Review for “Conspiracy” – a dramatization of the Wannsee Conference

Conspiracy (2001)

Copyright by the Doomster 2003

Rating (1 to 10) : 7

Summary: A historical recreation of the bureaucratic wrangling during the formulation of the Final Solution.

On Jan. 20^th, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, deputy to the Chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, convened a meeting of several key Nazi officials from various government departments to resolve the “Jewish question.” He was ordered by Adolf Hitler to come up with a solution to the burgeoning number of Jews that were coming under German occupation. The result of the meeting was the implementation of the “Final Solution”, a plan to systematically collect, gather, and exterminate all the Jews in Europe.

This film is a dramatization of that meeting. Of course, no actual film footage or photographs of the meeting exist because those in charge of organizing the meeting (Heydrich and his assistant, Adolf Eichmann) made every effort to destroy any record of the meeting. As Heydrich points out in the movie, all the participants of said meeting became “keepers of secrets.” But even with the meeting being held secret, the screenwriter was able to produce a script because a transcript of this infamous yet clandestine meeting exists; each attendant of the Wannsee Conference was given an edited transcript of the meeting by Adolf Eichmann, to be destroyed after review, but one participant, Martin Luther, kept his copy and it survived the war (Martin Luther did not).

What sticks out the most in this movie is how the meeting to formulate the Final Solution, the plan to exterminate millions of lives, was really a debate concerned more about who does what and who gets authority over whom rather than about the central question of whether killing millions of Jews was right or wrong. It’s amazing that the meeting, which started murder on an industrial scale, doesn’t come off as a gathering of villainous evil incarnates but rather like a group of politicos fighting over money in a budget. The participants look like bureaucrats looking to further their own departments and defend their bureaucratic turf. The functional and allocative rivalries of the various Nazi bureaucracies take up most of the argument, not the question of whether or not killing of Jews is just.

Only one participant, Dr. Kritzinger (David Threlfall), voices opposition to a plan to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews; yet he only opposes it because it sounds impossible and absurd. Everyone else at the table, from Heydrich (played by Kenneth Branagh) to a lowly coordinator of industrial production, Dr. Neumann, is in agreement with the notion that all Jews in Europe must be exterminated. All participants, including Kritzinger, never challenge the central premise of anti-Semitism that brought the meeting about in the first place.

Kenneth Branagh ( “Hamlet”), in the leading role as Reinhard Heydrich, plays his part perfectly as the completely amoral opportunist out to gain political power. The real-life Heydrich was a slick, power-hungry manipulator, someone who wielded a velvet glove to flatter, to impress, to cajole, and if need be, to intimidate others to get his way. If Heydrich had not died and if the Third Reich did survive for 1000 years, some historians have surmised that Heydrich would have succeeded Hitler as the Fuhrer.

Colin Firth (of “Bridget Jones Diary” fame), as Dr. Stuckart, a legalist from the Interior Ministry, does a wonderful job in a supporting role as someone who, at first, opposes Heydrich’s plan, but later goes along after being subtly intimidated by Heydrich. Dr. Stuckart doesn’t oppose the Final Solution because he opposes anti-Semitism; indeed, he is a believer of the central Nazi tenet. He opposes it because in implementing the Final Solution, many laws that he wrote as part of the Nuremberg laws sanctioning anti-Semitism will be trampled. The fact that many Jews will be killed doesn’t bother him as much as the fact that his work will be discarded.

The one disappointing performance is by Stanley Tucci (Epstein from “Deconstructing Harry”), who plays Adolf Eichmann, Heydrich’s deputy who organized the meeting and the venue. He portrays Eichmann as a routine bureaucrat, reserved, quiet, seemingly lacking passion for the Final Solution, when in fact, he was a rabid anti-Semite and the chief architect of the Final Solution after Heydrich was assassinated a few months later, something which led to him being convicted for war crimes and hanged in Israel in 1960.

There is a message at the end, when Eichmann slaps a lowly attendant soldier for goofing off and participating in a snowball fight while on duty. The soldier stammered that the snowball fight just happened, to which Eichmann replies “Nothing ever just happens.” This movie scene contradicts the Nazi apologists who claimed that these genocidal crimes were unfortunate occurrences of war.

