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| Alexander Fehling as Johann Radmann |
After seeing Labyrinth of Lies on Friday, I wanted to
get my reaction down before I lost the thread and before my enthusiasm
cooled. With apologies to Pascal and
Cicero, I didn’t have the time to write a short review of this entertaining and
informative film, so I wrote a long one instead. Since then, I’ve had more time, so I’ve
written a shorter one, as well. Because
this is the digital age, and you can easily unburden yourself of too many words
with the flick of a delete button, I have no shame in sending you both
versions. I’ll put the short version
first.
The short version:
In the 1930s,
Germany, under Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, unleashed misery and chaos upon the
world. By the time the Third Reich was
defeated in 1945, untold millions of people were dead, a largely successful
attempt had been made to wipe out every Jewish man, woman and child in
extermination camps, Europe’s economies were in ruin, and we still ask ourselves
to this day how Germans could have participated in such evil doings.
Unfortunately,
that human disaster was followed by another, a build-up of hostilities between
two forces once joined to fight Hitler, the world of Stalinist communism and
the Western world committed to a capitalist ideology.
In order to fight
the Communists, the West, led by the Americans, now the world’s leading
superpower, cut short the pursuit of Nazi war criminals, including those who
ran the concentration camp at Auschwitz, which has come to represent to most of
us the pinnacle of the mechanized streamlined evil that was Nazism.
Every age gives us
heroes, and as Nazism was effectively being extended into the Cold War through
neglect, a group of men and women in Germany stood up and resisted the
pressures to bury that evil and to dull the memory of the murderers of the six
million Jews and others at Auschwitz. They were
lawyers who used their legal system both to punish these men, but also, and more importantly, to raise the consciousness of the German people about what had happened in
their name, believing that not to do so only extended Germany’s shame.
These legal Nazi hunters,
Fritz Bauer, Attorney General of the State of Hessen and his team of
prosecutors, had their hands tied behind their backs because the German legal
system they were working under was the same legal system, still in place, that
had defended the worst perpetrators of war crimes at Nuremberg. Just as East and West was divided by communist
and capitalist ideologies, two legal systems were at loggerheads. While the highest value within the legal
philosophy that drove the Nuremberg Tribunal was the rights of the individual,
the highest German value was legally-constituted authority, and duty to that
authority. Under the German system, there was a wide gap between morality and the
law, and reason determined that a man could not be punished, even for the most
evil of deeds, if those deeds were not illegal at the time.
Labyrinth of Lies (Labyrinth of
Silence, in German) is the story of those lawyers and their struggle to
overcome that legal system and reach the conscience of the German people.
The long version:
The Cold War, the four decade long standoff between the Soviet Empire and the West, is generally
thought to have started in earnest when the Soviets tried to close off access to Berlin
by the Western powers in 1948 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989. In reality, the Cold War actually began the moment the Russians and
Americans stopped fighting the Nazis and began an all-out competition for
hearts and minds and territory and power.
That period of
time is intensely personal to me. It was my coming of age time. I had finished school and was just starting my adult life. And because I had joined the army and gone to work
for the Army Security Agency, I was in Berlin from 1962 till 1965, as part of what was
perhaps the greatest collection of snoopers in the world at the time. I
remember 40,000 being tossed around as the number of people in Berlin involved
in espionage. Some of it would become the stuff of thriller films for
decades afterwards, right up to the present moment. Other parts of it
were, if observed up close, routine and dull as dishwater, including my point
of contact with the “Rooskies,” or “die da drüben (those guys over there)” depending
on whether you used the bad guy term my colleagues wearing the American uniform
used, or the one used by my Aunt Frieda and Uncle Otto and their fellow
Berliners, which focused on the tragedy of separation.
My colleagues and
I listened in on communist party cadre sharing information with each other
about broken water mains, chemical plant mis-deliveries and visitors from Moscow
who had to be met at the airport. All terribly top secret at the
time. All of absolutely no significance whatsoever a half century later.
