Conspiracy [2001]

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Kritzinger, whose department has proceeded on assurances the Jews will be held in "liveable conditions", never lets Eichmann or Heydrich get away with cloaking brutality with ambiguity. On the other hand it's clear that the "liveable conditions" are in reality overcrowded Polish ghettos with a high risk of disease. Heydrich later calls Kritzinger on his hypocrisy for being willing to accept everything short of genocide. Think about every bad decision you’ve read in a memorandum. Generally, those memos were the result of people sitting in a room. In that room, probably, were people with less bad ideas who were overpowered by more forceful or charismatic personalities. (President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller is said to embody the latter traits.) In “Conspiracy,” the S.S. general Reinhard Heydrich, played with an icy suavity by Kenneth Branagh, does the overpowering. When he lays out the full extent of his plans, to kill every Jew in Europe, anyone offering anything more than an uneasy look is taken away for a talking-to. In one such aside, Heydrich warns a disgusted Wilhelm Kritzinger, played by David Threlfall, “You would be a hard man to bring down, but not impossible.” (The actual Wannsee minutes don’t note any offense by Kritzinger, though some historians have said that he was more squeamish than he let on.) On a more Meta-level, the viewers with even the most basic grasp of history will definitely know or guess from the get-go what the result of the conference will be. Food Porn: There are some loving shots of the hors d'oeuvres served during the conference, possibly to contrast how cultured the attendees were to the inhumanity of their purpose.

Enemy Civil War: Discussed. Müller at several points in the film interjects when other characters protest the way that the SS is dominating the situation, explaining that there must be a single guiding hand to form policy. If there are multiple objectives then the entire process can fall into shambles as they compete against one another; he likens it to an animal having two heads and a ship having two captains. He explicitly points out that having Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring fight it out would be disastrous. Shut Up, Hannibal!: Downplayed. When Neumann is talking to Müller towards the end of the meeting, and Müller begins to again restate his usual speech about unity of vision and avoiding internal conflict, Neumann just holds up his hand and says "Spare me" before walking off in the middle of his sentence. Not to be confused with The Conspiracy. Another German film based on the same events, also called Die Wannseekonferenz, was released in 2022. Real Time: Like the German original, the events within the conference room strictly follow the minutes of the meeting that took place, which was over in less than 90 minutes.

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Heydrich insists on referring to the slaughter of Jews as "evacuation," even long after it's been made clear that they're talking about a massacre. After a while, the conference members all start correcting each other when they use a different term. Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Heydrich and Eichmann get a brief narration at the end describing what happened to them during the remainder of the war. The entire cast gets a brief text exposition, with a picture of the real person, explaining their ultimate fate after the war.

Utopia Justifies the Means: Heydrich has a personal talk with Major Lange about the duties of soldiering. Heydrich seems to view himself as some sort of impromptu mentor figure to Lange (who was the lowest-ranked man at the meeting, personally selected by Heydrich because of his experience of the mass killings in Latvia), as he tries to convince Lange that all the death they're causing (including annihilating an entire people) is for a "better future". Given Heydrich's sociopathic qualities it's doubtful that he actually believes it himself and was instead just turning up the charm, but Lange takes the message at face value. Let Me Tell You a Story: Kritzinger relates a story to Heydrich as a warning to what he is trying to accomplish, which Heydrich later relates in turn to Müller and Eichmann at the end. It concerns a boyhood friend of Kritzinger, who hated his abusive father fiercely but was devoted to his loving mother. When his mother died some years later, the man tried to cry as her casket was lowered into the grave, but wasn’t able to. When his father died at a much older age, the man couldn't control his tears. The moral of the story is that being consumed by hatred for something will mean that once that thing is gone, the hater's life will be nothing but a hollow shell anymore. Heydrich is unimpressed — after relaying the story and the warning to Eichmann and Müller, he simply remarks that he will not miss the Jews. David Threlfall as Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger: Deputy Head, Reich Chancellery.Nazi Protagonist: Every single character is either working for the Nazi government or one of its subsidiary organizations. What Happened to the Mouse?: In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue the film observes Heinrich Müller's fate is unknown. This is true: Müller is the highest-ranking Nazi whose exact fate is more or less unknown, having just vanished from Hitler's bunker in 1945 after making a comment that he would not be taken prisoner by the Soviets (which implies either suicide or some kind of escape route). To this day his whereabouts are unclear, with the main theories being that he either committed suicide/was killed in early May 1945 and subsequently buried in a mass grave — or that he survived and was recruited by the Soviets afterwards. Neither of these is considered decisively (dis)proven, but most historians tend to believe the former.