This time, Daniel and Jack consider the 2001 film Conspiracy, a dramatisation of the infamous Wannsee Conference, a wartime meeting of Third Reich officials on the subject of the 'final solution to the Jewish question'. Content Warnings. Notes/Links: Wannsee Conference Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference Speaking the unspeakable: the portrayal of the Wannsee Conference in the film Conspiracy by Alex J. Kay: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17504902.2019.1637492 Die Wannseekonferenz (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g English translation of the Protocol: http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/news/uploads/WanseeProtocols.pdf The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting by Mark Roseman: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Villa-Lake-Meeting-Wannsee-Solution/dp/0141003952 Hitler, vol. 2: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitler-1936-1945-Nemesis-Allen-History/dp/0140272399/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VX5FLJJ3LS7I&dchild=1&keywords=kershaw+hitler+nemesis&qid=1589291029&s=books&sprefix=kershaw+hitler+ne%2Cstripbooks%2C159&sr=1-1 Hitler's American Model by James Q. Whitman: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691183066/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hitler%27s+american+model&qid=1589250377&s=books&sr=1-1
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German, the anti-fascist podcast in which I, Jack Graham, and my friend Daniel Harper have conversations about the far-right's conversations.
Every episode comes with a big content warning.
And welcome to episode 51 of I Don't Speak German, which could be a problem if we were trying to read official documents.
And yeah, Daniel and I, this week, we're going to be doing one of our movie ones.
We're going to be talking about The movie Conspiracy from whenever that was made.
Hello Daniel, do you know when that was made?
2001 is an HBO film.
Well, well.
It's a made-for-TV movie, as they used to call them back when that was a distinction that mattered.
That's right, yeah.
There's nothing going on.
I was going to ask Daniel, do you have any news?
But there's literally nothing happening in the world at the moment.
We're just going to transition into being a movie review show because all the Nazis are gone, we beat them all, and there's just really nothing else to do except for to talk about pop culture now.
That's right.
Which isn't true at all.
We could do some Cantwell news, but we could save it.
He's in jail.
It's just the little tidbits and stuff.
It's been very amusing because he is appearing on his buddy Jared Howe's show from time to time, calling in from jail, but it's nowhere near as asinine as his regular behavior is.
But apparently he does not yet have coronavirus despite being in jail in New Hampshire.
Wow.
We'll see.
Quite an achievement for him there.
I hate to say this because our listeners love it so, but Cantwell News, it can be a bit samey, can't it?
Yeah, I mean it really is just him kind of like being a dipshit and getting into situations that he could, was, were completely avoidable on his part.
Yeah.
And, you know, we do have, we do have a listener, a dear listener who DMs me, you know, like, oh, you got 55 minutes into this episode before you mentioned Cantwell.
I thought, I thought you were actually going to not do it at all.
It's just a, You know, it's apparently the thing we're known for, but, uh, you know, that's just because we talk about him a lot because, you know, it's a way of bringing levity to the show often.
Yeah, we'll have to kind of pick a new target for our ridicule.
Yeah.
See how that goes.
Yeah.
It's not like we're lacking options for people to repeatedly ridicule, is it?
Right.
People who definitely deserve it, not, you know, like, this is definitely a punching the people who deserve it verbally with ridicule kind of situation.
Like, Cantwell deserved everything that we said about him, for sure.
Absolutely.
And much, much more.
Absolutely.
But it does get a bit, you know, it's just Cantwell news.
He's still a dick.
And that's it.
Yeah.
So moving straight into the episode, as I say, it's our it's one of our periodical.
That's the wrong word.
It's one of our periodic movie review episodes.
So it's a fun one.
So we're going to be talking about a movie about the one of the pivotal meetings where the Nazis Planned the extermination of the Jews in our fun episode.
The light-hearted episodes are the ones that are directly about depictions of the Holocaust, yes.
That's right, yeah.
Barrel of laughs.
From 2001, BBC Films and HBO, I believe, stars, well, my goodness, stars so many Familiar faces Kenneth Branagh and the Tooch himself.
A bizarre piece of casting I always think.
Stanley Tucci as Eichmann and various other people that you'll be familiar with if you're familiar with British character actors.
Yeah, Colin Firth is the only one that I sort of know on sight from the cast other than, of course, our two Hollywood stars.
But yeah, a lot of them, if you do watch a lot of British TV, you'll at least kind of recognize some faces here and there.
So, probably more familiar to you than they are to me.
There's no fewer than two actors here who are now quite successful who made their television debuts in 80's Doctor Who.
Actually, both of them in the same season with Colin Baker!
Owen Teal who plays Roland Fraisler and Kevin McNally who plays Martin Luther both made their debut on telly alongside Colin Baker in that costume of his.
And that's our Doctor Who related content to this episode as well.
It is indeed, yes.
And, yeah, Daniel, why are we... I mean, this was your suggestion.
Why are we talking about this?
Well, one, I just... I didn't see this film until a couple of years ago when I was, you know, just kind of like idly on Amazon Prime.
This film is currently available on Amazon Prime, at least in the US, but apparently it's going off in just a couple of weeks.
So if you have not seen it, I would recommend... I don't know, Jack, we could talk about whether we recommend the film or not.
Um, but I think it's worth seeing.
Um, and so I, I watched it.
I remember seeing ads for it kind of at the time cause like for whatever reason I lived in an apartment complex that just gave everybody free HBO.
Um, and that's the only time I've ever really had, um, pay cable in my adult life, uh, was when someone else was paying for it.
And so I remember seeing the ads for it, but just never, I mean I was in my early 20s at the time, and it never really kind of pinged as something I was like all too interested in.
Like let's watch a movie about the meeting where they planned the Holocaust, which isn't exactly what's going on, but certainly sort of the conception, the summary, you know, the logline for it.
Yeah, that's how they sell it to you.
And, uh, really just kind of caught up with it.
Again, saw it on Amazon Prime and went, oh yeah, this is 90 minutes long.
I can watch this before I go to bed and quite thought it was interesting.
Um, and, uh, just thought if we're gonna do a movie, this would be kind of an interesting one to talk about.
About like sort of the way language is used in the way that You know the Nazis were the first Holocaust deniers and essentially they're denying the people playing the Holocaust or denying that it's happening at the same time that they're Engaging in it and I thought it would be sort of an interesting dynamic and an interesting thing that you and I would bring a perspective to that Would would be something that I think the audience would appreciate
Yeah, so if you don't know, in 1942, early 1942, the 20th of January, I believe.
January 20th, 1942.
That's it.
A group of people, a group of fairly high ranking, I mean a lot of them were state secretaries or deputies to state secretaries, And high-ranking SS Gestapo people, party bosses, people like that.
And some SS military officers, at least one, who was actually directly involved in the extermination campaigns.
The Einsatzgruppen in German-occupied territory in the East.
They met at a very nice villa.
It was commercially available for conferences, so the German state paid to rent this place.
And the meeting was organised by Adolf Eichmann, who of course became famous for being Well, famous for being one of the principal architects and organizers of the Holocaust, but very much thought of, I think, in terms of what happened to him after the war, which is that he was captured by the Israelis and put on trial in Jerusalem.
