The Conference begins on the morning of 20 January 1942, in a villa on the picturesque Lake Wannsee in Berlin, where leading members of the Nazi regime including SS, Reich Chancellery, ministries, police and administration were invited by Reinhard Heydrich to come together. This meeting would go down in history as the “Wannsee Conference”. The sole topic on the agenda that morning was what the Nazis called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: the organisation of the systematic mass murder of millions of Jews throughout Europe.
The Conference follows the minutes of this meeting as recorded by Adolf Eichmann, and the event is shown for exactly what it was: an objective, matter-of-fact bureaucratic act, the veiled language of which makes the horror even more inhumane.
What has been created by director Matti Geschonneck, his screenwriters, Magnus Vattrodt and Paul Mommertz, and the impeccable cast and crew, is an intimate dramatisation that retells, with brutal and nightmarish honesty and coruscating banality, the story of a historical event, which leads to a humongous, horrifying crime, one of the great shames and indelible stains in human history.
The seemingly civilised conduct of debate and argument by lawyers, bureaucrats and the military as they convene to determine the fate of European Jewry belies the barbaric outcome.
Admirable qualities like efficiency and rule of law are applied to despicable acts, and with little or no denying that the agenda is genocide.
The Conference could well have been yawn inspiring. Instead, fuelled by an impeccable ensemble cast, it is a gripping examination of the cynical nature of humankind’s inhumanity to what it sees as “the other”, inferior to itself, and is a startling reminder that these very horrors perpetrated eighty hateful years ago could happen again.
The Conference is an enthralling history lesson, drenched in drama, detailed in the dynamic of the time, a lesson not lessened by the passing of time, rather, reinforced by those who would repeat the errors of an era.
