Movie: Conspiracy
It's not been a fun time in the Netflix queue lately. First The Reader and then Conspiracy. It would have been The Talented Mr. Ripley but that movie seems to be in high demand at the moment. I am looking forward to June 28th because that's when I'll be sent the first disc of the first season of Rizzoli and Isles which AfterEllen assures me I will love.
But, anyway. Yeah. Depressing time. I don't remember putting Conspiracy in my queue. It was a BBC film from 2001 starring Stanley Tucci, Kenneth Branagh, and Colin Firth (in what must be one of the worst German accents of all time. I thought he was playing an Englishman.)
The movie is about a meeting that occurred in Berlin in 1942 with 12 or 13 German SS officers and governmental workers. The meeting was arranged to discuss the "Jewish Question". Recognizing that fighting a war on two fronts and having to deal with the influx of American soldiers for the Allies, Hitler and his ilk realized that they could not continue to just house millions of Jews in various ghettos without severe strain on the economy. So, these men were put together to devise a solution.
Now, we all know what ended up happening. At this "conference" it was decided that the Jews would be exterminated, en masse, with help from poison gas. We've all studied this in history class, probably from elementary to middle to high school.
What was truly remarkable about Conspiracy, written with the actual transcript of the meeting that took place, was, for me at least, the relative ease those men solved the "Jewish Problem". The movie itself is a few minutes over an hour and a half. The conference at Berlin took, in real life, just about two hours.
Two hours that sealed the fate, in the most ghastly manner, of millions of Jews.
Two hours.
I mean, are you kidding me?
What also astounded me was how few of those men, after the war, found any kind of justice. Many of them were put on trial for war crimes and, if they weren't sentenced to four years or time served or were released for good behavior, they were let go due to lack of evidence.
The transcript of the meeting was not found until 1947 but . . . C'mon. It's called going back and reentering evidence.
I know I wrote in my thoughts about The Reader that it was hard to assign blame for something as large as the Holocaust, but these men were the architects of the Holocaust, second only to Hitler. The fact that so many of them managed to escape true justice is, to me, a mark of exactly how fucked up this world truly is.
The one cool thing was that one of the men, one of the men who was really into the gas chambers, was taken by Israeli soldiers in Argentina (where he had, alongside many other Nazis, escaped to). He was taken back, tried, and hanged in 1962.
But, anyway. Yeah. Depressing time. I don't remember putting Conspiracy in my queue. It was a BBC film from 2001 starring Stanley Tucci, Kenneth Branagh, and Colin Firth (in what must be one of the worst German accents of all time. I thought he was playing an Englishman.)
The movie is about a meeting that occurred in Berlin in 1942 with 12 or 13 German SS officers and governmental workers. The meeting was arranged to discuss the "Jewish Question". Recognizing that fighting a war on two fronts and having to deal with the influx of American soldiers for the Allies, Hitler and his ilk realized that they could not continue to just house millions of Jews in various ghettos without severe strain on the economy. So, these men were put together to devise a solution.
Now, we all know what ended up happening. At this "conference" it was decided that the Jews would be exterminated, en masse, with help from poison gas. We've all studied this in history class, probably from elementary to middle to high school.
What was truly remarkable about Conspiracy, written with the actual transcript of the meeting that took place, was, for me at least, the relative ease those men solved the "Jewish Problem". The movie itself is a few minutes over an hour and a half. The conference at Berlin took, in real life, just about two hours.
Two hours that sealed the fate, in the most ghastly manner, of millions of Jews.
Two hours.
I mean, are you kidding me?
What also astounded me was how few of those men, after the war, found any kind of justice. Many of them were put on trial for war crimes and, if they weren't sentenced to four years or time served or were released for good behavior, they were let go due to lack of evidence.
The transcript of the meeting was not found until 1947 but . . . C'mon. It's called going back and reentering evidence.
I know I wrote in my thoughts about The Reader that it was hard to assign blame for something as large as the Holocaust, but these men were the architects of the Holocaust, second only to Hitler. The fact that so many of them managed to escape true justice is, to me, a mark of exactly how fucked up this world truly is.
The one cool thing was that one of the men, one of the men who was really into the gas chambers, was taken by Israeli soldiers in Argentina (where he had, alongside many other Nazis, escaped to). He was taken back, tried, and hanged in 1962.