And, of course, that became the basis of Hannah Arendt's famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she coins famously the phrase, the banality of evil.
He convened the meeting, organized it, at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich, again a very infamous Nazi figure, the butcher of Krakow.
Hitler himself described him as the man with the iron heart.
And when Hitler When literally Adolf Hitler goes, that guy has no feelings.
Yeah.
You know which kind of man you're talking about.
Yeah, when Adolf Hitler looks at you and goes, Jesus man, calm down.
Come on man, just chill out just a little bit.
Steady on, dude.
This is people we're talking about.
Come on.
Yeah, yeah, this was... I mean, we're laughing, but this isn't really... You know, we're laughing darkly in full knowledge of the horror of what we're talking about.
Absolutely.
This is absolutely one of the most vile and despicable human beings who ever lived.
And he called this meeting himself acting at the...
You know, one of the things about the Nazi government and the Nazi chain of command is that it is insanely complicated, which is partly why they had to have this meeting.
But, you know, he was like Himmler's number two at this point.
Heinrich Himmler, of course, another of the most despicable people who ever lived, and another architect of the genocide of the Jews in Europe during the Second World War.
And they're all in it as well.
Goering had his fingerprints all over a document granting Heydrich the authority to set about, you know, implementing the final solution and that came up at the Nuremberg trial.
And ultimately, of course, obviously at the behest of Adolf Hitler.
They call this meeting to... and it's often... it's often...
I think misunderstood, this meeting.
It's often said to be the meeting where the Holocaust was planned or when the decision was made.
And the film kinda sorta implies that, but also kinda sorta doesn't.
And it's actually a lot more complicated than that.
Although, you know, not in any way that casts doubt on the essential truths of what happened.
But these men, these very high-ranking people, top brass from the Nazi bureaucracies and ministries and the security police and everybody concerned essentially, they came together at this very swanky villa on the banks of the Wannsee River.
Very nice area.
Previously, the home of Max Lieberman, the famous surrealist artist.
Not this house in particular, but his home was near it.
It was sort of this bohemian, liberal area before the war.
And they came together and they drank cognac and they smoked cigars and they had this lovely, friendly, amiable meeting.
And this is essentially the meeting where the sort of bureaucratic and organisational details, in very broad terms, are thrashed out of murdering millions upon millions of people.
And this has subsequently become infamous as one of the most, well, I've already said it, infamous meetings in history.
Because one of the sets of minutes survived.
The minutes of, I think it was Luther's copies.
Yeah, Luther's copy, at least of the Wikipedia pages, to be believed.
Yeah, he was like the Foreign Office guy, wasn't he?
He's the Undersecretary and SS Liaison, Foreign Ministry.
Foreign Ministry, that's right.
And he was the only one who failed, probably because he was, I think he was actually executed for ostensibly conspiring against Ribbentrop.
That's what it says at the end of the movie Conspiracy, anyway.
He was the only one who never got around to destroying his copy of the Minutes.
And the Minutes, drawn up by Eichmann, have subsequently become known as the Wannsee Protocols, or the Wannsee Records, or whatever you want to say.
And they've been tidied up and sanitized, you know, but you can still tell from them what is being talked about.
And it's this document that was discovered and was taken to disbelieving prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials and has subsequently become one of the most infamous documents in history.
An actual record of a government Implementing the plans for unprecedented, industrialised, racial mass murder.
And that's what this film is about.
It's a reconstruction, based on those surviving minutes, of what the meeting might have been like.
Do you want to dive straight into the history, or do you want to talk a little bit about the movie as a movie first?
I think maybe talking about the movie, just kind of moving into, I mean, we've got kind of the background of sort of what the Von C protocol was and what this conference was.
I think maybe kind of discussing the film first and then kind of moving into sort of what it is, what it's saying, what it means and, you know, sort of some of the issues with the portrayals in terms of its reflection of real history would be the place to go next.
Yeah, I think it's really interesting to compare this actually to an earlier film based on the same subject matter.
There was a German film made in the 80s just called The Wannsee Conference or Die Wannsee Konferenz, you know, in German.
There's no speaking of German on this podcast.
That's right, I forgot.
Be careful about that.
Yeah, we don't speak German.
But it's an interesting film.
It's on YouTube.
Conspiracy is not, but the other film, it's just called The Wannsee Conference, is on YouTube.
You can watch it.
It's in German with English subtitles.
And it's, in some ways, I think it's a lot better than this.
It's a bit more like television and it's a bit flatter and so on, but I think it's probably a bit more historically accurate and I think it's a bit less...
I think conspiracy is quite concerned with characterisation.
It's trying to be a little in-camera drama.
It reminds me a little bit of 12 Angry Men by Sidney Lumet.
It reminds me a lot of 12 Angry Men.
It's probably the clearest point of, if you want to know what watching this film is like, it is very similar to watching 12 Angry Men.
And I think in certain ways some of the choices made in the film are meant to deliberately evoke some of the 12 Angry Men aesthetic.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Well, in the way that, I mean, I adore 12 Angry Men.
I think it's glorious cinema, which is, if you don't know it, is a film taking place over the course of a single long day where 12 jurors decide whether or not to acquit someone for, a young Hispanic man, for killing his father, I believe.
And Henry Fonda stars as sort of the one lone holdout who thinks he's going to vote not guilty.
And then over the course of the film, a smaller alert for a film from 1957, he convinces everyone to kind of come his way and they eventually do not convict the teenage boy.
But it's structured in such a way so that you spend the entire time in this one room or with a couple of sort of like there's like a bathroom area and there's sort of a plate like a hallway.
And so occasionally they break and they kind of go out and like two or three people kind of have a separate conversation.
They come back in and they meet.
And that's where I really saw the parallel to Conspiracy, because Conspiracy, this is a movie about a meeting.
If the Vonsi Conference happened today, it would have PowerPoint slides.
Well, if it happened today, they'd have to do it on Zoom.
Well, okay, if it happened in late 2019, say, this is literally a record of a meeting.
This is a movie about a single meeting.
And were it not for the sort of the content of the thing that we're discussing, it would be almost banal, right?
I mean, it's just sort of this drama of the individual characters and sort of their petty beefs with one another and their, you know, sort of the legalistic framework through which they're sort of envisioning this process of elimination or immigration or extermination, which is what they're actually doing. sort of the legalistic framework through which they're sort of And the way they kind of dance around words, it feels very like a corporate meeting.
I don't know if you've ever had to sit through a meeting of kind of corporate bigwigs, you know, or had to kind of be in this kind of planning meeting.
But, like, this is – this felt very familiar to certain experiences I've had in my life, not that I've been plotting to kill people with the state apparatus.
But, you know, this feels very like a corporate meeting to me.
Yeah.
And, you know, Heydrich kind of walks in and just kind of, Heydrich and Eichmann, who sort of becomes the, he's sort of the logistics person.
He's sort of the person putting the meeting together.
He's making sure all the notes are done.
He's making sure all the kind of details, the finicky details, are in place where they need to be.
And Hydra just kind of comes in and runs the meeting and literally just sort of like steamrolls over everyone and sort of like manufactures the consent that they're actually going to do this.
Although, largely by indicating that, like, this is actually already happening, we're just telling you and we're just telling you to put all your resources into making this happen.
