The Wannsee Conference

A meticulous reconstruction of the meeting of 14 top German officials in a Berlin suburb on January 20, 1942, that set the Final Solution in motion. (Among those present were Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann.) Directed by Heinz Schirk from a screenplay by Paul Mommertz, this docudrama was financed largely by German and Austrian TV and shown overseas in 1984. Convincingly done and predictably chilling, though it isn’t clear from the credits how much of the meeting is drawn from existing records and how much comes from the filmmakers’ imaginations. But it doesn’t teach us anything we haven’t already learned from much better films on the subject, such as Shoah. In German with subtitles. (JR)

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