What an EXCELLENT movie. It shows us the Wannsee Conference, that notorious meeting of Nazi leaders - military, civilian - who settled upon the extermination of the Jews in Europe. I became curious about this meeting after watching the miniseries War & Remembrance last summer, and also having watched the docudrama Nuremberg. So, I was excited when I found out that there was this docudrama about the Wannsee Conference itself - and the film is a masterful study of the event.
It opens with Eichmann nervously preparing for the conference - the servants are polishing the silver, the food is being set out, flowers in vases, and so on - and then the conference attendees begin to arrive: civilians and Nazi party officials like F.W. Kritzinger, Wilhelm Stuckart (brilliant performance by Colin Firth!) and Gerhard Klopfer, along with military commanders, like Otto Hofmann and Heinrich Müller. Finally, General Heydrich arrives - played to terrifying perfection by Branagh - and the meeting begins.
Then, what we see is the meeting itself. A highly edited transcript has actually survived, and that provides the basis for this reconstruction of the contentious argument about what to do with the millions of Jews not just in Germany but in the occupied territories (including Russia, which the Germans still believe they will occupy even though at that very moment the war in Russian is going disastrously for the Germans). It's not that anyone at the table has any love for the Jews. They despise the Jews. That still does not stop them from arguing intensely about what to do. Stuckart, who wrote the Nuremberg laws which laid the legal groundwork for Nazi persecution of the Jews, is outraged that the "rule of law" is going to be jettisoned in favor of putting the SS in charge of the Jewish problem. Erich Neumann, a bureaucrat in charge of the industrial "Four Year Plan," is distraught because valuable Jewish labor may be deported or sent to the gas chambers. The military men are worried about the negative effect on morale posed by asking soldiers to kill millions of Jews. It is blood-chilling to listen to all of this... a discussion which happened in the heart of Europe, just sixty years ago.
The script is brilliant - not a word wasted. I found the film completely gripping from start to finish, and even though I have read a lot of Holocaust literature, I had never really seen anything like this, the debate amongst the Nazis themselves - a debate which resulted directly in the establishment and the administration of the death camps.
Everyone involved in the production of this film deserves a round of applause. These surely cannot have been easy roles to play, but all of the performances were excellent, especially Branagh, Firth and Stanley Tucci, as Eichmann. At just 96 minutes, the film gives you the actual length of the meeting itself: 85 minutes, in which millions of people were condemned to death. Was there ever such a meeting like this in the history of the world? Let us hope there never will be again.
And here is YouTube video clip, which shows a crucial moment in the meeting, when the question of the actual murder of the Jews emerges into the open (I'm just now realizing what great film clips I can find at YouTube to add to these blog posts - thanks to the people who are finding such good clips to share).
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