Two inadvertent bookends explore the Holocaust from its deceptively mundane beginning to a heretofore unstaged end. Conspiracy re-enacts the 90-minute meeting in which silky-voiced SS bureaucrat Reinhard Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh) gently bullies a roomful of Nazi functionaries into accepting the Final Solution as a fait accompli. A bloodless yet brutal testament to the violence of euphemism and groupthink—eerily indistinguishable from any middle managers' meeting—it is the banality of evil brought unignorably to life.

Eat, Drink, Kill
National Review, May 19-20, 2001, by Victorino Matus

When Stanley Tucci told Variety that HBO has got "the biggest balls in the business," he was right. Not just because the network was willing to spend millions on a movie that lacks explosive action, computer-animated effects, and nudity, but also because it planned on redefining evil on film.

The movie is Conspiracy (debuting May 19), starring Stanley Tucci and Shakespearean thespian Kenneth Branagh. Most of the film takes place in a meeting room inside an opulent villa. Fifteen men laze about, drink fine French wine, smoke cigars and cigarettes, eat roasted pork loins, herring on toast with just a dollop of sour cream, and discuss bureaucratic problems, legal intricacies, and chains of command. There's many a headache and eye rolling. A few wisecracks here and there. But in the end, they break out the champagne and find the solution to their problem: By coordinating their efforts, the remaining 11 million European Jews will be "evacuated" to camps and exterminated.

The meeting that is being chronicled is the notorious Wannsee Conference of 1942. The fifteen men assembled represent some of the highest-ranking department heads of the Third Reich. And their appearance and demeanor at this meeting defies most of our notions of villainy, at least as we are used to seeing villainy portrayed on screen. This isn't Alan Rickman of Die Hard. Not even Hannibal Lecter. Tucci plays Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann of the SS Jewish Affairs Office—formerly a gasoline salesman. Indeed, his boss Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer. And Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop used to sell champagne. It is Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil.

Portraits of mass murderers are so indelibly etched in our brains as something out of the Legion of Doom—a collection of the most gruesome looking and intimidating figures one can conjure up (or as Tucci phrased it in an interview, "mustache- twirling" bad guys). And imagining the look of fifteen men who helped engineer the deaths of six million Jews is mind- boggling. But in fact, the collection of men who planned to solve the "Jewish storage problem" was just that: men. This is something director Frank Pierson is determined to drive home. At no time in the meeting room is the camera above or below eye level, creating the sense that you are there too, complicit in some unspoken way.

As Eichmann, Tucci performs convincingly, despite his dark Italian looks—perhaps because his character is the one with whom we are most familiar from Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and from recently released transcripts of his interrogation by Israeli police. The lieutenant colonel was a bureaucrat to the extreme, willing to follow orders though fully cognizant of the consequences, and carrying out his duties with the soulless efficiency of the HAL 9000. Kenneth Branagh, on the other hand, had less to work with. The Academy Award nominee for Hamlet plays Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, second only to Himmler. History knows him only as "The Hangman" and "of diabolical cast." Branagh confesses it was enormously difficult to portray such a man, without any sense of guilt, conscience, or humanity. (Branagh also mentions he'll be more than happy never to don the SS uniform again.) Still, the actor delivers a truly terrifying performance, his friendly smile betrayed by his cold blue eyes.

Though it is explained at the outset that the movie is based on the transcripts of the Wannsee Conference, the script by Loring Mandel follows the actual minutes quite accurately. The discussions of how to handle Germans married to Jews, sterilization of men, women, and children, and, ultimately, the logistics of gas chambers, are not to be believed—and wouldn't be, had all the records been destroyed (of 30 copies made, only one survived, found in the Foreign Ministry in 1947). Of course, in the six months preceding Wannsee, Jews were already being slaughtered in the occupied territories—just not in an orderly fashion. Hence, the fifteen participants met to simply speed up the decision-making process, formalizing what was already understood: That emigration was no longer an option; the liquidation of European Jewry would now become policy.

