Worth: $16.50
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Cast:
Philipp Hochmair, Johannes Allmayer, Maximilian Bruckner
Intro:
...a pretty compelling drama overall.
The conference in question here is the Wannsee one, a breakfast meeting held in a mansion by a lake in Berlin in 1942. Those attending were members of the SS and The Nazi Party and of the ministerial bureaucracy, and the key item on the agenda was the planned extermination of all the Jews in Europe via the so-called Final Solution.
The bland generality and vagueness of the title here is rather apt, because one of the most chilling aspects of the conference was the way in which the participants spoke – for the most part at least – in chilling euphemisms. (“Special treatment” is, for example, a favoured way of referring to murder.) The conversation does get more explicit as it progresses, with only the slightest – understandably nervous – suggestion of any moral reservations by anyone.
There have been a couple of previous films on exactly this subject, the more recent one being a very good 2001 TV movie (Conspiracy) in which Kenneth Branagh portrayed the presiding chairman Reinhard Heydrich, the principal architect of The Holocaust. This version – released to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the horrible event – is even better and more powerful, not least by virtue of actually being German.
Philipp Hochmair plays Heydrich with an ingratiating and incongruous smile which you won’t soon forget. Equally indelible are the shots of black Nazi staff cars slowly pulling into the driveway, and the robotic impersonality of Adolf Eichmann (Johannes Allmayer). Speaking of Eichmann, the script – although fictionalised – is based on the minutes which he wrote about the meeting.
The Conference would actually be quite tedious were it not for the extreme reality being alluded to, because objectively it’s little more than 105 minutes of men talking while they sit around a table. And indeed, that limitation does create the occasional longueur, but they’re fleeting and this is a pretty compelling drama overall.
