This show is pretty brutal on its main characters. But that's part of what reminded me of Raymond Chandler and the noir era. Phillip Marlowe was constantly getting his ass kicked by thugs and finding himself if bad situations with damsels in distress who he couldn't really trust. And Chandler and Graham Greene were un-ironic in their contempt for that kind of cartoonish, faux macho tough guy act. The "tough guys" were always thugs in their books. Babylon Berlin does lay it on a little thick, though.
The train car of Russian gold was a nice homage to the Maltese Falcon. There's a comic element to the existence of actual gold that they all missed in their search.
Mostly, I liked the fact that the show skipped the "History Channel version" of the rise of the Nazis. Instead of the cartoon version of a bunch of drunk army vets causing trouble and getting into the occult, they show a little nuance with elements of the military establishment and upper class making a devil's bargain with the workers' party. There's a scene in season 3 that spells out explicitly that they were not conservatives; they were revolutionaries trying to forge a new regime in a country that was still struggling with the concept of a unified nation-state.
*Funnily enough, as I type this, the History Channel is running "Lost Gold of World War II."
