THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE Movie Review

Wannseekonferenz

The formalities and basic logistical arrangements for the systematic murder of millions of men, women, and children known as the Final Solution were decided in an 85-minute meeting of 14 Nazi leaders on January 20, 1942. From notes taken by the secretary at the meeting, as well as letters written by Hermann Goering and Adolf Eichmann, screenwriter Paul Mommertz and director Heinz Schirk have recreated—in real screen time—the businesslike but occasionally relaxed gathering that took place that day. The Wannsee Conference is one of those cinematic ideas that just seems too simple and too obvious to work—but work it does, and stunningly. Looking at these people joking with each other, drinking their coffee, speaking in only slightly elliptical terms about how to efficiently turn millions of living human beings into piles of dead flesh, and then how to most inexpensively dispose of the mountains of corpses that they intend to create, is to understand—once again—that the most horrifying actions imaginable can grow from the most seemingly ordinary of people when they are above the law. In the film's undramatic, offhanded recreation of what to these Nazis was just one more business meeting, we can grasp a bit of the obscenity of the Nazi denial that their victims were human beings at all. That emotionless matter-of-factness is more horrifying than any traditional monster movie, all the more so because these monsters were real—as are their spiritual offspring around the world.

NEXT STOP … Shoah, Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, The Memory of Justice

1984 87m/C GE Dietrich Mattausch, Gerd Brockmann, Friedrich Beckhaus; D: Heinz Schirk. VHS, LV HMV, GLV, BTV