MOVIES ABOUT THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE

 

“The Wannsee Conference” (1984) is a German film.  Before the meeting, the Nazis mingle and laugh it up.  One of them asks “why didn’t the Allies take in the Jews?”  Why indeed, but this was thrown in to indict the Allies.  Low blow, but deserving.  Another references the Vatican ignoring what was going on.  Another low blow that is sadly true.  One of the men tells a story.  “Himmler fainted when witnessing an execution.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of.  It proves we Germans are humans.”  When one questions that the use of trains to transport Jews when the military needs them in Russia,  he is told the Final Solution is part of the war effort.  These conversations are the only discussions of alternatives to extermination.  Once Heydrich (Dietrich Mattausch) convenes the meeting, it focuses on just the extermination.  It is the only item on the agenda.  Stuckart (Peter Fitz) argues for exempting half-Jews.  Some are serving in the army.  He is laughed at as a Jew-lover.  The movie concludes with the inevitable decision to use the death camps to solve the Jewish problem.    

                This movie has a German cast.  It is well-acted.  Mattausch is good as Heydrich.  He comes off as impatient over questioning, but charming.  He flirts with the female secretary.  Eichmann is given a bigger role.  It appears that the film wanted to make a case for Eichmann as an architect of the Holocaust. “Eichmann is more than just a shipping agent, after all.”  The other men are portrayed as evil clowns.  Their conversations are malevolently banal.  There is a lot of laughing in this version.  It’s infuriating.  The dialogue has more trivial comments, but it does a better job of making clear the belief that Jews were considered inferior by these loathsome individuals.  However, overall this version is less chilling than “Conspiracy”.

                “Die Wannseekonferenz” (The Conference) is a movie made for German television.  It was aired two days before the 80^th anniversary of the conference.  A narrator makes it clear that the conference was held to discuss the final solution to the Jewish problem.  SPOILER ALERT:  For those of you who have seen either of the other movies or just want to know what happened at the conference, I’m going to cover this whole movie. 

It attempts to identify the participants by having one of them talk about the others, but this is not very informative.  At a pre-meeting of a select few, the work of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia.  Shooting and the vans using carbon monoxide are the two main methods.  Heydrich starts the meeting talking about the “final solution.”  Hitler wants the Jewish problem solved.  The Jews forced the war on Germany.  They need to be exterminated.  There is some pushback.  One mentions the deportation of half Jews and some decorated WWI veterans.  The solution to the Jewish veterans problem will be to put them in model ghettoes for international inspections.  What about the cost?  The Jews will be billed!  A representative of Goring says that he is concerned about losing Jewish workers.  They can still be used.  The weaker ones will die from the working and the ones that don’t will clearly be the most resilient.  Those will be sent to the gas chambers.  Another worries about taking trains away from the military to transport Jews.  He is told that the Final Solution is part of the war effort.  Eichmann, who is in charge of the transportation, smirks as he explains that they will use the trains to bring Russian slave laborers to Germany and then use the empty cars to ship Jews to the East.  What about the morale of the German soldiers who are shooting thousands of Jews, including kids?  Give them an extra ration of schnapps.  But be careful because drunk soldiers might result in wounded Jews crawling out of the burial pits and that requires another bullet.  The killing of kids is actually humane because they wouldn’t survive without their parents

 The meeting is about how to efficiently deal with the 11 million Jews in Europe.  Heydrich is including Jews in England and neutral countries like Switzerland.  There are some problems with the occupied countries like Denmark, Norway, and Finland.  Their populace need to be convinced that the Jews must be eliminated.  In the “allied” countries like Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, we ask nicely if we can take care of your Jewish problem. Only Hungary was not on board.  Slovakia is troublesome because it wants to keep the Jewish assets.  Many of the participants are not concerned about genocide, they are concerned with protecting their own turf.  They argue for being included in the murder

The highlight of the movie is Stuckart arguing for sticking to the law when it comes to half Jews.  The others look at him and see a Jew-lover.  He insists he is simply pointing out that the laws call for exempting these Jews from deportation. Since he gets so much blowback, he falls back to his alternative of sterilization.  Heydrich calls him aside, but unlike in “Conspiracy”, Heydrich does not threaten him.  In fact, it turns out that they are friends.  We are left with the impression that Heydrich will just ignore Stuckart’s argument.  When Kitzinger brings up the strain on soldiers, Heydrich sees the opening to discuss the use of poison gas.  See, no stress on the soldiers. Heydrich concludes the meeting by likening the Final Solution to amputating a bad leg

“The Conference” is a movie that I question why it was made since we already had two good movies on this 90-minute meeting. I guess you could argue that about every twenty years we need to be reminded about how evil the Nazis were.  In this case, the movie found a large audience in Germany and a new generation was made aware of the Final Solution.  Kudos to German television for covering one of the blackest events in German history.  (Here in America, we are still waiting on a movie about the Tulsa Massacre.)  I hope there was a feeling of shame for German viewers

                I would put “The Conference” on a level with “The Wannsee Conference”.  The cast is fine, but not as potent as “Conspiracy”.  Heydrich is not as charismatic.  He is flanked by two toadies.  One is malevolent and scowls through the meeting.  If looks could kill.  The other is jocular.  This movie has more Eichmann than the other two.  What stands out is the ghastly discussions and comments.  It is illuminating that these men would say things that are damning, yet they don’t care that there will be a transcript.  They make no effort to hide their racism.  Thankfully, because of the transcript, we get movies that recreate one of the mostevil meetings in history.        

                The three movies have much in common.  We have all seen Holocaust films that gut punch us with what the death camps were like, but most of us have not seen films about how the death camps came about.  How could humans do that to other humans?  These films show that it was morally inferior people who got the ball rolling.  There was bureaucracy backing the “Final Solution”.  Petty men given power over vast numbers of people.  Men who were willingly corrupted by an ideology that tapped into their inherent anti-semitism.  Men, like Eichmann, who were willing to talk about their crimes without shame.  Without him, we wouldn’t have this film.  And without him and others like him, we would not have had the Holocaust.  Sadly, one takeaway is that something like this could happen again because it does not take supervillain abilities to pull off this kind of crime.

 

Wannsee Conference  =  B

The Conference  =  B