With any movie, there is a tendency to find sympathy with at least one character. In Conspiracy, the effort to do so is futile. At times, you are led to think that one of the participants is squeamish about the Final Solution—judging by his grimace or his shifting eyes, as is the case with Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, co-drafter of the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Stuckart (played by Colin Firth) is appalled by Heydrich and Eichmann's hijacking of the meeting, whereupon they decide for all who counts as a Jew, as a half-Jew, and on methods of "evacuation." Yet Stuckart's uneasiness derives not from the act of genocide, but from the apparent flouting of the law, a law he had worked so hard to create. Stuckart quickly reaffirms his anti-Semitic credentials by insisting that Jews must not be underestimated, and that their cleverness must be reckoned with.

Another participant is Erich Neumann (Jonathan Coy), one of Hermann Göring's underlings, who also expresses a concern about the planned extermination of the Jews—why, where will we get most of our slave labor? And the same can be said of the department heads of the newly conquered Eastern territories, who resent having to be the collection centers for all the Jews, including Jews from Germany. Of all the men who exhibit signs of unease during the hour and a half meeting, only Friedrich Kritzinger (David Threlfall) of the Reich chancellory ever expresses remorse for the Holocaust—naturally, after the war is over.

Conspiracy defies the conventional drama. There isn't a single soul to root for, no happy ending, not even a sense of vindication—many of the participants, including the detestable party hack Gerhard Klopfer (Ian McNeice), evade capture or imprisonment. The viewer is left helpless and empty, having sat through one of the most notorious meetings in history, a gathering of men who ate, drank, then agreed to commit mass murder. A gathering of evil redefined.

HBO's chilling ‘Conspiracy' recounts the meeting of Nazi minds gone mad
Chicago Tribune, May 19, 2001, by Allan Johnson

What makes HBO's "Conspiracy" so chilling is that if it weren't for the subject—the Nazis' extermination of millions of Jews during World War II—it would seem like a business meeting were taking place to discuss how to improve a firm's profit margin.

That was the bottom line on Jan. 20, 1942, as 15 of Germany's High Command got together at a picturesque, snow-covered villa outside Berlin to figure out details of what would become Hitler's solution.

The "chairman" of this board meeting was high-ranking military officer Reinhard Heydrich, coolly played by Kenneth Branagh ("Hamlet").

It would be later revealed that the man who carried out this insidious plan was SS officer Adolf Eichmann, who is portrayed by Stanley Tucci ("Winchell") as a fastidious assistant to Heydrich who was just as meticulous in carrying out details for the refreshments being prepared for those attending the meeting, as he was in offering facts to prove that gas is the best method of exterminating human beings.

"Conspiracy" effectively shows how calmly and soullessly evil can be carried out.

The Faces of Evil and Its Victims
LA Times, May 18, 2001, by Howard Rosenberg

Television dramatizes history mostly in isolation. No context, driftwood in a vast ocean. So viewers have an unusual opportunity this weekend, if a painful one.

Saturday brings HBO's "Conspiracy," an uncomfortably real, brilliantly understated reprise of the Jan. 20, 1942, gathering at which arch criminals Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and 13 other important Nazis coldly addressed the problem of "the Jew." Displayed here strikingly is the "banality of evil" that noted scholar Hannah Arendt saw in Eichmann years later.

This is not the usual rant from brownshirts and leather coats, but chatty ordinariness at least as sinister, its stony forays into the arcane as to what constitutes a Jew playing almost as dark satire. The implications are unmistakable, though.

How chilling these Nazi functionaries are, how frigidly efficient.

And how valuable that viewers the evening after "Conspiracy" can connect the threads by seeing a story showing a bit of human wreckage resulting from this pivotal conference organized by Eichmann at the behest of his boss, Heydrich.

The setting for "Conspiracy" is an ornate villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the environment opulent, elegant and refined on a crisp, snowy morning. Silver and crystal are carefully polished and arranged on white linen. Flowers, cigars and place cards are set out. A fire is lit. Arriving guests throw out "Heil Hitlers" like high fives. Then wine, appetizers and a fine buffet lunch are served as butlers and adjutants stand by attentively. Less than 90 minutes later, ending a discussion as numbly procedural as a meeting of production managers at Germany's I.G. Farben, the chauffeured crowd begins leaving, having secretly codified into policy Hitler's "final solution" for European Jews.

