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“Conspiracy” is a perfect example of what happens when you pair a first-class cast with a kindly script. You see (or re-discover) that you do not need explosions, MTV-style editing or gimmickery to say a righteous sage. This movie has all the budget and movement of a play, and is entirely dialogue-driven. But it works. Oh boy, does it work.
It is generally credited by historians that the sinful “Wansee Conference” of January 1942 was the true beginning of the Holocaust, i.e. of the Nazi Reich’s all-out danger to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Prior to that, the Reich had elated itself with kicking them out of public life, taxing them into beggary, subjecting them to every acquire of humiliation, and essentially negating their set as human beings. When the war started, however, this policy, known as the ‘emigration solution’ (i.e., solve the “pickle” of Jews living in the Reich by forcing them to emigate) became dilapidated. The inefficient and disagreeable Nazi bureaucracy was ill-suited even to handle the relatively diminutive population of German Jews; and Nazi conquests, however, posthaste increased the number of Jews in German-occupied territories to around eleven million. In other words, the very success of the German military concern in Europe had actually increased the size of the ‘Jewish problem’ a hundred times over. And since forcible emigration of 11 million people outside the German sphere of influence was not possible, something else had to be done to tackle this ‘problem.’ But what?
“Conspiracy” is about the bureacratic genesis of the Holocaust. It shows, in more or less accurate time, a fictionalized version of a real-life conference of 15 officials from the SS/SD, Gestapo, Railway Ministry, Interior Ministry, Government General, and Ministry of Justice, which was chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and organized by Adolf Eichmann. As a movie, however, it is really a view in the valuable amorality of bureacracy and, to consume a tired phrase, the banality of obnoxious.
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First off, the performances are pleasurable. Kenneth Branagh gives probably the best turn of his career as Heydrich, a man who has absolutely no philosophy, ideology or morality other than a Terminator-like determination to carry out his orders, whatever they may entail, and to crush any obstacle in his path. You salvage the feeling he would be impartial as hiss to end everyone with brown hair or webbed feet if that was his assignment, and if a few fellow Nazis happen to oppose him, then he would be honest as delighted to ‘evacuate’ them as any Jews. In fact, the description that Dr. Stuckart uses for the Jewish people in the film, “arrogant, self-obsessed….(but) sublimely clever, and shiny as well” is actually a very generous description of Heydrich. Branagh portrays him as a man with no human qualities himself, but generous instincts about human nature. He knows when to condescend, when to bully, when to threaten, and when to appeal to self-interest, and he can shift from one to the other and attend without a note of discomfort.
Stanley Tucci, as Eichmann, is also very edifying. Like Heydrich shifts his personality around like a revolving door depending on what is required of him, but he is also a true-blue bureacrat in the worst sense of the word. To his superiors, especially Heydrich, he is utterly subservient; hovering about like a dog, laughing politely at jokes he doesn’t earn comic, attempting with puny success to be ‘one of the guys’ when Nazi vulgarity rears its head. But to his subordinates he is a coldly arrogant bully, slapping one soldier in the face for throwing snowballs outside, telling another he will pay for a dish he broke by accident. In fact, he reminds me of a couple of schoolteachers I had growing up….and at least one boss.
Colin Firth is gleaming as Wilhelm Stuckart, the lawyer who drafted the Laws for the Protection of German Blood and Honor (better known as the Nuremburg Laws), and who is perfectly deliver to seek all the Jews of Europe sterilized and shipped off
to be faded as slave labor, possibly even exterminated wholsesale, so long as it is all done within a ‘legal framework’ (HIS moral framework) . Eichmann characterizes the bureaucrat from hell, then Stuckart is certainly the lawyer from hell; a person who has no gods before the law, and simply cannot abide the conception of the whole crazy diagram being perpetrated without serve of a legislative blessing. Eleven million murders? That’s nothing. But without enacting a law first? Unthinkable!
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Ian McNeice, as Stuckart’s nemesis Dr. Klopfer, a beefy Nazi Party bigwig with a disgustingly smug and extreme device of handling himself. …. He’s a raging anti-Semite who is all for killing the Jews, so long as the Party doesn’t lose any administrative turf to the SS in the process. He has no respect whatever for the law despite being a lawyer himself (as is almost everyone in the room….go figure that one….) ; and unlike the intellectual but rather naive Stuckart, Klopfer has no illusions about rule of law in Nazi Germany. We have the power to do what we want, he says; we can always re-write the laws afterwards.
