MOVIE REVIEWS : CHILLING ‘CONFERENCE’ OF NAZI EXTERMINATORS

On Tuesday, Jan. 20, 1942, at a mansion in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, 15 key representatives of the SS, the Nazi Party and the Third Reich met at the request of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police and the Secret Service.

The meeting lasted only 85 minutes, yet by the time it was over the “Final Solution” had been set in motion, decreeing the systematic extermination in German-occupied Europe of all Jews and all others decreed undesirable by the Nazis.

“The Wannsee Conference” (at the Fine Arts) re-creates this meeting with a you-are-there immediacy that is as mesmerizing as it is meticulous. It lasts only a minute longer--for credits--than the actual gathering did and is virtually all talk, but it’s the most chilling discussion imaginable, all the more so for taking place in so casual and gemutlich an atmosphere.

Everyone in attendance had long before stopped thinking of Jews as human beings--if they had ever done so in the first place--so that for them the Final Solution of the Jewish Question is entirely a question of logistics and public relations. Delegate after delegate, while each touting his successes to date, makes it clear that it isn’t going to be easy to dispose of millions and millions of people. But all regard it as a challenge surely to be met by fabled German efficiency. Heydrich had no trouble getting the backing of the various government ministries in the implementing of the decree.

None in the group is so zealous or imaginative in coming up with answers as Adolf Eichmann (Gerd Boeckmann), head of the Gestapo’s Jewish Department, yet he admits in shame that he was sickened by some only partially successful experiments in the use of carbon monoxide. A laughing Heydrich (Dietrich Mattausch) comforts him by saying that his reaction only shows that “Germans are human.” The entire conference is marked by heavy-handed, virulently anti-Semitic humor, deftly underlined by the film’s brisk pacing and subtly ironic tone.

Mattausch’s smug, arrogant, handsome yet cruel-looking Heydrich, the very embodiment of the blond Aryan ideal, easily dominates--and all the while casually flirts with his secretary (Anita Mally). No one is identified, which is sometimes distracting, but perhaps it finally doesn’t much matter in the face of so much pure, seamless evil. Only one man, Wilhelm Stuckart (Peter Fitz), Reich Minister of the Interior, shows a twinge of conscience, a sense of awareness of the magnitude of what was being decided, when he protests in vain for the rights of those of only partially Jewish blood.

One of the key points of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” to which “The Wannsee Conference” becomes a fitting prologue, was that the Nazis never quite spelled out the Final Solution--itself a euphemism--leaving the bureaucrats to work out the hideous means themselves. (Significantly, neither Hitler nor Goering, who ordered the conference at Der Fuehrer’s direction, attended.) “The Wannsee Conference” is thus a portrait of individuals caught up in collective self-deception, a microcosm for their nation. These are people who firmly believed in Hitler’s assertion that the Jews owed the German people a “debt” that could be paid only with their lives. They are deeply immersed in “displacement,” to use the psychological term, determined to lay the blame of every ill in German society on others. Their defense mechanisms reflexively make them concerned with world opinion, without ever weighing it.

Ironically, “The Wannsee Conference,” financed primarily by German and Austrian television, was made possible by characteristic Germanic thoroughness. Not only did that secretary keep careful notes of the conference, she even recorded Eichmann’s recounting to her of private discussions with Heydrich and others. These minutes and other related documents preserved at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Archives in Jerusalem, formed the basis of Paul Mommertz’s terse screenplay. “The Wannsee Conference” is a fine example of the art that conceals itself, and represents six years of research on the part of co-producer Manfred Korytowski. Mommertz’s script allows for natural-seeming shifts and pauses, which permits director Heinz Schirk and cinematographer Horst Schier to create and sustain a sense of rhythm, variety and movement through all that talk. The ensemble performances are impeccable. “The Wannsee Conference” is, almost perversely, a very handsome film with luxuriously tasteful interiors providing an appropriately subdued background for grandiose Nazi uniforms. (The actual building today houses a kindergarten.)

The events re-enacted with such unsettling conviction in “The Wannsee Conference” (Times-rated Mature) seem so long ago, yet the last surviving member of the conference, former SS general Gerhard Klopfer, died less than three weeks ago at the age of 81.

‘THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE’

A Rearguard release of a co-production of InfaFilm GmbH (Munich)--Manfred Korytowski/Austrian television (O.R.F.)/Bavarian Broadcasting Corp. Executive producer Norbert Bittmann. Director Heinz Schirk. Screenplay Paul Mommertz. Historical adviser Shlomo Aronson, University of Jerusalem. Camera Horst Schier. Art directors Robert Hofer-Ach, Barbara Siebner. Costumes Diemut Remy. Film editor Ursula Moellinger. With Robert Artzorn, Friedrich Beckhaus, Gerd Boeckmann, Jochen Busse, Hans W. Bussinger, Harald Dietl, Peter Fitz, Reinhard Glemnitz, Dieter Groest, Martin Luettge, Anita Mally, Dietrich Mattausch, Gerd Rigauer, Franz Rudnick, Gunter Spoerrle, Rainer Steffen. In German, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hours, 26 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.