Conspiracy is an excellent HBO TV movie about the Wannsee Conference. It was to a villa just off the Wannsee lake on the outskirts of Berlin that on 20 January 1942 Reich Main Security Office (RHSA) supremo Reinhard Heydrich, with authority granted by Hitler via Himmler and Göring, assembled a conference of senior Nazi officials from across the panopoly of organisations that administrated the territories of the Reich. This was the meeting where the planned, mechanised and audited mass murder of the Jewish Holocaust was laid out in its entirety to those men charged with its undertaking, the full horror masked in bureaucratic mildness.
The film is, at its simplest, a room full of men talking. There is no action, no romance, no sub-plots, no special effects, no twist and no pay-off.
The ending is already known. It is a tragedy in the truest sense: the drama of horrible inevitability.
Not the inevitability of nature – that Autumn follows Summer, then leads into Winter; or that the rain shall fall down and not up. This is the inevitability of actions that men have wrought unto others; men who at one point in time did that which cannot, no matter how many days pass between then and now, be undone. The inevitability that pain lingers even if wounds heal. The inevitability of complete, irreversible death – but death on such an immense, unmentionable, inconceivable scale that it should never be so much as contemplated, let alone considered, much less carried out.
SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich
Kenneth Branagh
- Chief of the RSHA Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
- Chaired the meeting
- Joined NSDAP August 1931, and personally hired by Himmler to run SS counter intelligence unit
- Fatally wounded in Praha by assassins in May 1942; died 4 June
SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann
Stanley Tucci
- Head of Referat IV B4 of the Gestapo
- Took minutes of the meeting
- Appointed ‘Transportation Administrator’ for the Final Solution
- Joined NSDAP April 1932
- Escaped to Argentina after the war where he lived under an assumed identity
- Kidnapped by agents of the Mossad in 1960 and transported to Isrtael where he stood trial in 1961
- Executed 31 May 1962
Dr Josef Bühler
Ben Daniels
- State Secretary, General Government of Poland
- Joined NSDAP April 1933
- Subsequently tried in post-war Poland
- Found guilty of war crimes and executed in Kraków, 22 August 1948
Dr Roland Freisler
Owen Teale
- State Secretary, Reich Ministry of Justice
- President of the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court)
- Joined NSDAP July 1925
- Killed in air raid on Berlin, 3 February 1945
SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann
Nicholas Woodeson
- Head of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA)
- Joined NSDAP April 1923
- Joined SS April 1931
- Tried for war crimes in 1948 and imprisoned for 25 years
- Pardoned and released in 1954
- Died 1982
SS-Oberführer Dr Gerhard Klopfer
Ian McNeice
- Permanent Secretary, Nazi Party Chancellery
- Joined NSDAP 1933
- Joined SA and Gestapo 1934
- Captured after the war and charged with war crimes, but released for lack of evidence
- Died 1987
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger
David Threlfall
- Permanent Secretary, Reich Chancellery
- Joined NSDAP 1938
- Captured 1946
- Recanted for role in Holocaust at Nuremberg Trials and released
- Died 25 April 1947
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange
Barnaby Kay
Commander of the SiPo and the SD for the General-District Latvia
- Deputy of the Commander of the SiPo and the SD for the Reichskommissariat Ostland
Dr Georg Leibbrandt
Ewan Stewart
- Reichsamtleiter, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories
- Joined NSDAP 1933
- Arrested by Allies in 1945 and interned until his release in 1949
- Arrested by German authorities for role in Holocaust but subsequently released without trial in 1950
- Died 16 June 1982
Martin Luther
Kevin McNally
- Under Secretary, Reich Foreign Ministry
- Joined NSDAP and SA on 1 Match 1933
- Sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp for intrigues against his superior, Ribbentrop
- Liberated May 1945 by Soviet army but died soon after of a heart attack
Dr Alfred Meyer
Brian Pettifer
- Gauleiter, State Secretary and Deputy Reich Minister, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories
- Joined NSDAP 1928
- Committed suicide, 11 April 1945
SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller
Brendan Coyle
- Chief of Amt IV (Gestapo)
- Recruited to SD by Heydrich in 1933
- Joined SS 1934
- Joined NSDAP 1939
- Last seen in the Führerbunker 1 May 1945
Erich Neumann
Jonathan Coy
- State Secretary, Office of the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan
- Joined NSDAP May 1933
- Joined SS 1934
- Interned after the wear but released in 1948 due to ill health
- Thought to have died either in 1948 or 1951
SS-Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth
Pete Sullivan
- Commander of the SiPo and the SD in the General Government
- Joined (then left) NSDAP in 1922
- Rejoined NSDAP 1933
- Joined SS 1 March 1933
- Captured by Allied forces after the war and tried for murdering a PoW by a military court
- Found guilty and executed 15 May 1946
Dr Wilhelm Stuckart
Colin Firth
- State Secretary, Reich Interior Ministry
- Joined NSDAP December 1922 and remained a member until its banning the following November
- Rejoined NSDAP (by proxy) in 1930
- Joined SA 1932
- Joined SS December 1933 on Himmler’s recommendation
- Co-drafted 1935’s Nuremberg Laws on racial purity
- Served as Interior Minister in Dönitz’s brief post-Hitler ‘Flensburg Government’ of May 1945
- Arrested and prosecuted for role in racial laws and genocide at ‘Ministries Trial’
- Sentenced to time served and released in April 1949
- Died 15 November 1953
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