I mean, it's essentially an organizational meeting as opposed to something that's got, like, a real moral heft to it.
And my understanding is that what the film is doing is it's, in some ways, it's heightening some of the disagreements that a couple of the individual characters have with the plan as a way of sort of drawing out drama so that it isn't just, you know, the meetings of a meeting or the minutes of it's heightening some of the disagreements that a couple of the individual
In particular, this character of Stuttgart, who is one of the people responsible for writing up the Nuremberg Laws, and Klopfer, no, No, which one is it?
Klopfer, yeah.
Yeah, it's the Ian McNeice character versus the Colin Firth character.
Yeah, that's Stuttgart and Klopfer.
Right, right.
So yeah, they end up kind of Heightening up some of these dramas between these guys in ways that seem to not really match the historical record so much.
There is some fictionalization going on here.
That is actually the film's, as far as I can tell, that's the film's biggest historical gaffe.
I mean, I don't know if it's actually a gaffe or whether they just chose to change it in order to work up the drama.
But it presents Gerhard Klopfer, who was part of the Nazi party.
He was a bigwig in the party itself, next to Martin Bormann, who was Hitler's private secretary.
The number of people jockeying for position and closeness to Hitler, very much like in a feudal monarchy, closeness to the leader was the best guarantee of power.
So you have all these different people jockeying for closeness to Hitler, to have Hitler's ear, to have influence over him.
And Hitler has like four different private secretaries or ministries attached that are supposed to be... Because the Nazi regime is so... It's a labyrinth of competing ministries and competing departments with overlapping remits.
And this is kind of deliberate as well.
It was actually sort of one of Hitler's ideas that a good way to do things was to give two guys the same job and the most ruthless of them would succeed by beating the other one.
You know, sort of like social Darwinism applied to government bureaucracy.
But, I mean, Bormann was constantly fighting all these other people for access to Hitler, but Bormann was...
was high up in the party, the Nazi party.
And Klopfer was, he was from that area, as the film depicts.
And the film has him in, not only does it depict him and I think Stuttgart's first name was Wilhelm, It depicts them as arguing and sort of instantly disliking each other and hating each other over the table.
It also depicts them as strangers at this meeting.
They don't know each other.
The truth is these guys are old buddies.
I've got a quote here from a very good book by Mark Roseman called The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting, which is a book entirely about the Vanzay Conference.
In some cases bonds of friendship and shared ideas bridge to the different institutions.
The most striking being that between the SD's chief architect Werner Best, not himself present at Wannsee, the party man Gerhard Klopfer, and the civil servant Wilhelm Stuckart.
In autumn 1941 these men founded the new journal, Reich Volksordnung Lebensraum, Reich Ethnic Order Living Space, for ethnically based constitution and administration.
So these were not only guys who sort of went, and Stuttgart is presented as, you know, a very respectable intellectual type.
Stuttgart was like an old Freikorps thug, you know, he was one of the guys that went around beating up left-wing meetings and attacking communists in the street and stuff in the revolutionary days.
But yeah, that is a big gaffe.
But it's probably just, as you say, to try to create some drama in what is a depiction of essentially a bunch of management types sitting around a table talking about procedure.
Yeah, and even the other character, the one whose name I couldn't... David Theronfall as Kritzinger is sort of the other character who is portrayed as having an objection to this idea.
But I think it's worth noting that even within the film, these sorts of objections, you know, Stokart's hypothetical objection is, you know, we must do this according to the law, that both as sort of a personal point of pride In terms of he having been sort of the architect of the Nuremberg Laws, although he kind of demurs when it's kind of pointed out.
He's like, oh no, I co-authored those.
But then, just to break in, there's a very nice touch where he then sort of, as he's ranting, he starts to say, my laws, and then he corrects himself.
Yes, yes, yes.
That's Colin Firth.
It's an amazing performance.
I mean, don't get me wrong, even though it's not Historically accurate.
I think he does a really kind of wonderful job with this material.
But his objection is, well, we have to do this according to the law.
We have to do this according to the way that, you know, because we can't like kind of get tangled up in the bureaucracy.
And one of the other guys is like, I think Heydrich himself says, you know, we've got to, you know, we've just got to get it done.
And if we skip a few steps, that's just, you know, something that has to be done.
And Sukkot's objection is not to the idea of sterilization, which is sort of his suggestion.
Instead of dealing with personal vagaries of who is and is not considered Jewish under the law, let's just sterilize everyone who fits even a modicum of this.
And then the problem is gone within a generation.
And even just on the practicalities of that, the idea of taking...
They couldn't even afford the bullets to shoot this many people that they managed to murder.
The idea that you're going to send every one of them into a doctor's office with a sterilization technique.
And they start talking about x-rays.
They're going to use this x-ray machine.
And then they start joking about like a bzzz.
If you're going to raise or lower the desk, I think that's Klopfer's line.
And that bit of the film is this very dark levity, but reminded me a lot of the, like, sort of the material that these guys produce today, right?
Where it is kind of taking this, like, kind of horrific idea that they all agree must happen and then, like, kind of spinning jokes around it.
It felt very, you know, authentic to certainly the 21st century.
Although, I don't know if that was actually something that was happening in that meeting.
I mean, this is probably something just created by the filmmakers to kind of create this moment.
Well, I think, I was going to say, I mean, sections of this film must have sounded quite familiar to you.
You sort of close your eyes and, you know, obviously make allowances for the fact that it's mostly British accents.
He must have been thinking, oh, I'm listening to one of these podcasts, aren't I?
Because one of the things the film captures quite well, and the German version does this as well.
Although, as I started to say before, the German version is less interested in establishing
character and conflict it does that a little bit but it's it's it's sticking more closely to the idea of this as of being a representation of a meeting rather than because the the conspiracy the later film is trying to kind of tell a story it's it's doing as much as it possibly can to turn an account of a meeting into a story so it gives you character it gives you miniature character arcs for people like Kritzinger and you know we can get back to him etc because he's interesting but
Yeah, it does show you these moments where these men laugh and joke.
And I'm sure they did.
I'm sure these guys did horse around and giggle as they were doing this stuff.
Eichmann says it was very amiable and friendly and there wasn't much chatting.
Who the hell knows when and if Eichmann's telling the truth.
The question of what exactly was said is very interesting, but Eichmann famously said that the language was He was quite unguarded at times you know they talked openly about what they were talking about and this is one of the interesting things about Kritzinger because Kritzinger is one of the I think he's the only one subsequently to express remorse but he also says we didn't talk about killing Well, yes you did.
I mean, even if none of you actually talked about, none of you actually said the words kill, you all knew you were talking about killing.
And, you know, it's an interesting question.
Did they go into the details of exactly what the final solution would entail?
And historians disagree about it.
But yeah, conspiracy, with its concern to be dramatic, Shows you these character moments.
And, yeah, I remember thinking it must have been quite familiar to you.
But, yeah, Stuttgart's interesting because actually the position that he states in the film is kind of not accurate for him at that point.
According to Roseman, actually, in his book that I mentioned earlier, Stuttgart had kind of moved on from the position that Jews were actually, you know, clever.
Because that's the little speech Stuckart gives in the film, you know.
