The notorious 1942 conference at which senior Nazi Party officials met to decide on the fate of the 11 million Jewish citizens living in their German and captured territories has been depicted on screen a handful of times before, notably Heinz Shirk’s 1984 drama The Wannsee Conference.
While the subject matter is distasteful, Matti Geschonneck’s precise new film, made to mark the event’s 80th anniversary, is a fascinating watch.
Screenwriters Magnus Vattrodt and Paul Mommertz have the conference’s official documentation on which to base their screenplay.
They go for as thorough an historically accurate representation of the day as possible, while also imagining some of the social interplays and jockeying for position and notice amongst those around the table.
Convening at midday on January 20, 1942, in a charming villa at Grossen Wanssee outside of Berlin, senior figures from the Reich main Security Office, SiPo, the Gestapo, and the SS, along with regional senior public servants, met to discuss what we would all come to know as the Final Solution.
Reinhard Heydrich (Philipp Hochmair) has convened the conference, assisted by Ingeburg Werlemann (Lilli Fichtner) who is keeping the conference notes.
Figures around the table include Adolf Eichmann (Johannes Allmayer) and a dozen other names history remembers for their participation in the administration of genocide, including Gestapo head Heinrich Muller (Jakob Deihl), and Reich State Secretary Josef Buhler (Sascha Nathan) – the man who later sentences Sophie Scholl to death.
Read the article by Cris Kennedy in The Canberra Times.