Conspiracy (2001) on Netflix
At a villa in Wannsee, Berlin, fifteen senior Nazi officials meet to settle the Jewish question. Reinhard Heydrich chairs the conference, holding a mandate to rid German territory of Jews.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In January 1942, with the Russian Front stalled and the Americans now in the war, fifteen men from across the Nazi government gather at a villa in Wannsee, Berlin, on the Führer's order. The attendees range from soldiers to lawyers, economists and administrators. Reinhard Heydrich chairs the meeting, acting on a mandate from Hermann Göring to make German territory free of Jews, and Adolf Eichmann assists him. Heydrich tells the men that policy will shift from forced emigration to what he calls evacuation. Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, a lawyer who helped write the Nuremberg Laws, warns of legal and administrative chaos; Dr. Joseph Bühler presses for the Jews in the crowded ghettos of occupied Poland to be handled first; Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger asks whether the matter is not already settled. Nothing said in the room is to be recorded.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Conspiracy (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A post-script reveals that German Foreign Office secretary Martin Luther's copy of the Wannsee minutes, recovered by the US Army in the archives of the Foreign Office in 1947, was the only record of the conference to survive.
- Mandel used the only existing copy of the conference minutes, called the Wansee Protocols, found in 1947 in the German Foreign Office files, as the basis for the script; the meeting itself occurred over 90 minutes, the same running time as the movie.
- Historical advisor Andrea Axelrod provided research and documentation amounting to 170 citations, including verifying the amount of snowfall in Wannsee on the date of the conference, while consultant Christopher Browning flagged geographical mistakes and references to events that had not yet happened in January 1942.
- Kenneth Branagh found the role of Heydrich deeply unsettling, grappling with a profound aversion towards the historical figure and with the absence of discernible motivations explaining Heydrich's chilling readiness to perpetrate genocide on an unprecedented scale.
- Pierson first brought Mandel into the project for an unproduced script entitled Complicity, a companion movie detailing the failure of the Allies to help with Jewish refugees, which never made it to the screen, most likely because of the sensitive subject of Western Allied culpability.
- Tom Hiddleston, in one of his first film roles, appears briefly at the beginning and end as a telephone operator, while Ross O'Hennessy appears at the beginning and middle as the SS officer in charge of the building.