Oh right, yeah.
No, and that bit is definitely very, felt very familiar to the way these guys talk.
Yeah.
You know, they are fiendishly clever.
And we just have to have the force of will to take care of this problem while we can.
Apparently Stuttgart had moved from that perspective, according to Roseman anyway, Stuttgart had moved to a sort of a different perspective where he actually did agree that the Jewish people were inferior, unto mention.
And one of the things the German version brings out quite well is Stuttgart's Stuckhart's a really interesting character, but he framed his objection to... because one of the things they're doing is they have this concept of the Miesling, you know, the half-Jew, that is part of the Nuremberg Law.
Both the protocol and the film spends a really long time on this sort of question of You know, what is the first order and second order to you?
And what is, you know, what are the relations of these meetings?
I mean, the actual document spends probably about a third of its length, you know, kind of detailing these questions.
And in the film, it's probably, I didn't time it, it's roughly 10 minutes or so.
It's kind of like going over this Pretty, fairly kind of convoluted definitions.
And, you know, honestly, it was kind of difficult for me to kind of follow exactly what they're meaning by what is a First order versus second order mix and et cetera, et cetera.
It was, it was very, uh, absolutely.
Yeah.
And the, it gets, it gets really convoluted, but this is the nature of what the Nuremberg laws were.
It was, you know, it was defining in this, in this very, um, straightforward or not in a straightforward way, but in a very overt way, like all the different ways that meetings could happen and all the different, like whether a grandparent on one side or the other would classify you.
And it sort of creates this framework for classifying people into this category.
of whether you were considered German or Jew.
Yeah, yeah.
It's one of those things where there's a book I'm going to recommend, Hitler's American Model, which goes specifically over sort of the Nuremberg Laws and sort of the way that they were designed and the way they were modeled after United States racial laws.
And in many ways, the Nuremberg Laws were much softer than what was going on in terms of racial segregation in the United States at that time, because the American laws indicate the one-drop rule, whereas the Germans were kind of like, well, if you're less than a quarter, then you're probably fine.
Yeah, that's right.
The Nazi regime, at least under its legal definitional rules, was much more lax than American segregation laws.
Yeah, and both the films, The Conspiracy and the previous film, The Wannsee Conference, they both have little scenes or bits of scenes where they kind of refer to the insane complexity of the rules about who counts as a full Jew and a half Jew, etc, etc, but only if your spouse is German.
The Nuremberg Laws are, they're kind of this vast compromise.
They're this big fiddly technically worked out compromise, you know, between these, between, you know, different orders of insane bigots and trying to make this insane bigotry work within the context of, you know, actually enforceable laws in a modern state.
So you come up with this great big Tangle.
One of the things that the film does get across, I think, for all the problems with it, it gets across the fact that this meeting, from the point of view of the men who called it, you know, Heydrich and so on, the point is to cut through all that.
The point is to say, yeah, all this lovely big tangled compromise about who was half a Jew and who was quarter of a Jew, You know, these people didn't have to wear yellow stars because they were decorated for military service.
You know, we're cutting through all that now.
We are now in charge.
The SS are now in charge.
And they all go.
And the meeting was kind of about making the state secretaries, the bureaucrats, the politicians, understand that and getting them on board.
And I think that that is one of the things that the film does quite well.
That it's probably artificial for the purposes of dramatising it, but the way they give certain characters in the room a little arc of walking into the room thinking, well, you know, they've got their priorities and I've got mine and they've got their points to make and I've got my points to make and I can...
Right.
this nugget that and and eventually they over the course of the film they come to realize oh right I see I haven't actually got it I haven't actually got any say in this this is happening right which is not to lessen their complicity by the way oh no not at all and And something I do think we'll get to, Kritzscher, here in just a second.
The meeting starts with Heydrich essentially saying, look, we've got a problem in Germany.
And it's these Jews.
There are just Jews everywhere.
There are Jews all over the place.
They are getting in the way of our war efforts.
They're getting in the way.
We've got to do something about them.
We have tried to immigrate them.
Nobody wants to take them.
Oh my goodness.
And then we invade Russia and what do we get?
Five million more Jews.
Yeah.
We've just got to do something about this problem.
And you know, we've tried immigrating and nobody wants them.
We've tried moving them east and there's, they're just going, there's just more and more of them.
We're taking over the east.
And what are we going to do now?
And then the answer is, well, we've already been building these death camps at Auschwitz and in other places.
And yeah, we're just going to now get everybody on board.
Just put all your Jews onto trains and just send them to us and we will take care of it.
And it's an SS matter now.
It's out of your control, and that's essentially what the point of the meeting.
And Heydrich, at least in the film, is resolutely dedicated to kind of reaching that goal.
I mean, everything is built around this idea of, we are going to do this, I'm going to make sure that everyone leaves this meeting knowing that we're the ones in charge and knowing that this is what we're going to do.
And, you know, from the minutes of the meeting, I mean, things like Stuttgart does, it is in the Von C protocol that he kind of had some kind of objection around, oh, we have to do this according to the law, we have to, you know, that the legal niceties are going to be obeyed.
But ultimately everyone walks into this meeting, you know, there's no one being kind to the Jews here.
There's no one saying like, well, maybe we shouldn't evacuate, maybe we shouldn't eliminate.
I mean, even Kritzinger in the film, you know, he's kind of portrayed as sort of the bleeding heart a little bit.
I have been assured that these people are going to have livable conditions.
But even he doesn't sort of argue with the main premise.
And I think it is worthwhile quoting a bit from the protocol here, just in case anybody wants to pretend that there wasn't mass murder, even in this coded version.
And this is from a bit from the English translation.
I'll link this in the show notes.
I'll link this in the description below.
I'll link this in the description below. I'll link this in the description below. I'll link this in the description below. I'll link this in the description below. I'll link this in the description below. I'll link this in the description below. I'll link this in the description below.
The ones that survive must also be eliminated otherwise they will form the seed of a new Jewish revival and we will be back where we are now only even worse because they're stronger seed or whatever like you're you're kind of racial theorizing so anyone in that meeting this is the coded version this is the like quiet part quiet version there's no way you could you could be at this meeting and not understand that you're talking about extermination that's just it's it's what we're it's what we're talking Yeah, absolutely.
It's fairly credible to me that they didn't go into the... This is before the full system was set up as well.
But it seems fairly credible to me that the SS chose not to in front of this room full of career bureaucrats and people like that, who didn't really need to know this stuff.
I mean the details of it.
They didn't go into the details of how they were going to use gas and so on.
And again, the system is still in, the extermination camp, the gas chamber system is still in the process of being assembled.
So it's quite credible to me, like the original German version, the earlier film as I was talking about, It has a scene where the SS men, at a point in the conversation, they kind of get up from the table and walk to one side when they need to briefly discuss the question of gas chambers, and then they come back to the table.
But even in that, you know, it's clear that I mean, it's clear, firstly, to everybody at the table that these men are off in a corner talking about something they don't want the rest of them to hear.
So, I mean, I think that's a speculation on the part of the writers.
But if that happened, then that's a sign in itself.
But it's clear to everybody at the table that evacuation means mass murder.