Inside the
walls of those quonset huts on top of Teufelsberg in Berlin, we were given to
understand we were fighting for God, country and apple pie. Not far outside those walls, across the country, in Frankfurt, something else was happening which wasn't even on our radar. The Germans were beginning to come to terms at
long last with the horrors of the Third Reich. A courageous bunch of folk
were making it their goal to smash the comforting notion that those horrors could
and should be put to bed and forgotten.
Astonished at the
discovery that many Germans could not even identify Auschwitz as a place on a map,
much less as a source of German shame, local prosecutors began taking up the
task of charging the murderers of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other
victims of the Holocaust. The beginning and ending of the Frankfurt
Auschwitz Trials coincided almost to the day with the beginning and ending of
my time with the ASA in Germany. That coincidence adds a layer of significance for me, and helps me take this story to heart.
I learned of this coincidence only yesterday, a half century after these events took place, while watching the
film Labyrinth of Lies (German: Im Labyrinth des Schweigens), a somewhat
fictionalized treatment of the buildup to those trials. It's a trivial coincidence, actually, but I’m struck by the irony that this story about how one could live so close to something and remain unaware that it was happening was being mirrored by my ignorance of the Frankfurt trials. In December of 1963 I had not yet gone to Berlin. I was living in Frankfurt.
The film’s
director, Giulio Ricciarelli, was born in Milan but he has made a career as
a German stage and film actor for twenty-five years and calls Munich
home. Labyrinth of Lies is his first full-length film. He
might have made a documentary, but chose instead to fictionalize the story
somewhat and create an entertaining tale of detective work. It's not so much
fictionalized, actually, as gussied up with pretty people. Some might
want to say this hero-making and prettifying only cheapens the actual story of
the untiring efforts of probably more ordinary bureaucrats who might not dance
and make love as well, but I think that would be terribly unfair. A bit
of sugar makes the medicine go down. And if you find a bit of padding
unworthy, remember that the story is ultimately about a man who devoted his life to
putting his fellow Germans in a better place to take responsibility for their
history. That part of the story was not fictionalized; that actually happened.
The storyline is
straightforward. It begins in 1958, thirteen years after war’s end.
The Bundesrepublik under Konrad Adenauer is experiencing an economic
miracle. Nobody is remotely interested in talking about the recent
disaster. Auschwitz survivor Thomas Gnielka passes a
schoolyard one day and recognizes one of the teachers as the former Auschwitz concentration camp commander. He takes this information to the authorities, hoping to have the man arrested and
prosecuted, but finds not only no interest, but actual hostility. As luck would have it, there is a strict by-the-book kind of guy working in the D.A.'s office, (we're into fiction now) a man named Johann Radmann. Radmann is bored with his job of processing traffic violations and hoping for
a more exciting job. The main thrust of the plot derives from the fact
that when Radmann takes on the case, and finds to his surprise that he has the Attorney General at his back, he is not prepared for the discovery of how many
toes he is about to step on.
Radmann burns himself
out, ultimately, trying to bring Josef Mengele to justice. He learns that although Mengele lives in Argentina, he visits his home in Germany
regularly and his movements are known to the German police and the local authorities. He has
friends in high places and comes and goes freely. Having to recognize the
limits of his power, Radmann struggles with his boss’s view that justice must
take a back seat to recognition, that punishment should not be the ultimate
goal of their investigation but bringing their countrymen to accept a sense of
responsibility for history.
Some have
criticized the film for its undue emphasis on chasing down Mengele when there
were so many other stories to tell. I don’t share that criticism at
all. It was the failure to capture Mengele that brought home the ugly
truth that Germany’s descent into darkness didn’t end in 1945, but lasted well
into the Cold War in the form of denial.
In a very real
sense, you can blame the Americans for a good bit of the German failure to
understand what they had done at Auschwitz and elsewhere during the Second
World War. If you’ve seen that magnificent film, Judgment at Nuremberg,
you’ll remember the frustration the prosecutors had at having their hands
tied when trying to track down war criminals. “The Germans are now our
friends,” they were told. “We need them to fight the Russians.” The
task of chasing down the killers of six million Jews, gypsies, socialists,
homosexuals and others would fall on the likes of Simon Wiesenthal. The
Americans were more inclined to help the Nazis blend into the woodwork.
