The Faces of Evil and Its Victims

Television dramatizes history mostly in isolation. No context, driftwood in a vast ocean. So viewers have an unusual opportunity this weekend, if a painful one.

Saturday brings HBO’s “Conspiracy,” an uncomfortably real, brilliantly understated reprise of the Jan. 20, 1942, gathering at which arch criminals Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and 13 other important Nazis coldly addressed the problem of “the Jew.” Displayed here strikingly is the “banality of evil” that noted scholar Hannah Arendt saw in Eichmann years later.

This is not the usual rant from brownshirts and leather coats, but chatty ordinariness at least as sinister, its stony forays into the arcane as to what constitutes a Jew playing almost as dark satire. The implications are unmistakable, though.

How chilling these Nazi functionaries are, how frigidly efficient.

And how valuable that viewers the evening after “Conspiracy” can connect the threads by seeing a story showing a bit of human wreckage resulting from this pivotal conference organized by Eichmann at the behest of his boss, Heydrich.

That happens when ABC revisits Anne Frank, history’s most famous Jewish holocaust victim and diarist whose journal about hiding in occupied Amsterdam with her family and several friends has been published globally and retold again and again on stage and screen. This time formidably in the two-part “Anne Frank.”

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The setting for “Conspiracy” is an ornate villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the environment opulent, elegant and refined on a crisp, snowy morning. Silver and crystal are carefully polished and arranged on white linen. Flowers, cigars and place cards are set out. A fire is lit. Arriving guests throw out “Heil Hitlers” like high fives. Then wine, appetizers and a fine buffet lunch are served as butlers and adjutants stand by attentively. Less than 90 minutes later, ending a discussion as numbly procedural as a meeting of production managers at Germany’s I.G. Farben, the chauffeured crowd begins leaving, having secretly codified into policy Hitler’s “final solution” for European Jews.

The Nazi slaughter of Jews along with other non-Aryans was already well underway, of course, but these efforts had to be coordinated, given legal standing and endorsed by the Reich’s entire state apparatus if they were to be applied to all Europe. So summon the SS and civil service boys to Wannsee, feed them canapes, shuffle a few papers, mention “deportation” for the record when you mean elimination, and goodbye Jews.

This script from Loring Mandel, direction from Frank Pierson and performances around the table yield a quiet terror that turns to intrigue during short breaks when the participants gossip and jockey privately for position. Especially strong are Colin Firth as Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of Nazi laws proclaiming a Jewish-free society; David Threlfall as turf-guarding Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger; Stanley Tucci as the obliging Eichmann; and Ian McNeice as that foulmouthed SS sausage Gerhard Klopfer.

Most notable, though, is Kenneth Branagh’s smarmy SS Gen. Heydrich, aiming his eyes menacingly when not being charming and witty, the glib ideal host for a dinner party, and for a hanging.

How stunning the contrast between their victims’ suffering and the bureaucratic callousness expressed by Nazi Party members dismissing them as inventory (“We cannot store these Jews”).

Not until halfway through the meeting do we hear the words “gas chambers,” a bit later “Auschwitz.” Eichmann has done the math, cascading statistics like production quotas. Sixty thousand Jews a day up in smoke? “We can achieve that,” Heydrich says.

“Conspiracy” arrives 17 years after “The Wannsee Conference,” a meticulously authentic German reenactment that also drew heavily from the meeting’s only surviving set of edited notes. With subtitles, it, too, staged wickedness with an almost surreal calm that belied the severe repression, roundups and murders already occurring.

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Barely six months after the Wannsee group gave thumbs up to purging Jews from the continent, Otto and Edith Frank and their daughters, Margot and Anne; the Van Daans and their son, Peter; and dentist Albert Dussel moved secretly to a hidden attic above Otto’s business at 263 Prinsengracht.

It’s here where ABC’s new Anne dreams at night of being a twirling ice skater, where she gets her first period, kisses her first boy (Peter), puts on her first pair of high heels. For two years the eight Jews remain in hiding here, assisted by heroic Miep Gies and a few other trusted Frank employees, living amazingly routine lives when not bickering and irritating one another in this cramped space. Then they are discovered and yanked off by Dutch Nazis.

This is where the Anne Frank story usually wraps, most famously and excessively in 1959 in a Hollywoodish feature film with sirens blaring, music crescendoing and miscast Millie Perkins as 13-year-old Anne reciting her most transcendent diary entry: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” An uplifting thought that has followed Anne across decades.

In the end, after all that befell her and those near her, though, did her trust in humankind endure?

Draw your own inference from this beautifully cast new “Anne Frank,” in which Hannah Taylor Gordon is outstanding as Anne, the radiance and lively face of this bright, gifted, inquisitive, mischievous young girl a contrast to the fate awaiting her. There’s fine work here, also, by Ben Kingsley as Otto, Tatjana Blacher as Edith, Lili Taylor as Miep, Jessica Manley as Margot, Jan Niklas as Dussel (renamed Fritz Pffefer here) and Brenda Blethyn and Joachim Krol as the Van Daans (renamed Van Pels).

Director Robert Dornhelm has “Anne Frank,” too, pour it on mercilessly when driving toward the final credits, as if prime-time audiences have to be prodded by music and effects to be deeply moved by this holocaust and cry about genocide.

Yet the story’s considerable power, as a metaphor for victims of holocausts everywhere, is attained mostly without manipulation. Instead of ending when freedom ends for Anne and the others, Kirk Ellis’ teleplay follows them to the Dutch transit camp from which they are transported by cattle car to Auschwitz, later to be separated and become cadaverous figures with scabby faces and sinkholes for eyes. Only Anne’s father and her diary survived the war.

Filmed in Prague, two-part “Anne Frank” is based not on that diary--whose rights now belong to a Fox film division drafting its own movie remake of it--but on much of Melissa Muller’s 1998 book, “Anne Frank: The Biography.” It joins TV’s bulging archive of Jewish holocaust stories, (with NBC’s Warsaw ghetto uprising miniseries set for November), each a bitter memory, each recalling mass erosion of life under terror.

* “Conspiracy” will be shown Saturday night at 9 on HBO. The network has rated it TV-14-LD (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for coarse language and suggestive dialogue).

* “Anne Frank” will air Sunday and Monday night at 9 on ABC. The network has rated Part 1 TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children, with special advisories for violent content); Part 2 has been rated TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for violent content).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted via e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.