In Conspiracy, you actually have Langer, who's one of the Einsatzgruppen butchers, Stand up and say that.
You know, I think it's important to know what words mean.
Whether or not anything like that happened, it's absolutely clear.
And I think... He has a line like, we're the 30,000 people we massacred, such and such, were they eliminated?
Yeah.
In your words.
And the answer is yes, that's what that means.
And then Kritzinger says, like, hold on, wait a minute, I need to know what the... Were they eliminated?
Is that what this... Because I've been... It has been denied to me by Hitler himself that this is what's happening.
And then Heydrich says, Lin, he will continue to deny it.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, no, that's, you know, and just for our Nazi listeners here, I think it's worth, you know.
The film goes to great lengths to kind of describe the process by which these secrets are being kept from, you know, no records are kept in this meeting.
Eichmann, like, you know, somebody signs into the guestbook and Eichmann tears out the page and burns it, like everything is destroyed, everything is like going through this Very rigorous process where no notes are supposed to be kept, and the only reason we have this document to look at even now, even in this coded version, is because one of the guys just didn't get around to burning it before he himself was liquidated.
But for, you know, the Nazis, the modern-day Nazis, they say, well, look, you're talking about a conspiracy theory, like, ooh, they talked in code, ooh, they made it a secret, they couldn't say out loud the thing that they were doing, and you're just, like, putting, you're just doing by implication, you're putting these words into place.
And, of course, this is just a lie on your part to kind of smear the Germans, etc., etc.
And I think it's worthwhile.
I mean, you know, it is like this film will not convince them of anything because they're just going to say, oh, this is just more Jewish tricks or whatever.
Yeah.
But I think that, like, realistically, the Nazis today in my.
Orbit do the exact same thing of kind of speaking in code and deleting things that they don't want people to see, and every Nazi listener of this podcast will be fully aware of the fact that like the first 70-something episodes of Facts of the Nation have disappeared from the internet, for instance.
And why would that be the case unless there were things that they maybe just didn't want people to know?
You know, like, there are countless examples of this, where stuff is kind of voluntarily taken down, or things are said because they fear censorship from the wider culture.
They admit this fully and then they go, oh no, those OG Nazis, they were.
clearly just acting in complete good faith the entire time.
And if there's not a document with Hitler's signature on it saying, kill this many Jews, then clearly it didn't happen, and nothing could be further from the truth.
This enormous weight of historical evidence that they just have to completely pretend it doesn't exist by just denying its kind of fundamental reality that every trial was a show trial, and every witness was coerced, and every person who came out of the camps is just lying and mischievous or mistaken. and every person who came out of the camps is That any kind of question about sort of, you know, every document is faked.
It's just, it's absurd the amount of like direct evidence that we have of this process and the degree to which they just have to deny Every single piece of that evidence to pretend that this wasn't what was going on.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's there in black and white.
The protocols exist.
A copy survived.
And it's there in black and white.
Despite the fact that... I don't care if these men talked in decorous code all the way through the meeting.
It's still clear what they're talking... I mean, for one thing, if you need to do that, then you know why you're doing it.
You know, but I think Roseman is very good on this.
I want to recommend that book again, The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting, Mark Roseman.
There's a section, I'm going to crave the listener's indulgence and read from this at a certain amount of length because I think this is very good.
Kritziger from the Reich Chancellery, who is in the film, this is me now, in the film he's depicted as, as you say, the closest thing to a bleeding heart.
Chris Singer from the Right Chancellery was alone among Robert Kempner's, he's the prosecutor at Nuremberg, one of them, post-war interviewees in expressing feelings of shame.
Yet he too denied killings had been openly talked about, a fact that has led eminent historians such as Hans Momsen and Dieter Rieven to Ribbentish.
I'm afraid I don't know that historian, so if I've mispronounced his name I beg your pardon, to believe that this was the truth.
Stuttgart's subordinate Bernhard Loesner, by contrast, argued after the war that at the latest, at the notorious Wannsee Conference, Stuttgart gained precise information.
So there's Stuttgart's deputy telling you that Stuttgart knew exactly what was happening after the Wannsee Conference.
Back to Rosemary.
There's a danger of two separate matters being confused here.
One is the question whether the Wannsee Protocol clearly and explicitly envisaged the killing of all the Jews.
The other is whether the means of killing were clearly determined and articulated.
On the former question, the evidence is straightforward.
He means on the question of whether they went into the methods they were going to use.
Otto Hoffmann, who's one of the men at the meeting, Otto Hoffmann was sure that half-Jews could be relied upon to prefer sterilization as the alternative to evacuation.
Heydrich argued that because of the psychological impact on the German relatives, the Jewish partner in mixed marriages might be deported to a ghetto rather than evacuated.
What kind of evacuation could they be talking about?
One thing is clear, concluded the judges at the Ministries Trial at Nuremberg.
No one would suggest sterilization as a procedure of amelioration unless he was wholly convinced that deportation meant a worse fate, namely death.
But the protocol is, this is back to Rosemond, but the protocol is even more revealing than that.
With ice-cold precision, Hydra clarified that Jews fit for work were all programmed to die.
Either they would be crushed by working conditions, or murdered for being resilient enough to survive them.
You just outlined that yourself.
You said they'd be killed through being put to work.
Killed through natural causes, they put it.
Or, if they didn't die in the process of being worked to death, then they would constitute that core that would be the basis of a revival, look at the lessons of history.
So they'd have to die.
So either they die working, or they die because they didn't die working.
And the only other group of people are the people that aren't fit for work in the first place.
Elsewhere in the protocol, they talk about evacuating the people from the general government in Poland who aren't fit for work.
That's Bula's rationale for why they need to be gotten rid of.
They're not fit for work.
So that's literally, you've covered every single category there.
The people who can't work, the people who can, and the people who can and survive it.
They're all dead.
OK, so it's unarguable.
The fate of Jews deemed unable to work at the outset could hardly be open to doubt.
Buhler justified it.
I've just paraphrased that bit.
And then there's another bit.
The point is worth making again.
Whether or not the means were clearly established, the final solution now unambiguously meant the death of all European Jews, except for the specific privileged exceptions to be deported to the old age ghetto, most of whom, as we know, were in any case sent to Auschwitz.
there was no other outcome than death possibly this was not spelled out at the meeting itself but that is of only secondary importance it was there in black and white in the protocol at the latest by the time it landed on their desks stuttgart kritzinger and all the rest knew what it was that was being planned i think that's i think that puts it brilliantly personally yeah no definitely
It is like you're engaged in the machinery of mass murder, and you're forced to sort of like not use the exact words, which again, is something that happens in, you know, corporate situations all the time, in which, you know, like, there's certain things that don't get put in emails, because, you know, they can be, you know, found by You know, various legal means, you know, discovery if something kind of goes wrong.
You know, companies have like email retention policies.
You know, we don't keep any emails older than 60 days for the event that something's happening.
And, you know, all these kind of face-to-face meetings that happen where, you know, even if it's nothing nefarious, even if it's just like protecting trade secrets or whatever, like this is how organizations work is things are kind of, you know, semi-openly discussed.
And the idea that like you could plan a mass murder, the idea that you can deny this by just kind of going, well, we don't, they didn't say that.
They didn't just say it in so many words.
