From Stalin To Hitler

This understated little TV movie features some monstrously talented actors of the stage and screen.  But the truly monstrous thing about it is that it’s “screenplay” is taken 80% verbatim from an actual transcript of a wintery meeting of senior (and often, strangely at odds with each other) Nazi party members to discuss the “final solution.”  The was the infamous Wannsee Conference

Here we have to run down who plays who since these are recent historical figures:

Kenneth Branagh:  Reinhardt Heydrick SS

Stanley Tucci:  Adolf Eichmann

Peter Sullivan:  SS. Col. Eberhard “Karl” Schöngarth

Ben Daniels:  Dr. Joseph Bühler

Ewan Stewart:  Dr. Georg Leibbrandt

Brain Pettifer:  Dr. Alfred Meyer

Colin Firth:  Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart

Nicholas Woodeson:  SS Lt. Gen. Otto Hofmann

Jonathan Coy:  Eric Neumann

David Thelfall:  Dr. Wilhelm Kritzinger

Ian McNiece:  Dr. Gerhard Klopfer

Brendan Coyle:  SS Maj. Gen. Heinrich Müller

The house that this historic and horrible meeting took place in was the residence of wealthy Jews, who the Nazi’s had “evacuated”.  It was held during the literal dead of winter, when many Europeans were starving [Jan. 20, 1942], and yet this house was brimming with canapés and delectable trivialities of which the many of the most well off Europeans could only dream of at the time.  This food screams violence in and of itself.  The nature of privileged indifference that these horrible people consume it, is also a form a violence.  It is almost as if they are symbolically consuming their future victims—and kind of sacrificial feast.

When they sit down to actually discuss what is to be done about “the Jewish problem,” the utter banality of their speech is shocking.  It is an extreme form psychological violence.  Although no actual recording of the meeting exists, there were enough descriptions of the argument that took place between Stuckart (Colin Firth) and Heydrick (Kenneth Branagh), that the filmed cadence of the speech rings spot on.  It is well known that the Nazi’s came to this horrible place with verve and ease; never pausing along the way for redress or fear of consequence.  They really believed all of their party rhetoric, the same way that kids believe in the tooth-fairy or Santa.  The way they saw the outcome of the war was a for-gone conclusion; and probability thinking, what most of us call reality, never kicked in.  When a large portion of a society wants to drag everyone to CrazyTown, there is very little that more realistic, one could say “more civilized,” portions of that society can do to stop it.  This is why some people in this country get worried about the rise of violent political rhetoric, or the heavy military reliance on “private security”—because that is how it got started in Germany, leading the whole world down the lane of Fascism.  

In this film, we see nothing violent, it’s violence is in planned description, we hear violence.  The explanation of the building of permanent gas chambers to other attendees is positively nauseating for the viewer.  Never mind that at least one actual member of the party did become physically sick at the description of such a monstrous and efficient way that so many people going to go their deaths—for what??  To feed the fires of the perceived German ethnic superiority.  This isn’t just violence for the sake of war, or even national security, it isn’t violence that is even merely severely motivated by racial or religious bigotry, it is the worst, most cowardly kind of violence.  It is violence that is demanded by controlling political party to serve a national purpose of keeping them in charge and keeping the public with a perception that they are in the best of hands.  They killed people on industrial levels so that they would, as their political thinking went, the German people would “like” them.

Part of Auschwitz Gas Chamber

There is a theory about cultures that has been extrapolated from domestic child abuse—that the abused become the abusers—emulating with terrible detail the pattern of abuse that they themselves suffered.  The Romans certainly abused the Germans to an extreme.  They were part of the so-called “barbarian hordes.”  That some faction of their population would attempt to make their national identity over into that of the new Roman empire would make some sense, if one follows the notion that cultures can be like abused children.  Why it would take until the 20^th century for this to happen is a bit puzzling.    It seems that politically, the climate was ripe for this to occur after German defeat in World War I.  However, there is no doubt that the Nazi party engaged extreme Roman emulation.  It was admiration that soared to such levels, that traditional German heroes who had helped defeat and expel the Romans from German tribal lands were deliberately left out of the so called “Nazi pantheon”—“heroes” that were chosen by the Nazi party for a type of ethnic “canonization.”  This, to me, says loads about the role of “myth building” in Nazi Germany.  On this level they were psychologically abusing their own people—telling them, demanding of them, how they must think about themselves as Germans—making up a history that was a fiction and flinging it all over the populace.  This form of thinking provides a framework with which to view this film and attempt to understand the “justification” for such planned and excruciating  mass murder.  Here we see that the worst violence, is the quiet type.  It cold, calculating and utterly implacable.  It is violence not just against the world at large in the form war and invasion, it is not even merely industrial murder; it is self-serving justification to psychologically mind-rape the very populace they are claiming to elevate to the status of the “master race.”

Ovens (With Bodies) At Buchenwald