The Nazi slaughter of Jews along with other non-Aryans was already well underway, of course, but these efforts had to be coordinated, given legal standing and endorsed by the Reich's entire state apparatus if they were to be applied to all Europe. So summon the SS and civil service boys to Wannsee, feed them canapés, shuffle a few papers, mention "deportation" for the record when you mean elimination, and goodbye Jews.

This script from Loring Mandel, direction from Frank Pierson and performances around the table yield a quiet terror that turns to intrigue during short breaks when the participants gossip and jockey privately for position. Especially strong are Colin Firth as Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of Nazi laws proclaiming a Jewish-free society; David Threlfall as turf-guarding Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger; Stanley Tucci as the obliging Eichmann; and Ian McNeice as that foulmouthed SS sausage Gerhard Klopfer.

Most notable, though, is Kenneth Branagh's smarmy SS Gen. Heydrich, aiming his eyes menacingly when not being charming and witty, the glib ideal host for a dinner party, and for a hanging.

How stunning the contrast between their victims' suffering and the bureaucratic callousness expressed by Nazi Party members dismissing them as inventory ("We cannot store these Jews").

Not until halfway through the meeting do we hear the words "gas chambers," a bit later "Auschwitz." Eichmann has done the math, cascading statistics like production quotas. Sixty thousand Jews a day up in smoke? "We can achieve that," Heydrich says.

"Conspiracy" arrives 17 years after "The Wannsee Conference," a meticulously authentic German reenactment that also drew heavily from the meeting's only surviving set of edited notes. With subtitles, it, too, staged wickedness with an almost surreal calm that belied the severe repression, roundups and murders already occurring.

Evil Holds a Fateful Meeting
Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2001, by Michael Kilian

Actor Stanley Tucci entered the room looking pale and stricken. He had just emerged from the exhibits at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Its huge central hall was being used for a reception and preview screening of his and Kenneth Branagh's new HBO movie "Conspiracy," debuting on the cable network at 8 p.m. Saturday.

This most somber of Washington spaces seemed an odd place to hold a social gathering or a film premiere, but in this case it was most fitting.

"Conspiracy" is about the infamous 1942 Wansee Conference at which 15 German officials representing a variety of departments and bureaucracies—the Nazi equivalent of American Cabinet departments—met at a manor house outside Berlin and decided the grim fate they hoped would befall more than 11 million European Jews potentially within their grasp.

Unlike most Holocaust films, "Conspiracy" has no scenes of concentration camps, midnight Gestapo raids, gas chambers or mass shootings. All that is implied. It is a 90-minute meeting with 15 men sitting around a conference table, breaking only for food and drink.

But because of the subject matter under discussion, it makes for a chilling and compelling drama.

Heading up the Wansee Conference was the suave, cunning and utterly ruthless SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, played with astonishing verisimilitude by Branagh. Tucci plays Heydrich's notorious assistant, Adolf Eichmann, who organized the meeting.

Filmed on the actual site of the conference as well as at London's Shepperton Studios, "Conspiracy" had a profound effect on Tucci from the beginning.

‘My stomach turned'

"I went through the [Wansee] museum early in the morning," he said, "and then I went back and got into my makeup, and then dressed in the [SS] uniform. As soon as I walked through the gate in that uniform, and I saw all the military vehicles there, my stomach started to turn."

Branagh said he had known little about the conference until approached about the project, and his first response was to wonder what drama there was in 15 men sitting around a room talking.

"But upon reading the script I became fascinated by the compulsive, rather hypnotic power of what one was reminded was fact, rather than fiction," he said. "It certainly gave one the chills."

The film is based on the concluding protocol and one surviving copy of the minutes of the meeting. Though some license is taken with dialogue, as when Tucci's character deals with kitchen staff about luncheon preparations, the script pretty much adheres to what actually transpired. If anything, the film underplays the tone of the actual conference.