It's preposterous.
And I think one thing that this film does kind of get across is the degree to which everyone in the room knows, you know, what they're really talking about, even if they're sort of like a couple of them are pretending that they're not.
And I think this should be the moment to kind of talk a bit about Kritzinger, who in the film, like when I first saw it, I kind of, not thinking too hard about it, I just kind of thought of him as kind of a squish, right?
As someone who just didn't have the kind of the hardness of heart, who was a Nazi by, you know, You know, kind of training, not by inclination.
Sorry, just to break in.
According to Rosemond, he was late to join the Nazi party.
He sort of joined it at the latest point he possibly could, you know, in order to keep his career.
Which, I think that tells you a lot, doesn't it?
He didn't join it until he had to, but when he had to, in order to continue with his career, he did.
So, there you go.
You just adapt to the realities on the ground, right?
Let's just, you know, hey, this is what we do.
He's kind of portrayed in the film as being kind of the one holdout.
He's sort of the Henry Fonda of this, if we're going by the 12 Angry Men scenario.
But even his objections are very weak.
He's not strongly objecting to this, and even he agrees that, you know, elimination in terms of, you know, exportation, Is necessary like he's not like kind to the Jewish people again.
I think I've kind of reiterated this But he finds the the prospect of mass killing distasteful, and he's been assured that this is not going to happen And it is like you know it does kind of speak to the reality of you know when even you're like quote-unquote sympathetic character when even the person that you're sort of To the degree that you're rooting for anyone in this film, you're at least sort of like on his side morally.
To the degree that you can be on anyone's side.
He's not really disagreeing with the fundamental question and issue here.
He's just sort of like, you know, he's squeamish about the methods.
Yeah, and kind of also, you know, at least as pissed off about the fact that he personally has been lied to and his authority and the authority of his ministry is being circumvented.
I mean, that's at least as much of a sticking point for him, isn't it?
Assurances that he has been given and his boss llamas have been given are apparently just turning out to be bullshit.
Right.
And isn't this supposed to be in my office?
Aren't we supposed to be the ones coordinating this as opposed to the SS?
And so there's this kind of point of professional pride that his authority is being usurped.
And, you know, this is not like a principled opposition here.
And again, it does speak to, you know, when the Iraq War was kind of getting started and, you know, like, no, we have to do this.
We have to go through the UN.
And we have to get a multilateral, like, coalition of people if we're going to go and bomb Afghanistan and Iraq into dust.
You know, we've got to make sure we have to fulfill the right legal protocols here if we're going to do this.
And, you know, without sort of the moral weight of, like, maybe we just shouldn't do this at all, you know?
It's this, like, they all agree that, like, the Jews are the problem.
They all agree On that, and because they all agree, certain questions just don't get asked at all.
They're in a sealed-off, self-contained ideological universe, these people.
Because they're ultimately... I mean, well, because in some ways the ones who are sort of... You've got your sort of like high-up SS men, who have been literally performing these murders already, and who have a very clear-eyed view of what's going on, and they kind of congregate at one end of the table to a bit, where they're kind of, you know,
You see them kind of passing glances back and forth a little bit and you kind of get like kind of the harder edge of this because they're actually the ones like engaging in this and they look down on these like petty bureaucrats who are like not willing to get their hands dirty and actually kind of be out there and actually deal with this problem and you know there is this there is this really weird dynamic kind of going on there.
The 80s German film makes that even more explicit.
It kind of has all the SS uniforms on one side of the table and the suits on the other side.
Although, interestingly, the 80s movie has Stuttgart turn up in his SS uniform that he is entitled to wear because he's apparently an honorary SS man.
Yeah, they make a joke in the film that they all have multiple hats.
That they all have various titles like, I am also ranked in the Gestapo, or I am also in the SS, or I am also a party member of this and that, etc.
This kind of convoluted nature of the structure here does speak to it.
That is an interesting question.
Yeah, I mean, Friessler says at one point, doesn't he, that he's also in the SS or the Gestapo or a stormtrooper or something.
Friessler, interestingly, is... If you've ever seen the famous footage of, like, Nazi show trials where people accuse... I mean, sometimes... I mean, I think Friessler presided over the trials of some of the conspirators that tried to kill Hitler, you know, in the November bomb plot.
The famous footage of the judge screaming at defendants.
That's Friesla.
That's that guy.
And he was apparently hated by absolutely everyone.
Because they all hated each other, these people.
And he was killed in an air raid.
Yet again, something that has not continued to the 21st century.
In which they all hate each other.
But yeah, he actually does that joke about also being a stormtrooper and so on and so forth.
But yeah, I think one of the reasons why they needed this conference, this sort of, Heydrich needed this conference, where he gets all the state secretaries, the heads of the ministries, or the deputy heads of the ministries, as it turned out, most of them were sort of deputies, Together, and pushes through this idea that the Jewish question is now his baby, and what they say goes, you know, and it's everybody else's job to accept that.
They all get their hands dirty, because part of it is kind of getting everybody equally guilty.
And then everybody knows from then on, okay, it's Himmler and Heydrich that run this, and our job is to help them.
And one of the reasons that he needed to do this, I mean, apart from just the fact that he was a vain narcissistic show-off that craved power, was that the Nazi governmental system was so insanely overcomplicated, with all these different ministries all with overlapping jurisdictions and remits doing the same jobs and fighting each other constantly.
It's hilarious irony that Nazi, at least in some registers, has gone down in this sort of joke way of saying somebody is incredibly over-efficient and incredibly over-rule-bound, whereas of course the reality of the Nazi governmental system was absolute fucking constant chaos.
Yes.
Which is why, you know, so much paperwork has been both destroyed and why so much of it, you know, failed to be destroyed when it was supposed to be, right?
Like, there's so much documentation that just kind of gets lost in the shuffle eventually.
And I mean, there are, you know, still historians going through and kind of finding individual documents, you know, 80 years later, 80 years after the war.
Um, you know, finding like, oh, this, this, this document that, you know, kind of indicates, uh, you know, some particular piece of this plan or some particular, you know, kind of thing going on.
I mean, a lot of this stuff is still, um, being found and translated and there are still like troves of documents that really nobody's gone through.
Um, again, the, the sheer amount of documentation is astonishing on, on, you know, on, you know, they, they produced a lot of paperwork.
Um, and even when they tried to destroy it, they were not always efficient at destroying.
Absolutely, yeah.
I feel like there's one character, or one actor we haven't really discussed a lot, and that's Stanley Tucci.
It's Eichmann.
He actually won, I think, he won some awards for this.
I think a Golden Globe or something, for this performance.
And you kind of, you said it was strange casting.
I'm wondering, would you expand on that a bit?
Well, I don't know.
In this room full of British character actors, you have Stanley Tucci playing Eichmann.
Stanley Tucci is, to me anyway, this incredibly likeable screen presence.
His career has been based, to a large extent, on playing against that, actually, now that I come to think of it.
The first time I saw, or at least became aware of, Stanley Tucci was when I was watching, in the 90s, a television program called Murder One.
I don't know if anybody remembers that.
But it was a... Only old men like us.
Only old men like us, yeah.