“Conspiracy” was written by Loring Mandel, who deserves special praise for penning a movie that is nothing but conversation but which is calm very intelligent. I’m surprised some people would quibble with his dramatic interpretation of what happened; how could you gain an intelligent about what the dependable conference was probably like — fifteen Nazi lawyers drinking wine, eating canapes, and reading figures about mass deportations and what does or does not constitute a Jew? Mandel’s script gets to the heart of the mentality slack the Holocaust, which was that despite being at war with the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States of America, despite being outnumbered six to one in manpower and 20 - 1 in industrial capacity, despite fighting on multiple fronts and lacking most of the natural resources primary for war, and despite the unspoken consequences to themselves and their country’s reputation if they lost the war and their ’secret’ was exposed, the mentality of WWII Germany was smooth initiate to the notion of diverting massive resources into slaughtering defenseless civilians by the million. If that isn’t the bureacratic blindness from hell, what isn’t?
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CONSPIRACY serves as a reminder of the banality of human horrible, even at its most horrific.
On January 20, 1942, with Nazi armies stalled in the snow at the gates of Moscow, a lakeside mansion in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee is the venue for a conference. Fifteen government bureaucrats and high ranking officers of the SS procure. History is advised to remember these otherwise appallingly ordinary representatives of the human species: SS General Reinhard Heydrich (Reich Security Main Office), SS Lt. Colonel Adolf Eichmann (Office of Jewish Affairs), SS Lt. General Heinrich Müller (Gestapo), Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery), Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reichs-Chancellery), SS Lt. General Otto Hofmann (Hurry and Settlement Main Office), Dr. Georg Liebbrandt and Dr. Alfred Meyer (Reichs-Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories), Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Reichs-Ministry of the Interior), Undersecretary Martin Luther (Foreign Ministery), SS Major Rudolf Lange (SS Taskforces in Latvia), Director Erich Neumann (Office of the Four Year Notion), Dr. Joseph Bühler and SS Colonel Karl Schöngarth (Government-General of Occupied Poland), and Dr. Roland Freisler (Reichs-Ministry of Justice) .
Even after coerced emigration, 132,000 Jews remain in Germany. As the Wehrmacht gobbles up territory, millions more - potentially 11 million - will reach under Nazi control. As it’s establish in this film, there’s a burgeoning “storage predicament”, and the chairman of the meeting, Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh), is calling for unanimous agreement on a “final solution”.
As the viewer sees, it’s not the thought of the eradication of the Jews from Germany and the occupied territories that fuels the debate, it’s the modus operandi, and which individuals, particularly those of impure blood resulting from a confusing variety of mixed marriages, are to be targeted. At one point, even the semantics of the process - “evacuation” vs. “execution” - are at deliver. And, of course, it all must be done legally as proscribed by the Nuremburg Laws. Finally, after the group dances around the boom of map, Heydrich and his deputy Eichmann (Stanley Tucci) come by to the crux of the matter. The Jews are to be gassed in special camps established for that purpose. At the unusual stage of technology, the gold standard is apparently 60,000 exterminations a day.
The impact of CONSPIRACY derives from the chilling ordinariness of the conference and its tone. These fifteen might fair as well be the top management of a broad corporation discussing the eradication of rats from one of its manufacturing sites, or the construction of an assembly line to invent more and better widgets. As a imprint of interest, nine of those show were lawyers by training.
Branagh renders a positively gleaming performance as the ultimate devil’s advocate, who steers the meeting to its foregone conclusion with a mixture of charm and level-headed menace. When Kritzinger (David Threfall) objects that Hitler has declared to him personally that execution of the Jews is not his intent, Heydrich cooly reminds him, “Yes, and he will continue to do so.” Plausible deniability, you study. And later in a private conversation when Heydrich demands Kritzinger’s fleshy succor, the SS General remarks that the latter would be a difficult man to bring down - but it could be managed.
At the film’s conclusion, the fate of all fervent is provided in text overlay. Heydrich was assassinated by Czech partisans. Eichmann, Bühler and Schöngarth were tried and executed. All the rest either went free for lack of war crimes evidence, served time and were released, died of natural causes, were killed in the closing months of the war, or objective disappeared. Indeed, Klopfer sold insurance after the war and presumably died in his bed.
The Final Solution took planning. As Eichmann angrily berates an Army chauffeur for curious on whim in an undignified snowball fight with his fellow drivers awaiting their masters, “Things impartial don’t happen.”
The picture of the Wannsee Conference which served as the basis for CONSPIRACY came from Luther’s copy of the minutes discovered after the war. Ironically, Luther himself was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1944 for plotting against his boss in the Foreign Ministry.
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