‘Nothing but the Truth’ Gives Mengele His Day in Court

Does one of the most notorious war criminals of the Nazi era deserve his day in court and the right to a committed defense attorney? That question is asked and answered with a resounding, and disturbing, affirmative by the makers of “Nothing but the Truth,” a courtroom thriller depicting the imagined prosecution of Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who sent as many as 400,000 people to their deaths and performed brutal experiments on the living.

The first German-made film about one of the leading perpetrators of the Holocaust, “Nothing but the Truth” has opened to mostly savage reviews for its failure to explore how Mengele devolved from the accomplished son of an affluent family into an unfeeling human aberration.

Despite masterful acting by Gotz George in the role of the doctor and long-overdue examination of the Nazi era by filmmakers in the country of its origin, the production has been panned for providing a stage for Mengele to defend himself for indefensible behavior.

“A Monster Is Rendered Harmless,” the mass-circulation Bild newspaper headlined its account of the film in which an unremorseful Mengele explains his actions as carrying out orders and excuses many of his murders as mercy killing because the victims of his lethal injections were otherwise destined for the gas chambers.

“You know what Auschwitz was like,” an ice-cold Mengele tells his attorney. “I was the only way out of there. I wanted to spare the children and others from needless suffering.”

Jewish leaders have dismissed the film as pointless and offensive for bringing back to life one of the most despicable Nazi figures but shedding no light on what compelled Adolf Hitler’s henchmen to commit such atrocities.

“This film ultimately goes nowhere,” Michael Friedman, a leading member of the Frankfurt-based Central Council of Jews in Germany, said in a radio interview. He bridled at the film’s hint that Mengele’s actions were at times applications of euthanasia.

(First-week ticket sales for the film placed it only ninth in the German box office, which is calculated by number of tickets sold Thursdays through Sundays, rather than by sales revenues. About 55,000 German moviegoers saw “Nothing but the Truth” in its first four days, compared with 10 times that figure for a new German action film and 337,830 who took in George Lucas’ latest “Star Wars” installment.)

In the film, the infamous “Angel of Death,” in his 80s, decides to return to his homeland to set the historical record straight. (In actuality, Mengele drowned in 1979 while a fugitive in South America.)

Through shadowy Nazi figures still lurking in Germany, Mengele is introduced to a young lawyer who has been working on a book about the Auschwitz doctor for years. The lawyer, Peter Rohm, is drugged and spirited to the ailing Mengele’s home in exile in Argentina and eventually compelled--by his own need to understand the “why?” behind Mengele’s actions--to defend the fugitive upon his return to Berlin.

Mengele’s indifference to the suffering and horror inflicted by his own hands is portrayed with blood-curdling effectiveness by George, who put up 1 million marks ($550,000) of his own money to help bankroll the film that had been refused funding by Germany’s traditional sources--television revenues and a national cultural fund.

Shortly after his return from South America to face his accusers, Mengele aloofly discusses his pending trial with Rohm, played by Kai Wiesinger, while being fitted for a suit in his jail cell. During courtroom testimony by an amputee that Mengele severed her legs without using anesthetic, the defendant interrupts to tell the court that he had no anesthetics available at Auschwitz.

Film Criticized for Message It Delivers

Critics have largely come down against the film’s failure to deliver a message more compelling than a reminder that culpability for the crimes of the Nazis ranges broadly across the German population--a point made by the defense lawyer’s discovery that his own mother had a hand in mercy killings at a Berlin home for the disabled during the war.

“Somehow this is supposed to elevate Mengele to the general population, the message being that the Nazi evil was embedded not just in the likes of Mengele but in all of us,” says Hans-Joachim Neumann, who reviewed the film for the popular weekly entertainment magazine Zitty.

The film credibly portrays the public mayhem that likely would ensue after the return of a Nazi henchman of Mengele’s notoriety, with skinheads marching in triumphant celebration of the Third Reich’s legacy and scuffling with mainstream Germans outraged by the platform provided a war criminal.

In the end, no verdict is delivered, and none is necessary because both defense and prosecution urge the judge to impose life imprisonment, the strongest sentence allowed in Germany, which, like most of Europe, has no death penalty.

The film has received nowhere near the attention or accolades of “Schindler’s List” or “Life Is Beautiful,” but it’s been well received by audiences tired of the instructive tone of previous endeavors to bring World War II history to the screen. Despite the media criticism, the film’s tense courtroom scenes and dramatic score give it the feel of an old-fashioned Hollywood thriller.

“I found the film quite good, although shocking in parts, but it held my interest,” said Klaus Faehnrich, a 46-year-old businessman from east Berlin. “The contradictions between law and justice are interesting and relate not only to the crimes of the Nazis.”

Director Roland Suso Richter and producer Werner Koenig, whose Helkon International has lately been co-producing films with U.S. studios, told journalists on the eve of their film’s premiere last month that interest has been expressed in Hollywood for U.S. distribution. No deal for the lucrative American audience, however, has yet been concluded, the filmmakers said.