And he plays a... It's a legal thriller told from the point of view of the defense firm defending this movie star who's accused of... Back when, you know, defense attorneys were allowed to be the good guys in TV shows.
And they find themselves up against, all the way through, this incredibly sinister, eccentric, ambiguous millionaire figure called Richard Cross, who's played by... God, I even remember the character names.
It's so burned in my memory.
Who's played by Stanley Tucci, and it's a brilliant performance, and it's an ambiguous performance where All the way through the show, you don't know if this guy is just like Satan or whether they've got him wrong and there's something more complicated going on.
So now I come to think of it, despite the fact that I kind of inherently find Stanley Tucci just this amiable, likeable presence.
Yeah, playing against that is actually quite central to his thing, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, I find, I mean, it's, it's, I think it's a really brilliant performance in its sort of simplicity.
Like, you're right, he is this very kind of amiable, likable guy, and so he does have the ability to sort of turn that on and kind of give that characterization to Eichmann, and sort of portrays, like, how, you know, at least in this kind of version of events, how Eichmann is able to manage the logistics of this situation so well.
Um, he does have this one kind of like moment of kick, this one kick the dog moment at the beginning where a waiter breaks some plates and there's a, you know, that man pays, you keep him out of my sight, I want an itemized list of all the things he broke and, you know, I want that separate and like, you know, just this kind of needless cruelty from Eichmann because he's sort of a character setting moment.
But throughout the rest of the film he's again very amiable, very I don't want to say personable, he's efficient.
There's a piece I read that kind of talked about whether the film was historically accurate or not.
There's this article from an actual historian of the period, Alex J.K.
I will stick that in the show notes so you can read it yourself, but it kind of points out that this kind of vision of Eichmann seems to be based on Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, this kind of more officious hog-in-the-machine kind of character as opposed to the moral monster that Eichmann actually was, that Arendt is far too kind based on what she saw in the early 60s of Eichmann.
And this portrayal seems to be kind of based on that.
I found this one moment which was very... He's talking about how he speaks a little bit of Hebrew and a little bit of Yiddish.
He says, you know, I found a rabbi.
Rabbi means teacher.
And I found this guy and I asked him to give me lessons.
And he forced me to pay.
Because of course he did, because he's Jewish, you know, etc, etc.
And then he says, I tried to expense it to the office, but they wouldn't okay it.
So I paid out of pocket, which was fine, whatever.
And then I realized later on, after he had already been taken away by the secret police, like, didn't he know I would protect him?
I would have protected him if, you know, at least until my lessons were done.
And he says ruefully, like, I realized belatedly that I had made a mistake.
All I could have just had the man arrested, come into his cell and forced him to give me the lessons for free.
And it is just this, again, it's such a, it's like a little anecdote he tells of like, oh, this is how I learned a little bit of the language.
I learned to think like the Jews think because I learned to speak their language.
I learned to speak like them.
And this is the way that these kind of state structures work.
This is just like, well, of course, this is just what I should have done.
The easier way would have just been to, like, torture this man, essentially.
And you hear this kind of thing.
If you listen to these guys talk long enough, they expose the same kind of, like, disregard for human life and human comfort, if it fits outside of there.
Um, racial categorization, like, well, of course, you know, we should just use these people as chattel or whatever, you know, we just need to need to get them away from us.
We just need to do this because it's necessary, but like, there's a devaluing of human life.
Um, and, uh, certainly in this moment of this kind of historical moment of the, you know, coronavirus and mass unemployment and death and everything, and just this kind of utter disregard that you hear from some of our quote unquote leaders on, on this matter.
It does speak to that same kind of, that same kind of just like, you know, your life is only worthwhile so long as it fits my convenience.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I seem to recall reading something about Eichmann which indicated that the sort of the cliched view of Eichmann is that he was just this ambitious, efficient bureaucrat and, you know, there's a cliche, you know, if somebody had said, you know, you can get promoted if you round up all the people with red hair instead of all the Jewish people, he'd have done that.
I seem to remember reading something that demonstrated that that was pretty wildly inaccurate.
Eichmann was a dedicated anti-Semite.
And also, I think, by a lot of accounts, a pretty creepy, twisted man.
And I think that there are interesting questions about You know, to what extent these sorts of state crimes are generated by blind structures that find the people to implement them through sort of Darwinian processes of winnowing down, you know, until you end up with the right crew to man the machine to do this stuff.
Or, do you have the policy pushed by the nature of the people that are on the staff, you know?
And I lean towards the former rather than the latter, but one of the things Roseman points out... It's certainly the individual personalities, particularly if they're given more and more power, do have a strong effect in terms of the shape of the finished product, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Putting Eichmann in, even if someone like Eichmann was eventually going to be found to do this, but Eichmann still put his own footprint on it.
Yeah, it's a recursive process.
If you have a niche in the machine where the perfect fit is a sadistic, sociopathic anti-Semite, Then you will, through that Darwinian process of winnowing, you will end up with a sadistic sociopathic antisemite that will fit that hole.
But then you have a particular person in that hole, that niche in the machine, and their particular abilities and traits and inclinations will then go on to fashion the machine or influence what it does.
I think that's... and I think one of the points Roseman makes in his book is that we need to kind of... it was kind of a fashionable cliche for a while of the desk-bound murderer as kind of this impersonal bureaucrat who... and there's, you know, there's a lot of truth to that, obviously, but it's also... I mean, the men round this table...
They were not just bureaucrats who were doing this for advancement or doing it because it was their job or, you know, that was another fashionable idea in Holocaust studies.
Third Reich studies was the idea of this happening to a great extent because of bureaucratic loyalty, etc, etc.
And again, it's not untrue.
There's a lot of truth to that.
But I think in both those versions of events, the completely amoral, desk-bound bureaucrat murderer and the loyal civil servant murderer, they both leave out something, which is, as Roseman points out, most of the men around this table were long-term, dedicated, hardline anti-Semites.
You've got, like, I think Muller and Luther are a bit more... and Friesler also isn't all that... you know, for a Nazi, these people are not all that anti-Semitic, you know.
They're more opportunistic and ambitious.
A nice caveat there, you know.
Like, by the standards of Nazis, you know, maybe not quite so bad, right?
I mean, yeah.
Obviously, we know what you're getting at.
Yeah, this is it.
This is exactly what I'm saying.
By the standards of Nazis, Friesla, Luther, Muller are not particularly anti-Semitic.
That's not to say they're not anti-Semitic.
They are.
They're Nazis.
But by the standards of Nazis, their careers are bigger priorities for them.
But the vast majority of the men around this table, the anti-Semitism is not incidental.
To these guys.
It's not like, well, anti-Semitism, anti-red hairism, I don't know, whatever's going to get me the biggest promotion.
No.
These guys, they were dedicated, convinced, lifelong hardline Jew haters, these people.
And it sounds kind of daft to be emphasising that when we're talking about the men at the Fanzay Conference.
But I do think sometimes we actually understress this.
The extent to which ideological anti-Semitism led to this.
They may have helped to prepare the mass murder of millions of Jewish people, but they didn't really have hate in their heart, certainly judging by the content of their characters.
Well, that is an argument that people actually make about certain people.
No, no, I agree.
I agree.
I'm not... And of course, we talk about it in terms of...