"It's believed it was much more savage, much more brutally casual than even we have it in the piece," Branagh said. "It was an uglier meeting, from the point of view of their absolute dismissal of any legitimate moral questioning of this kind of action. And much more sort of `locker room' than the [official] protocol itself."

In addition to making utterly horrid jokes—such as how the death gas turned Communist Jews pink—a number of meeting participants got into a sort of favor-currying contest with an argument about who hated the Jews most. And there was an extraordinary resort to bureaucratic euphemism.

Speaking in euphemisms

"In this strange paradox that the Nazis seemed to live by, they wished to trumpet their policy and philosophy in relation to the Jews," Branagh said, "but at the same time were careful to find a way of expressing the policies that implemented that philosophy in language that is careful to be neat and elegant.

"They wanted it both ways. They were at the same time unashamed about their policy but concerned that words like `evacuation' and `medical re-socialization'—the language of euphemism—could be developed in a way that could somehow make it more elegant—the annihilation of a race."

Branagh noted that, in one way or another, every cast member became deeply disturbed by the work, though the characters they played varied greatly in their culpability. For instance, Dr. Friedrich Kritzinger, state secretary of the Reich Chancellery (played by David Threlfall), seems utterly appalled by the enormity of what is being proposed, and ultimately has to be threatened with death before he can be made to vote his approval. Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (played by Colin Firth), a high- ranking Reich official and lawyer who wrote the Nazi's Nuremberg laws, is concerned that the extermination plan is illegal.

"He catches our attention in a hypnotic way as he blazes away in defense of the law and its abuse and then decides to come up with his alternative to what he calls the `bureaucratic train wreck' by announcing they should just sterilize them all," Branagh said. "As though that were a sane and rational position from which to speak, where we could understand and have sympathy."

Evil roles

Tucci has played Mafioso and murderers, and Branagh has done Iago, but neither has taken on characters so evil.

"[Heydrich] is vile," Branagh said. "It's hard to see that he had any friends, for a start; any human compassion, any pity, any conscience. This is the man who did all the dirty work for the Nazis. Had he remained alive (he was killed soon after the meeting), this would have been an enormous step for him and would have accelerated his already rapid rise through the Nazi ranks, and that made him quite a threat to Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS). People were referring to him then as the most dangerous man in Germany."

There is some doubt as to how much Heydrich believed in Nazi dogma. "There was little philosophizing about Aryan mysticism on his part," Branagh said. "It seemed to be ruthless pursuit of power for its own sake, where no prisoners were taken along the way and there was nothing he would not do."

Though the arch villain, Heydrich was a complicated man—married, with two children, but also a consummate ladies man and a hard drinker. He was also a pilot, a musician and an Olympic fencer.

Heydrich could be sentimental. In the film, he talks about having his "heart wrung out" by Franz Schubert's adagio from the Quintet in C Major. He could also be charming.

Man of little patience

"He had a whole range of techniques in dealing with people," Branagh said, "whether playing father figure to Major Lange (a young SS officer at the meeting) or treating Kritzinger as an intellectual equal—and then simply threatening death. He was a man of little patience so that if charm didn't work, kill them and move on."

Five months after the conference, Heydrich was assassinated by the Czech underground. In retaliation, the Nazis killed 15,000 people in the nearby village of Lidice, and ultimately murdered tens of thousands of people throughout Czechoslovakia as further retribution. Adolf Hitler and Himmler gave him a state funeral.

Yet Heydrich may have been involved in a plot to kill and displace Hitler, Branagh said. "It's very alarming to come across someone like that who is not just a fictional creation."

Asked why he took the role, Tucci said: "Because the piece is important. It's changed me. Yes, yes. It brings it closer."

"I felt that it was an important story," Branagh said. "I was shocked at the idea that a meeting lasting 90 minutes could have such an impact on the rest of the 20th Century."

"Let's hope nobody has another one," Tucci said.

