The Wannsee Conference

That item was implementation of the Endlosung, or Final Solution. Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Heinrich Muller were there to tell the bureaucrats that they were taking charge of the Jewish problem in their spheres of authority, while at the same time making it look like they weren't encroaching on their authority but helping them with the problem of getting rid of their Jews.

Of the people in the film, only Eichmann, Heydrich, Muller, Lange, Freisler, and Schongarth are identified. For the benefit of those wanting to match faces to names, I have the following list. At the one head of the table is the stenographer. Going to her left, we have the representatives of the SS:

SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann, Reich Central Security Office, Dept. IV-B4

SS-Oberfuehrer Dr. Schongarth, General Government

SS-Gruppenfuehrer Heinrich Muller, RCSO, Dept. IV

Deputy Reichsprotector SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, RCSO

SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Hoffman, Central Office for Race and Resettlement)

SS-Oberfuehrer Klopfer, Party Chancellery

SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Dr. Lange, Commando Squad Latvia

At the opposite end of the table, we have Ministerialdirektor Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery. Going around his left, we have the bureaucrats:

Staatsekretar Neumann, Office of the Four Year Plan

Staatsekretar Dr. Roland Freisler, Ministry of Justice

Staatsekretar Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, Ministry of Interior

Gauleiter Dr. Meyer, East Ministry

Staatsekretar Dr. Josef Buhler, General Government
Unterstaatsekretar Luther, Foreign Office

Reichsamtleiter Dr. Leibrandt, East Ministry

This will be more apparent when watching the movie, but notice the people I listed first: all SS, on one side of the table, and then the bureaucrats on the other side. What better way for the SS to face and tell them they were taking charge? The first part of the movie has Heydrich declaring his final authority of the Endlosung to the astonished bureaucrats.

All the light humor involves Lange's dog. Of the dark humor: A disappointed Gauleiter Meyer says, "So the Eastern Provinces won't be the site of the Final Solution?" To which Heydrich replies, "Well, not everybody can reap the laurels, gentlemen."
The second part of the meeting involves the mischling (mixed race) question, in which Dr. Stuckart turns out to be more human. He is upset that the half-German/half-Jews are to be included in the Endlosung. There's also a personal side to it. "It's not news that I am called a Jew-lover in the Brown House. But repetition doesn't make it true," he says, referring to an ongoing feud between him and the rabid xenophobe Klopfer. Stuckart says that with every mischling killed, not only is the Jewish blood lost, so is the German blood. Leibrandt ridicules him, saying, "To a pessimist, the glass is half empty. To an optimist, the glass is half full. You are an optimist." Everyone then roars with laughter.

Stuckart correctly points out German's precarious situation: the Russian front, an undefeated England, American to come on the scene, and resistance movements springing up. In fact he's predicting Germany's defeat.

Forget the pitiful Conspiracy movie! Dietrich Mattausch portrays Reinhard Heydrich better than Kenneth Branagh, and Gerd Bockmann's Eichmann stands heads over Stanley Tucci. And Gunter Sporrle's Klopfer makes Ian McNiece's rendition pathetic. Equal praise goes to Peter Fitz as Stuckart and Harald Dietl as Meyer. Guess it shows how American remakes are inferior to the foreign original.


A shameful moment of history made much too real for comfort   December 28, 2002
Linda Linguvic (New York City)
51 out of 54 found this review helpful

This 1984 German film gave me the chills. It's a dramatization of a scene that actually occurred on January 20, 1942, when the key representatives of the SS, the Nazi Party and various ministries met in the German suburb of Wannsee to give their approval of "the final solution". It was just one month after Pearl Harbor and America had entered the war, and the Third Reich was no longer quite as confident as they once were as Russia and England were vigorously resisting. The conference took only 85 minutes, which is the precise time of the film. I watched it all in horror and fascination, a fly on the wall and witness to what they was spoken of as an "organizational task unparalleled in history."

There were fourteen men there and one stenographer, an attractive woman who the leader flirted with throughout. Her notes of that day were later discovered in Nazi archives and much of the dialog was recreated verbatim. It all seemed like a business meeting, complete with one-upmanship and power struggles between the men. They ate fine food and drank cognac, made crude jokes and clashed with one another on minor issues. But they were all united in wanting the Jews, which by this time included Jews in all their conquered territories, exterminated.

Adolph Eichman is portrayed as a junior officer in charge of the complicated logistics of the operation. And the meeting is being held to engage the participants in a shared responsibility for it all, the result being pre-determined by higher officials, which nobody was about to question. The only exception is a middle-aged minor official from an interior ministry with a bad case of the flu, who brings up the issue of what to do with half-Jews and quibbles about their degree of racial purity.

Although the film shows only uniformed officers around a dinner table, I couldn't help my mind's eye from remembering other horrific newscast images. The cast spoke German and the subtitles were hard to read, as they didn't show up well against the color background. But it was more than the actual words that were important. It was the gestures, the silences, the facial expressions - and of course the very sound of the German language - that made it all real, much too real. There was a glimpse of the discipline and formality of the moment, as well as the crudeness of the men who were all intent on seizing Jewish property and who made jokes about how the Jews who had escaped to France had nothing more of value than cardboard suitcases.