Why you should or should not see this movie:

This is definitely a movie worth watching, a required watching along with movies like “Schindler’s List” or “Shoah” for those who wish to learn more about the Holocaust.

Memorable quotes

Heydrich: Emigration. The policy that will take the place of emigration, and we have collected enough practical experience to do it well, is evacuation.

Hofmann: Which differs from emigration in what way? Evacuation to where?

Heydrich: Let us postpone that question for a while.

Klopfer: To hell, one hopes.

Lange: Many already have.

Luther: Do they even have a hell?

Heydrich: They do now. We provide it.

Heydrich: And those who are exempt from evacuation, they too will fall within certain categories….

Lange (standing up): Could you General…sorry. I have the real feeling I ‘evacuated’ 30,000 Jews already, by shooting them, at Riga. Is what I did ‘evacuation’? When they fell, were they ‘evacuated?’ There are another 20,000 at least waiting for similar ‘evacuation’. I just think it is helpful to know what words mean. With all respect.

Eichmann: If I might, I think it’s unnecessary to burden the record…

Heydrich: Yes, in my personal opinion they are ‘evacuated.’

Kritzinger: Explain!

Heydrich: I had just done so.

Kritzinger: That is not…no…that is contrary to what the Chancellery has been told. I have directly been assured…I have!…that…purge the Jews, yes….but….to annihilate them….that we have undertaken to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe? No, no, no, no, no. That possibility has personally been denied TO ME by the FǕHRER.

Heydrich: And it will continue to be.

Heydrich: First-degree exempted will be sterilized. No more children and eventually, no more mixed-blood, once and for all. It is important to know what words mean, but it is important to remember that a thousand years from now, no matter who holds the power, history will be written in those words.

Luther: Do you expect the men serenely to submit to being sterilized?

Klopfer (sarcastically): Why not? They’ve already had their cocks clipped.

Heydrich (making his decision on sterilization vs extermination known): We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for them to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate the race. That’s farcical. Dead men don’t hump; dead women don’t get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way.

Heydrich (replying to why he personally flies to places): Nietzsche advises the secret of enjoying life is to uh, live dangerously.

Stuckart: He enjoyed it so much he went mad.

Heydrich: Look at the world and tell me the pleasures of sanity

Lange: Not exactly war is it? And gas chambers about to come?

Kritzinger: What gas chambers? Gas chambers?

Lange: I hear rumors, yes.

Kritzinger: This is…more than war. Must be a different word for this.

Lange: Try chaos.

Kritzinger: Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.

Lange: I studied law as well.

Kritzinger: Well how’d you apply that education to what you do?

Lange: It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.

Heydrich: Triumphant German vision. So this is my command to you here – link arms, your units, your ministries, apply your intelligence, apply your energies. The machinery is waiting. Feed it. Get them on the trains. Keep the trains rolling. And history will honor us for having the will and the vision to advance the human race to greater purity in a space of time so short Charles Darwin would be astonished.

Mueller: What was the story you were going to tell me?

Heydrich: Story?

Mueller: Kritizinger, the…

Heydrich: Yes, he told me a story about a man he’d known all his life, a boyhood friend. This man hated his father. Loved his mother fiercely, the mother was devoted to him but the father used to beat him, demeaned him, disinherited him. Anyway, this friend grew to manhood and he was still in his 30s when the mother died, this mother who had nurtured and protected him. She died. The man stood as they lowered her casket and uh tried to cry but…no tears came. The man’s father lived to a very extended old age, withered away and died when the son was in his 50s, I think, and at the father’s funeral, much to his son’s surprise, he could not control his tears. He was wailing, sobbing. He was apparently inconsolable. Lost even. That was the story Kritzinger told me.

Eichmann: I don’t understand.

Heydrich: No? The man had been driven his whole life by hatred of his father. When the mother died, that was a loss. When the father died, when the hate had lost its object, then…the man’s life was empty…over.

Eichmann: Interesting.

Heydrich: That was Kritzinger’s warning.

Eichmann: What, that we should not hate the Israelites?

Heydrich: No, that it should not so fill our lives that…when they are gone we have nothing left to live for…so says the story. [pause] I will not miss them.