Conspiracy

Conspiracy is based on a real meeting of high and mid level Nazi officials that look place in 1942, in a mansion at Wannsee, outside Berlin. The meeting was organized by SS General Reinhard Heydrich, who, historically, might be the scariest man ever born. Heydrich ran the SS police state that spanned all of Europe, which murdered thousands of "undesirables" and kept a stranglehold on the Axis world. Heydrich and other SS officials had somewhat covertly been constructing the infrastructure for the "Final Solution" to the Jewish question. Heydrich has also authorized the formation of the nefarious Einsetzgruppens, that roamed the Eastern lands of the Reich, carrying out mass slaughters of Jews and communists. General Heydrich called this meeting in order to inform the organs of the Reich that his plan was going to go forward, with the tacit support of the Fuhrer. His plan would set up a system of death camps, in which Jews would be gassed to death. Millions would die. At Heydrich's side was his aide, the ruthlessly effective Colonel Eichmann. Eichmann was one of the main architects of the final solution, taking a hands on approach on building the Holocaust infrastructure.

This movie does a masterful job of portraying this discussion as it happened. People talk of mass murder like it's an afterthought. The Jews are subhuman, their deaths mean nothing. Interestingly, there was a lot of insider politics going on at the meaning, as the Nazi party heads sought to ensure that their own influence and power would not be co-opted by Heydrich's growing SS apparatus. The discussions are horrifyingly fascinating, as the eventual outcome becomes clear. They all hesitate to say the "kill" word, but there is a general sense of wink wink. It's probably the best representation of Nazi politics I have seen on screen. Some might find a discussion driven movie a little boring, but it had my attention all the way through. The cast of actors did a very good job portraying their real life counterparts. I thought Stanley Tucci did the best job, as the strangely meek but mechanically evil Adolf Eichmann. Kenneth Branagh is excellent as Heydrich, who was amazingly charming while he plans the death of 6 million people. The overall theme of this movie is that educated, civilized men, can often perpetrate the worst evil imaginable. As a somber side note, the end of the movie points out how many of the men who sat at that table managed to escape the responsibility for their crimes, a tragic condemnation of post-war policy.

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Monsters Who Look Just Like Us   August 3, 2002
Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

When people ask why did so many millions of Jews die in the Holocaust, the next question is how. A question of this sort lends the questioner and his audience a sense of the quantitative. Numbers, statistics, and data become matters of import. CONSPIRACY attempts to illustrate the mechanism by which six million human beings were killed.
By the end of 1941, the war was starting to go bad for Germany. Hitler's invasion of Russia had bogged down and for the first time since 1939, there were doubters in his High Command that his thousand year Reich would last the decade. Much of the problem of transport priority overlapped the concommitant problem of what to do with the Jews. Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the SS after Reichsfuhrer Himmler, called the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942 to finalize the elimination of Europe's Jews. One of the members of this conference, Martin Luther, kept a transcipt that survived the war (Ironically Luther himself was tossed into one of these camps where he died in 1944) and it is this transcript that provided the dialogue for this movie. What is astonishing is the tone taken by all fifteen attendees. In their sense of blase, this meeting could have been held to increase market penetration of their company product. Heydrich made it clear that their product was an ideology that the Fuhrer Adolph Hitler had commanded to be transformed into reality. All fifteen were in agreement that there was a Jewish 'problem,' but they disagreed as to what should be done to solve it. Heydrich insisted that euphemisms like 'evacuation' should be used instead of 'killing.' At the beginning of the conference, the Nazi party's legal advisor, Dr. Stukart, insisted that whatever the solution might be, its implementation had to conform to pre-existing German law. Others were concerned with the day to day operational details of classifying half-Jews and quarter-Jews. Still others really thought Heydrich meant 'evacuation' in its literal sense, moving Jews from one ghetto to another. By the meeting's end, Heydrich clarified his point by detailing the proposed construction of huge gas chambers and crematoria that could evacuate 60,000 Jews every day. This impossibly big number got both the attention and approval of the others, and as the meeting broke up, each returned to his power base to implement and oversee the coming genocide.
Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich is the chilling image of a man who uses humor, intelligence, and intimidation to get his way. Stanley Tucci as Eichmann is the very personification of the corporate flunky whose true evil nature comes out not so much in the conference where he plans death wholesale by the millions but in his personal malice toward a waiter who drops a tray and a driver who has unauthorized fun throwing snowballs. Colin Firth as Dr. Stukart is seen as a man who opposes the slaughter not because of his love of Jews but because such killing breaks his laws that he himself helped to draft. What emerges from CONSPIRACY is a portrait of very ordinary men in extraordinarilly evil times conducting a business that we now call genocide. The 'how' then of the killing can now be seen as the flip side of the 'why.'


Neither fact nor fiction   August 7, 2002
K DEREK E GRAY (NASHUA, NH United States)
11 out of 30 found this review helpful

Let's begin with the positives: the acting is superb, and the costumes and sets are surprisingly accurate (note the bronze swastika-emblazoned napkin holders being polished in the opening scene.) Now the negatives: as a film, it drags. It is the story of a meeting of bureaucrats; how could it not? As history, it is largely speculative. The minutes of this infamous conference, from the "one surviving copy", are barely 8 1/2 typed pages, including the list of attendees. Three of those who attended spoke on the conference after the war, when their recollections were somewhat hazy & their commentary geared towards pleasing their Allied captors. My point is there is not enough documentation available to build a movie on the subject of Wannsee. The director et al attempted to make both an entertainment and a documentary, and failed at both.


The Best Movie to Take Place in One Room Ever?   April 15, 2006
Bart King (Portland, Oregon)
11 out of 14 found this review helpful

I will admit to being a pain to watch DVDs with; I am anxious to pause the film and comment on it while it's in progress.

One would think that I would find ample reasons to "pause" a movie about a Nazi board meeting which mostly takes place in a single room. Instead, I watched the film in its entirety, jaw agape at the brilliant acting and then enjoyed a discussion with my father (a WWII historian) about it.

Recommended for the thoughtful and curious.


Incredible film!   March 20, 2002
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

I saw this when it aired on HBO, after hearing the rave reviews some friends gave it. The film is exceptionally well-made, with precise attention to every little detail. You almost feel like you're there in 1942.

The performances all around are simply superb, most especially from Kenneth Branaugh, who once again establishes a strong screen presence. He's just a joy to watch.

What's great about this film is the creepy sense it gives you watching it. This is a meeting that actually took place in 1942.. while there are no doubt a few of the usual Hollywood refinements, this is all-around a true story. Considering the subject matter.. It's a little spooky to see these fifteen men sitting around a table discussing a chain of events that would scar history forever, in such a lackadaisical way, as though they were discussing the weather over a cup of tea.

Because of it's true-to-life subject matter, this could almost be viewed as an educational film, and I intend to show this to my children as part of their education concerning the German atrocities committed during WWII. "Never Again", as the plague before the walls of Auschwitz states.

But all around, this is a must-see. Rent it if you can, buy it for your collection, or catch it the next time HBO airs it. You'll definitely want to see this one. You'll remember it.