And if the Americans, the war victors who now ran the Western World, were not
going to press for justice, why should Germans themselves ask for trouble?
Reconciliation would seem to be in order. Calming down.
Getting on with it. Besides, how does one “punish” an entire nation, even
if one can agree that they deserve punishment?
And so it came to
pass. The Americans were not the only enablers of denial and cover-up. The Vatican, too, either actively participated or at least stood by (it
depends on whom you ask) when the Catholic Church in Croatia formed what came
to be called Ratlines to smuggle Nazis out of Europe to safety in South
America. And there was nobody around – certainly not the Americans - to
rap on the knuckles of Pius XII, except people of conscience like Rolf Hochhut,
whose play, The Deputy, about the Vatican’s alleged support of Hitler
and indifference to the Holocaust, was also making headlines in Germany in
1963.
In 1949 I was
beaten up on the playground because I grew up in a place largely populated by
immigrants and at one point our naïve fourth-grade teacher thought it would be
a great idea if we all spoke about where our “people” had come from. Most
said Italy. There was a sprinkling of Ireland and Poland. I was the
only one to say Germany. (Canada seemed so dull next to Italy and Poland,
and I identified more with my German side than with my Scottish/Canadian
side. I would pay for my innocence when some Italian kid
(Mussolini? Who’s Mussolini?) let me have it square in the face. For being
a Nazi, he said. My mother’s response when I burst into tears at the
question, “What happened in school today?” was “You’ve got to be more
careful.” She, who hid her German identity once the rocks went through
the stained-glass windows at the local St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church, was
being motherly. She had no interest in politics. She just wanted
her little boy to be safe.
My mother’s side
of the family, the German side, were a marvelous bunch of people. They
gave advice like, “If ever you’re out in the world and alone, find people who
love to sing and you’ll be safe.” They danced, loved their beer and their
cigars and their bratwursts. And more than anything, they loved to
laugh. After getting beaten up for being German, I set about trying to
find out what made the bullies pick on me. What I found out shook me to
the core. I was an American, after all, and Germany was still the enemy,
and I didn’t have to go far to uncover the grizzly details of Nazi
atrocities. It took me a long time to reconcile, as a 9-year-old, how
these people who could make steamed potatoes so delicious with a little butter
and some dill, could be the same people who could make the trains run on time to
Buchenwald and Auschwitz and just think of it as another day’s work.
“There are good
people and bad people wherever you go,” was my German grandmother’s
explanation. But even though I was only nine at the time, it was already
no longer a sufficient explanation, and I have spent my life with such ethical
questions as to what degree do individuals bear responsibility for the groups
they identify with, family, neighborhood, race or nation. And is there
such a thing as collective guilt? And is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
right when he says in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners that we are
making a terrible mistake blaming Hitler for the evil of the Holocaust, that
guilt belongs on the heads of the entire German people. Every last one of
them.
Don’t agree with that?
Then how do you go about assessing which ones deserve blame, which ones should
get some sort of slap on the wrist, and which ones should be exonerated?
Does the American genocide of the North American Indian and the centuries of
slavery mean Americans have no right to speak on the topic? Ditto for the
British and the French and their years of bloody growth-stunting
imperialism? Does the fact that evil is a human condition obviate the
need for identifying crimes and criminals and punishing them? A naïve
bunch of questions, ultimately, and our answers have not been satisfactory so
far, because they keep coming back up, over and over again, year after
year. In any case, here we are, in 2015, and the Germans are making
a movie about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. And I feel I have to ask
why. And why now?
I can guess at the answer to the why-now question. It appears to be in the zeitgeist now for Germany to finally come to terms with itself as a land of immigrants. This involves looking for a solid basis on which to build the new nation. Does Germany have a leitkultur, an “original and foundational
German culture” worth defending? Does it have a right to impose that on new-comers? If so, how does the Holocaust figure in the way that leitkultur is constituted? Can one justify setting the Holocaust aside as an aberration in German history and get on with it? Can Germans be proud to be Germans again? Yes, most would say. But only if history is not buried and the response to it is responsible. And there's the rub. What does that actually mean?
