Wordiezett So much average

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

macduff50 I was able to see this film at a film festival, where the director spoke afterward about how the film was created. As I had suspected while watching the film, the source for the script was not just the minutes of the meeting, which mention very little of the detailed discussions which occurred that day, but as well what the director called the "Eichmann protocol," that is, transcripts of the interviews conducted by the prosecutors at Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. Grupenfeurher is correct when he says that the minutes of the conference never mention extermination. But Eichmann's later, extensive, comments prove that that is precisely what was being discussed. For a detailed look at the conference, the best place to begin is Mark Roseman's book, "The Villa, the Lake, and the Meeting: Wansee and the Final Solution." But there are also comments noted in Goebels' diary, and interdepartmenal memos from those who were invited to the conference itself, and much other evidence besides. A good discussion of the process leading to the genocide can be found in Christopher Browning's "Origins of the Final Solution," and a more abbreviated discussion in volume two of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, "Nemesis."

Terrell-4 This meeting in January, 1942, of 14 Nazi officers and bureaucrats was chaired by Himmler's golden Aryan and arrogant SS protégé, Reinhard Heydrich. The conference took place in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. In 84 minutes, the mechanics and coordination of the final solution, the murder of millions of Jews, men women and children, was agreed upon. The film is based on records and minutes kept of the conference, spoken by unnervingly convincing actors in carefully reconstructed surroundings and wearing meticulously authentic uniforms. The film runs 84 minutes, the exact time of the conference. It captures the bantering and pleasantries and casual racist jokes, and the bureaucratic trade-offs. The buffet lunch is excellent and the cigars and brandy are prime. The bullies, the bean counters, the bureaucratic time servers, the power brokers, the slightly worried, the professional toadies, the back-slappers and the paper shufflers are there, representing their key departments of the Nazi party, the SS and the government. The orders, Heydrich tells them, have been given. Now the organizers and expediters must agree and take appropriate action...how do we mobilize sufficient transport...what are minimum feeding requirements...what methods should be employed that will yield the most efficiencies? It is clear that Heydrich is a leader to be reckoned with, and that he is expecting results. It is equally clear that he will get his results. For those at this conference, the final solution is a problem of logistics and disposal, to be dealt with crisply and solved with German thoroughness. And if a Nazi faints during a mass execution of Jews? "It shows we Germans are human," says Heydrich with a pleasant smile. This German television reenactment of the Wannsee Conference, directed by Heinz Schirk with a disturbing performance of charm and calculation by Dietrich Mattausch as Heydrich, is horrifying. Don't mistake this for the film, Conspiracy, which covers the same meeting but with a sheen of "this is meaningful drama" about it, especially with Kenneth Branagh's Heydrich. The Wannsee Conference is central to the plot of that fascinating thriller, Fatherland, by Robert Harris. Here, Germany won the war. It's 1964 and President Joseph P. Kennedy will visit Berlin to celebrate Adolph Hitler's 75th birthday. An honest German cop and an American news reporter are going to make a terrible discovery. The book is first-rate. The television adaptation of Fatherland is less so, but it has its moments.

Robert J. Maxwell I haven't seen this is twenty years or so, and I can't remember it in detail, but I'm compelled to comment on it anyway because I found it to be so gripping -- amazing, really. And a German production at that.The reason that this film has haunted me for so long, is the almost complete disjunction between the substance of the Wannsee Conference and the gemütlich ethos of the meeting itself. Here they are, a dozen or so guys, most of them in smart uniforms, sporting eight PhDs among them, talking about how to get rid of Europe's Jews without being too obvious or too messy or too inefficient about the "getting rid of" business.At the same time, this meeting of minds takes place in an atmosphere of politesse and camaraderie. Everyone is polite and chuckles over witticisms. They take breaks to help themselves at the buffet table groaning with strudel and canapés and loaves of bread and hams. They drink cognac. Heydrich stumbles over a table leg and makes a joke about it. Heydrich, a handsome fellow, laces his business with a dry wit, and of course everyone at the table laughs appreciatively. He flirts with the pretty secretary. It's almost a party in which the participants just happen to be talking about classifying Jews and half-Jews and killing them. And it's a knotty problem. What do you do with mixed children, one of whose parents is Aryan and the other Jewish. Will the Aryan blood enrich the offspring or will the Jewish blood pollute the purity of the race? What about the children who are only one quarter Jewish? How about the Jews who are in the Army? It's a striking movie in which the character we root for the most argues only for involuntary sterilization. I can't remember the characters any longer, but I recall Adolph Eichmann as a minor character. He oozes pleasantries, smiles generously, and has the figures worked out. Heydrich is the genial leader who represents the Führer. Only in the last few minutes, when most of the participants have left, do two guests remain behind and balk openly, angrily.Hannah Arendt made famous the phrase, "the banality of evil." But what we see here isn't banal. It's an effective combination of pleasure and of business efficiency. These aren't small minds dealing with small issues. And they aren't repulsive-looking bald monsters, as they're so often depicted in fiction. They're mostly ordinary, efficient, good-natured, intelligent men who just happen to have embraced some of the worst ideas that Western civilization has ever produced. How nice it would be if we could judge people by their appearance. There was at one time a popular school of psychology called "physiognomy," which proposed just that. Alas, the worst of us can be as handsome and charming and the best of us.

jandesimpson It was inspired programme planning on the part of BBC's Knowledge channel to preface Heinz Schirk's dramatised documentary with Alain Resnais's chilling piece of actuality footage "Nuit et Brouillard" made twenty years earlier. It is just possible that, without it, the more recent film might have lost something of its awesome impact. However, by preceding it with the most harrowing account of the consequences of that fateful meeting, there was no escaping the obscenity of what we were watching. The scene was one of glamour with smartly dressed high ranking Nazi officials being served refreshments by spotlessly groomed white uniformed young male waiters. With minutes detailing the planned murder of millions being taken by an attractive female stenographer with the calm impassivity of one recording an average business meeting, the underlying horror and grotesque irony of the occasion was complete. A masterly historical reconstruction.