This was a fine film, recapturing a horrible moment in history. It's so well done that it seems real, and that makes it extremely uncomfortable to watch. As a matter of fact, I was so disturbed that I actually thought of turning it off and not watching it all the way though. But I was hooked on the excellent acting, fine screenplay and great camerawork that focused on one man's face after another. I therefore give it an extremely high recommendation although it is not for the faint of heart.


Somewhere Between a Documentary and a Docudrama Lies....?   August 19, 2002
Dr Victor S Alpher (Austin, Texas, U.S.A.)
23 out of 25 found this review helpful

If you're reading this review, you've possibly also seen and reviewed a vastly differt version of the same event, "Conspiracy" (HBO, with Kenneth Branagh and the ever threatening Stanley Tucci, with light brown hair!). My purpose is not to compare or contrast them--they are both good in their own right for a variety of reasons.

This version is essential to any student of the War, the Holocaust, German history, BECAUSE it was made in Germany just before the advent of Glasnost. My own study of German history suggests that the "Final Solution" (Endloesung) of the "Jewish Question" was really a sad, confusing, and irrational approach toward dealing with partisan warfare, counter-espionage, and the search for a "higher" reason for the war than finding more German "living space" (Lebensraum). These men were looking for some "accomplishment" to look to, even if the war were lost (it was January 20, 1942--AND there were two MORE "Final Solution" conferences to follow (see Richard Overy, "Interrogations"). Ridding Europe of Jewish, and therefore Bolshevik/Communist influences, seemed like a reasonable parallel "war."

The reason these movies differ, of course, is because there is no verbatim transcript. ONE version of the minutes survives, and can be read in its entirety in German or English with a simple web search. Upon this, a dramatic version emerges and is dependent up the interpretation of actual historical figures, some well known (Stuckart), some little known until recently (Heinrich Mueller, SS-Gruppenfuehrer for internal Reich Police matters [see any of Gregory Douglas' works on him]).

What especially succeeds here is that this production, in its context, emerged at a time of undoubted fears that the Soviets would eventually relase information about the Reich and its activities hertofore unknown outside the NKVD, MVD and ultimately KGB. Sadly, many of the early Bolsheviks were also Jews (by Halakah, not by German racial laws, which were quite convoluted), and the two-century of assimilation of Jews into German society had NOT taken place in Russia and the USSR (see Rigg's new "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers" to understand the complex identity issues involved). Marxists and Communists happened to have Jewish ancestry (not all, of course), but enough to parallel the current question about our profiling or not profiling persons of obvious Middle Eastern descent or origin as possible security risks. To paraphrase the old saw, those who do not study and understand history are condemned to repeat it. The German version is more chilling, less burdened with poor costuming and fake snow. Also, the novelty of the German actors to Americans helps keep the focus on the issues, the humanity and lack thereof, and how any political system goes sour when politics is pursued "by other means." Be prepared to wonder where we may be headed, less than 60 years after the end of WWII (and with what appears to be the demise of assimilation here). Further, in light of VERY current events--can any such depiction (including the film "Hart's War") succeed while purged of the presence of the tobacco economy and bartering?


Horreur Veritee, or, My Dinner With Adolf   February 16, 2001
The Sanity Inspector (USA)
21 out of 21 found this review helpful

A gauleiter flirts with the stenographer. Reinhard Heydrich trips over Adolf Eichmann's briefcase. A Nazi chieftain has to keep going outside to shut up his barking dog. Little touches like those add to the creepiness of this reconstruction of the Final Solution conference. Of course, elimination of the Jews had been in full swing for some time before this conference--it seems mainly to have been held to get everyone to accept Heydrich's leadership of the project. But this conference is just about the only "paper trail" the Nazis left in the actual execution of their plans for the Holocaust.

The recreation of the conference is amazing. It isn't especially realistic--it's obvious that everyone is acting, because everyone is so crisp and "on". But the fine ensemble acting, taken for itself, is impressive. The pacing never drags, though you do have to pay attention. Everything is unnervingly ordinary--the applause for a toast to the soldiers on the Eastern Front, guffaws at someone's joke, Eichmann fussing over his papers of statistics. Even the sudden sound of a plucked piano string at the end is startling, as the viewer realizes the theretofore absence of a music track. A grim masterpiece of historical recovery.


The business meeting that spawned "the Final Solution"   December 29, 2000
Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota)
19 out of 22 found this review helpful

In recreating the horrors of the Holocaust the emphasis has almost always been on concentration camps and the death chambers, although "Holocaust," "War and Remembrance" and "Schindler's List," although all of those efforts dealt in some part with the bureaucracy behind the extermination process. "The Wannsee Conference" is all the more horrifying because it never goes anywhere near the camps, although the barking dogs outside the meeting function as symbols. This script was developed from the original minutes of the meeting on January 20, 1942 in Berlin where "The Final Solution" was worked out. The documentary-style reenactment is chilling because it reduces the Nazis to the level of bureaucrats, effortlessly rationalizing the extermination of millions of human beings. I think the idea of thinking of these monsters as bureaucrats rather than Nazis is informative, because the dehumanizing of people surely continues unabated today, although obviously not on this level. Still, the body count continues to climb. If you show "The Wannsee Conference" to students they might recognize the Nazis as being more like businessmen then skinheads. This would be an extremely useful film for classes focusing on 20th Century history.