The simple why question has a more obvious answer.
An event as momentous as the Holocaust demands three things of us: that we
learn and know about it, that we not forget it, and that we develop a
satisfactory response to it. Labyrinth of Lies tells the story of
how the goals of the Cold War nearly led to our falling down on even the first and simplest of
these three steps. It is the story of a number of heroic men and women, driven by
personal morality and a sense of responsibility to raise the consciousness of
the German people for what happened in their name. At the heart of the
story is the question put to the chief prosecutor. Johann Radmann is
asked, “Do you want every young German to ask if their father was a murderer?”
“Yes,” he responds, “That’s exactly what I want!”
Some background is
in order. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials make no sense without the
knowledge that the Americans pushed the Germans to take the low road and let
criminal Nazis go unpunished so that the wheels of industry could continue to
turn efficiently and so that Werner von Braun would not be the only German to
come to work with the Americans against the Russians.
Another piece of
important information needed in establishing the context of the film is the
fact that the German legal system approached war crimes differently from the
way they had been approached by the victors at Nuremberg. You will
remember that the single most important outcome of the trials at Nuremberg was
the judgment that one must accept responsibility for one’s individual actions,
that the excuse of following orders doesn’t hold water. If you kill someone,
you cannot hide behind the excuse that somebody told you to pull the
trigger. The law is governed by the notion that the individual is the
basic unit of society, not the collective, and every individual must stand
behind every act he or she performs, ultimately.
The German legal
system had not adopted the Nuremberg principles by the time of the Frankfurt
Auschwitz trials, however. They were still governed by the authoritarian notion
that if a legally constituted authority gave you an order, you simply had a
duty to obey it. You might be charged as an accomplice to murder, but not
as a murderer yourself. Not only had Nazis gone into hiding, but
the legal system had their backs, so to speak, by continuing to argue, as they
had at Nuremberg, that while the murderers at Auschwitz might be morally
reprehensible, they were not legally liable. The Allies had enforced
victors’ justice. The Tribunal had applied ex post facto law and was violating
the nullum crimen principle, that there is no crime without a law to make it a crime. Both at Nuremberg and here in Frankfurt (because the system had not evolved), the killers had a legal “devil made me do it” defense. I’m not responsible. My boss is, and
onward up the ladder to the state itself, or in Germany’s case, the Führer,
which amounts to the same thing.
The impact of the
principles established at the Nuremberg Tribunal cannot be
underestimated. In plain language, and in fact, the Americans had
applied a kind of “victor’s justice,” demanding that those charged with crime
should not have obeyed the laws in place, but laws they insisted should have
been in place, i.e., the kinds of laws the Americans governed themselves
by. The very legitimacy of the International Military Tribunal was
further weakened by the fact that the judges refused to allow any criticism of
war crimes committed by the Allied powers, such as the bombing of the civilian
populations of Hamburg and Dresden. And of the wholesale deportation of
Germans from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other places east of the
Oder-Neisse line, what today would be referred to as “ethnic cleansing.”
And the fact that one of the judges was from the Soviet Union, a country which
had committed acts against minority populations and political enemies more or
less equivalent to those committed by the Third Reich.
This is way more
detail than is reasonable for a film review, but I wanted to make
the point that the film’s “heroes” who were trying to find German guilt for war
crimes were not up against an arbitrarily established set of cowardly
prejudices. They were up against a well-reasoned and well-articulated
legal tradition, even if today their arguments may no longer be persuasive.
One of the
benefits of viewing the film, besides its obvious entertainment value, enhanced
by good acting and good directing, are the questions it raises. Like why there were so many hurdles one had to jump along the way to a full-scale world-wide adoption of
the Nuremberg Principles, the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. And how we might want to (or not want to) adjust the filter
we judge the crimes of the Third Reich by now that the United States itself has
gone from being a leader in establishing these sources of morality to flaunting
its abuse of them on the grounds of alleged national security, and placing the
state above the individual in terms of the law. The moral questions this
German film about German history raises has far broader implications.
