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 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.
The closest we get to a hint of a conscience comes towards the end, when Heydrich says somewhat ruefully that no one wants to kill these people, of course, especially the women and children. He likens it to a doctor sawing the gangrenous leg from a patient; it’s unpleasant, but it must be done for the health of the whole.
This beautifully made and impeccably rendered film, based on the minutes taken by Eichmann which were salvaged after the war from one of those present, is a profoundly moving study of the banality of evil.
They talk about what has been done so far and which European governments are co-operating (a long list). We learn that transiting Jews are kept docile through a farce of registration and bureaucracy whose sole intent is to give them a shred of hope. A mere handful of guards could shepherd thousands of doomed Jews without fear of revolt.
At this stage, most were being shot but the scale was getting too much – and it was messy. At one point the case was made for gas because it saved the feelings of the SS executioners.
Arguments were made about certain categories of Jews, like the German Jews who had fought for the Motherland in the Great War. And what about the half or quarter-blood Jews – were they part of the solution? One brainstorming suggestion: Forced sterilisation.
The first permanent structures were being planned and Auschwitz is named in passing. Ninety minutes later, the agenda has been worked through. The mood relaxes, some have to leave, others stick around for expensive cognac.
This highly intelligent film tugs at no heartstrings and there is no music. It passes no judgment but offers a provocative reminder of evil, 80 years on.
It is harrowing because of its subject, but the film itself is a political dance among bureaucrats who are sometimes petty and always genteel. These are busy, important people, mostly in their 30s and 40s, on whom the future of Germany depends. They talk about social hygiene and deportations, not genocide and gas chambers.
At the close, Heydrich says everyone should read what was decided so none could say later they didn’t know what it was.
On that day, they were proud to play their part.
The Conference is now showing in select cinemas.
This review first appeared in InDaily. Read the original here.
