ScoobyWell Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

SteinMo What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

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.

rudge49 I second the "fly on the wall" comment, this one almost has a cinema verite feel to it. One thing that impressed me was the business-like feel to, no table thumping speeches proclaiming loyalty to the Fuehrer or railing about the "Jewish Problem." Instead a group of second and third rank officials-important cogs in a machine but people little known outside their particular spheres-are discussing how to implement the orders of their superiors. In some respects it's almost like a sales meeting, I recall Heydrich says to one participant "We're taking it off your hands" and at the end he telephones Himmler and says "Our position was accepted across the board.", again, like a sales representative telling his boss that they've won the Big Contract. Frightening way to look at it but that's the way it was.

gracchi This movie is a fascinating 'fly on the wall' look at the infamous Wannsee Conference held on 20 Jan 1942. As they snack on food and sip on fine French Wines, the 'paper pushers', 'yes men', 'intellectuals' and 'hatchet men' of the Third Reich debate the fate of 11 million people.There is another movie that also looks at this same 90 min. meeting called 'Conspiracy' - which is available on DVD & VHS through Amazon.com. Although the 'WannseeKonferenz' is the better movie (and 'Conspiracy' sometimes comes across as a flashy imitation), I strongly urge everyone to watch both movies. Both movies have the same people attending the conference, but how each attendee is portrayed at the conference is strikingly different. Most of the attendees in 'Conspiracy' (except for Dr. Klopfer) are viewed as flawed intellectuals, but full of grace, charm and manners (which makes a nice stark comparison with what they are discussing). Almost all of the attendees in 'The Wannsee Conference' (except for the female secretary) are shown as crude, corrupt pigs that differ with each other only as to how to divide their 'power'. In particular after watching both versions, I am most curious as to the 'real' Major Lange. The crude drunken Major Lange of 'The Wannsee Conference' seems more likely to be butchering 1000's of Jews at Riga than the soft spoken, charming, well mannered Major Lange of 'Conspiracy'.

larcher-2 The one really horrifying film about Shoah. None of the rest, especially Schindler's List, comes anywhere close. In this movie, nobody visibly dies; a roomful of bureaucrats chatters for an hour or so about the most efficient ways to go about the final solution. The ones who seem the worst (Eichmann, Heydrich) meet briefly to talk about co-opting the suckers; the one who seems the best horrifies us by dragging us in to cheering for him when he haggles about saving 70,000 "half-Jews." We are in the depths of Hell when we watch men in clean suits pencil in the details of every horror, pausing only for light refreshment and a bit of shagadelic banter with the babes.