This chilling new film offers a provocative reminder of evil, taking viewers inside the room in Berlin where high-ranking members of the Nazi regime planned the systematic murder of 11 million Jews.
Like an opening scene of Succession, black cars with drivers deliver powerful people to a meeting. Something significant is about to take place. It’s not the dysfunctional Roys but high-ranking German military arriving at a stately villa on a lake at Wannsee, south-west of Berlin.
It is winter and they are there for talks. Someone is late, held up in Prague by a delayed flight, the others mingle and chat, asking after each other’s wives and families and jockeying for position within an invisible hierarchy.
It is 1942 and the agenda is simple: the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. The Führer himself isn’t in attendance but his spirit is in the room. Adolf Eichmann (Johannes Allmayer) is present, and the chair is Reinhard Heydrich (Philipp Hochmair), chief of the Reich Security Main Office. He is keen to see the meeting go smoothly and wants to push through the agenda without too many interruptions. While the room is being set up, Heydrich shifts the name card of a bureaucrat he dislikes further down the table. A bit later, it’s been moved back.
The proceedings are tense and tightly argued but it’s all about details. Discussions centre on the how, never the what or the why. No one objects in principle to the undertaking, which is the total elimination of all European Jews. How many is that, someone asks? Eleven million. The answer gives pause, not because of its blinding moral horror but because it shows how much work the people sitting around the table will have to do.
Read the complete article by Penelope Debelle on INDaily.