The principles
articulated by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg led ultimately to the establishment of the UN Charter and
a consensus that there is such a thing as an international community.
As a legal concept, with an International Criminal Court, and not just as
an academic construct. Without the concept of international
customary law as superior to the laws of individual states, there would be no
mechanism for furthering human rights generally. They would remain little
more than an impossible dream. The clout necessary to bring war criminals
to justice before the ICC is still weak – as evidenced by the failure to make
those responsible for the invasion of Iraq or for Abu Ghraib or for Guantanamo
face charges, for example – but the concept of international law is firmly in
place. At the time of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, it was not, and
bringing Nazis to trial in Germany was an uphill climb indeed.
As Germans
continue to use art and the media to comb through their history and expose
facts and events too long hidden, they are inevitably up against the challenge
of attracting and hanging onto their audience. The question is worth
repeating: who wants to listen to yet another tale of German criminality?
Who wants to call poor old grandpa, now in his doddering years or on his
deathbed, a killer? Particularly if he mostly stood and watched.
Finding the right
mechanisms to make this story palatable was crucial. Because the task is
daunting, one might forgive Ricciardelli and the producers of Labyrinth of Lies
for taking the three actual public prosecutors in the D.A.’s office in
Frankfurt appointed by Attorney General Fritz Bauer to conduct the
investigation and making them into a single handsome and terribly likeable
young composite, Johann Radmann, played by Alexander Fehling. The
fictional Radmann is portrayed as a virtual superman who stands alone against
the bullying of his colleagues and even his own mother, to fight the good
fight. Add a love story, a bit of humor here and there, and you’ve got
some pretty good entertainment.
It also helps that they
made use of the talents of one of Germany’s best known actors, Gert Voss, whom
some like to call the Lawrence Olivier of Germany, to play the role of Fritz
Bauer. Some big shoes to fill there, and Voss does the job superbly. An early opponent of the Nazis, Bauer was jailed and sent to a
concentration camp for a time in 1933, long before the “Final Solution” days,
when he likely would not have survived. He was released in 1935 and found
his way to Sweden, where he worked with Willi Brandt for a time before making his
way back to Germany in 1949 where he entered the civil service and rose to
become Attorney General (Generalstaatsanwalt) for Hessen, where Frankfurt is
located, and in a position to launch a campaign for justice. In fact,
Bauer chose the more important goal, as he saw it, of raising the German
consciousness about its wartime responsibility. His efforts led to a
class action suit.
Bauer once stated,
"In the justice system, I live as in exile." In the film, if I
remember correctly, he says “I’ve got no place to go outside this room,”
referring to his office. In his darkest moments of despair, having
learned that Germany was protecting the likes of Josef Mengele and things were
much worse than he originally thought, the Radmann character asks Bauer, his Jewish boss
why he chose to stay in Germany, given all that has happened. Bauer then
speaks for victims of injustice and brutality by governments all over the world
when he says, “This is where I met my wife. This is where the pond is
where my daughter played with ducks for the first time. This is the only
home I know.”
Voss died in
Vienna of leukemia about the time the film was released. Watching this actor exercise his craft was a
highlight of the film for me.
Many will remember
Alexander Fehling, who plays Chief prosecutor Johann Radmann, from Quentin
Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, in which he played the role
of Staff Sgt. Wilhelm.
Others in the cast
include Johannes Krish as Simon Kirsch; Friederike Becht as Marlene, Radmann’s
love interest; Hansi Jochmann as “Schmittchen,” Radmann’s secretary; Johann von
Bülow as Radmann’s slow to come around colleague, Otto Haller; Robert
Hunger-Bühler as opposition force Walter Friedberg; and André Szymanski as
Thomas Gnielka, the camp survivor who gets the ball rolling.
I’m not alone in
my view that this film is a success. It has received a rating, at the moment, of 80% by
critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 91% by viewers. (I’m with the
viewers, obviously). It has already received a number of prizes and is Germany’s submission to the category of Best Foreign Language Film at the
88th Academy Awards in 2016. It opened this week (October 2) in the
U.S.
I consider it a
must-see.
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