Nazis, I think people can see the contradiction there and kind of see the irony and laugh at it.
But then, you know, like, well, you know, Barack Obama droned a whole lot of weddings and killed a whole lot of people and was, you know, standing and, you know, personally intervened to kind of make that happen.
But shouldn't we judge him by the content of his character?
Let's talk about that, right?
It's only just recently that certain people have been rehabilitating George W. Bush.
That is such vile shit.
It is, isn't it?
It's amazing to me.
I don't equate George W. Bush to Himmler or whatever.
It's not the same.
I'm not saying that.
That's a straw man.
But George W. Bush is one of the architects of the War on Terror, which was a rampage of imperialist violence that killed God knows how many millions of people.
And he's being rehabilitated now by people who apparently have no shame or decency whatsoever.
He's become like America's grandpa.
People talk about him on Twitter like, oh yeah, he's just this cute old man.
He killed a million Iraqis.
He wore that coat kind of goofy that one time.
Isn't that really what matters?
We're kind of off in the weeds here.
Well, yeah, but also, but also very relevant, also very relevant in the way that we, you know, kind of consider these guys.
And, um, you know, I've been for, for the other episode I'm prepping right now, I've been thinking a lot about Holocaust denial, and I think we're going to, uh, some of this will, will kind of be restated in the, in the next episode or two.
So, um, you know, I think we should probably start to wrap up here.
I've known for over an hour You have any other kind of big points you wanted to make about the film?
Yeah, I mean not so much about the film.
I mean I the film I I like it in many ways I I'm a sucker for that kind of British character actor and that style of acting Not all that sold on Branagh, but I do think Tucci gives a great I mean who's American obviously, but I think Tucci gives a great performance and and I think a lot of the other people around the... You know, you can really just appreciate the artistry on display, I think, certainly in the acting.
And I appreciate the contrast, you know, between one version of German culture represented in the person of Schubert and this... It's a bit of a fatuous dichotomy, maybe, but I think it's... I appreciate it.
It's a film I have problems with, but there's a lot to like in it.
The only other thing I wanted to read out was, I found a section in Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler which talks about the Wannsee Conference.
And it's actually, if you search it out, it's a very good two-page summary of what happened and what it meant.
It starts on page 492 of the second volume in my edition.
So if you wanted a capsule, that'd be a good place to start.
But there's a good bit going on from it.
Because one of the things you hear from Holocaust deniers and bullshit artists and people like David Irving who try to defend Adolf Hitler and absolve him of responsibility and maybe people who have David Irving's books on their bookshelves is...
The idea that Hitler didn't know or didn't approve of the worst excesses, etc, etc, which is obviously crap.
There was no way that anything of this magnitude could take place in that system without it coming from him directly.
And there's no reason for any of these people to hide it from him either because he would have appreciated it.
Again, it sounds a bit strange to have to emphasise this, but Hitler, very anti-Semitic.
I have read Mein Kampf.
He is not shy about telling you that he hates Jews.
He hates them because they are disgusting vermin, and they smell, and they stink, and they spread syphilis, and they're subhuman, and they ought to be killed.
He, you know, it's in there.
It's not in code in Mein Kampf, you know.
So there's no reason anybody would want to hide this from him.
But this bit in Kershaw, it's very interesting.
The Fante Conference takes place on the 20th of January 1942.
On the 30th of January, 1942, ninth anniversary of the quote-unquote seizure of power, Hitler, because it wasn't, Hitler addressed a packed sports polast.
As he had been doing privately over the past weeks, I'm reading now, he invoked once more, let me repeat that actually, As he had been doing privately over the past weeks, he invoked once more, how often he repeated the emphasis in these months is striking, that's Kershaw, his prophecy of the 30th of January 1939.
As always, he wrongly dated it to the day of the outbreak of war with the attack on Poland.
We are clear, he declared, that the war can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples Or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.
He went on.
I already stated on the 1st of September 1939 in the German Reichstag, and I refrain from over-hasty prophecies, that this war will not come to an end as the Jews imagined with the extermination of the European Aryan peoples, but that the result of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry.
For the first time, the old Jewish law will now... blah blah blah, loads more shit there.
The message was not lost on his audience.
The SD, no doubt picking up comments made above all by avid Nazi supporters, reported that his words had been interpreted to mean that the Fuhrer's battle against the Jews would be followed through to the end with merciless consistency and that very soon the last Jew would disappear from European soil.
When Goebbels spoke to Hitler in March, the death mills of Belzec had commenced their grisly operations.
As regards the Jewish question, Hitler remained pitiless.
These are quotes.
The propaganda minister recorded, The Jews must get out of Europe if need be through the use of the most brutal means was his view.
A week later, Goebbels left no doubt what the most brutal means implied.
Quote, from the general government, beginning with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the East.
A fairly barbaric procedure, not to be described in any greater detail, is being used here, and not much more remains of the Jews themselves.
In general, it can probably be established that 60% of them must be liquidated, while only 40% can be put to work.
A judgement is being carried out on the Jews, which is barbaric but fully deserved.
The prophecy which the Führer gave them along the way for bringing about a new world war is beginning to become true in the most terrible fashion.
No sentimentality can be allowed to prevail in these things.
If we didn't fend them off, the Jews would annihilate us.
It's a life or death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.
No other government and no other regime could produce the strength to solve this question.
Generally, here too, the Führer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.
So, don't fucking tell me Adolf Hitler wasn't up to this, in this, up to his fucking neck.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, and again, it is like this kind of like blanket denial, this like, you know, reading between the lines and to, you know, find any kind of reason that this can't be true is just, you know, it's ridiculous.
And I need to read that Kershaw biography.
I have not gotten around to that three-volume tome just yet.
But yeah, I think that's about as good a place to leave it off as any.
OK, that was episode 51.
A bit off the beaten track this time, but I think that was quite interesting.
And yeah, what are we doing?
Well, I mean, we have a special episode coming, don't we, in the works?
Yeah, which may be the next one or the one after, depending on the project has expanded slightly as I've been finding other little bits to kind of stick in there.
So hopefully that'll be up next week.
I'm not sure what else we'll be doing, but we will pick something and there will be more content very soon.
Okay, so there you have it, listeners.
The next episode will be about something.
So I'm looking forward to that.
I hope you are too.
So thanks.
Thanks for talking to me again, Daniel.
And thanks for listening, everybody.
Always.
And thanks for everybody for listening.
We do like to do these movie episodes.
I mean, I have gotten some positive feedback on them where people kind of like them.
It's like a change of pace and, you know, something just a little bit different.
And it's something that Jack and I tend to enjoy.
So we are going to try to do these occasionally, but not to kind of overwhelm the ordinary topic of the show.
Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, before I go, thanks again to my patrons and especially the new patrons that I've picked up recently.
That's amazing.
Thank you so much for helping us out.
It genuinely does help us to produce this show.
Indeed it does, very much so.
So yeah, see you next time, listeners.
Or hear you next time.
Except that I won't, will I?
Because I don't hear you.
That'd be weird.
If I heard you, I'd be listening to your podcast.
I've talked myself into a real corner now.
I'll probably edit this out.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
Cheers.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
We're on iTunes and show up in most podcast catches.
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