films about Hitler's last days end, logically enough, shortly after his body is torched with Nazi Germany's last few remaining gallons of petrol. It took a certain amount of nerve for Downfall's filmmakers to risk a somewhat anticlimactic ending, by showing what went on after his demise.
Even with loudspeaker-equipped trucks roaming the streets telling Berlin's citizens and its remaining soldiers to put down their guns and surrender because the Fuhrer was dead, its few remaining diehard Nazis were hanging or shooting their own soldiers (by that point mostly most old men, young boys, and even a handful of women), and even civilians deemed to be disloyal or unwilling to fight.
Beyond The Nightmare World
I only became interested in seeing Downfall because Victorino Matus of the Weekly Standard raved about it. While its underlying story is known to virtually everyone, overall, the film does a superb job of telling it--not the least of which is because its cast delivers fine performances portraying the most evil of men--and one astoundingly evil woman, as well.
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