Hatred on the Agenda
Washington Post, 15 May 2001, by Nancy Mills

It was a simple business meeting lasting 94 minutes. Fifteen bureaucrats enjoyed their food and wine and then made a plan to kill 11 million Jews. Although Nazi persecution of the Jews predated the 1930s, it was at this conference, on Jan. 20, 1942, that Hitler's "Final Solution" was officially set in motion.

"It was a practical meeting in which these bureaucrats wished to facilitate the physical process of exterminating a race," says Kenneth Branagh, who appears in "Conspiracy," a new HBO film that depicts the gathering. "It seems incredible, yet they were pressing the button that started the Holocaust."

The Wannsee Conference, named after the luxurious villa and suburb of Grossen-Wannsee outside Berlin, was led by Reinhard Heydrich, the character Branagh plays. As chief of the Reich Security Service, he was right-hand man to Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo.

Also in attendance were Adolf Eichmann (played by Stanley Tucci), head of the SS Jewish Affairs Office, and Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (Colin Firth), State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of the Interior and co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, which proclaimed the legality of a Jewish-free society and economy.

"You've got this group of somewhat ordinary civil servants, men who you felt might just as easily be discussing some regional sales targets, speaking in a tone and manner that is chilling," says Branagh. "I read the script with horror, while remaining almost dumbstruck that it's not fiction.

"These men were apparently unmoved by the moral and ethical dimensions. They were much more agitated by the logistical and mechanical problems of moving large numbers of people and of the messy bureaucratic issue of determining who was a Jew and who wasn't. And they were obsessed about their railway timetables and the fact that their rolling stock might be taken up by this rather tedious administrative chore."

Heydrich, adds Branagh, "was a man without friends but with incriminating information on practically every high-ranking Nazi, including Hitler, and unafraid to use it. He was a man of utter ruthlessness. He could be superficially charming, but his capacity for human pity seemed to have been removed or to have never been there. In 20 years of acting, I've never been involved with a character so disturbing to my own peace of mind."

"I don't think the average American knows about the Wannsee Conference," says Professor Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and one of the founders of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. "But it's not top-secret information. One segment of the Holocaust Museum is devoted to it, there's a museum at the Wannsee Conference house, and I've published the Protocols of the Wannsee Conference in a book."

However, the Nazis had intended for the information to be suppressed. Heydrich ordered that the minutes of the meeting be destroyed, but after World War II, one copy was found in the files of the Third Reich's Foreign Office. "Conspiracy" writer Loring Mandel used it as the basis of his script.

"This is an important story to be told," Branagh says, "but its very grimness meant that the creative challenge was quite difficult. The idea was to keep it normal and naturalistic, not melodramatic. It didn't want showy acting. It's nothing to do with having a bunch of stars in the room.

"Robert De Niro once said to me, 'You need to save your energy for when the camera rolls,' but in this case I found it very hard to get away from Heydrich. I did not sleep well."

Director Frank Pierson cast British character actors, primarily, and they rehearsed for 2 1/2 weeks. Once filming started, the actors spent every day sitting around a conference table, delivering or listening to inhuman dialogue.

"You have all of this evil, but there is no graphic image of death, and barely anyone raises his voice," Berenbaum says. "This meeting is not unlike meetings we've all attended. But its power depends on the audience's knowledge of what happens afterwards." 

Ghastly Moment
As the meeting unfolds and everyone's opinion is solicited, it is not immediately clear that the program of extermination has been decided on.

"You wait for the advocate of the Jews," Branagh says, "and you get Stuckart and his version of the law. His solution is to sterilize them across the board.

"Toward the end, when Heydrich was wrapping up the meeting, there's this absolutely ghastly moment where he says, 'Right, this is what we're going to do. If anyone has a problem, get in touch with Col. Eichmann. Is everybody in agreement? Very good. We've accomplished something.'I remember finishing that line and thinking, 'I want to be sick.'

"It's almost incomprehensible, yet it happened. Perhaps it's only now we can fully understand or appreciate this side of it, given the many national and personal tragedies that followed. Maybe it offers some perspective that wasn't possible before."

Heydrich did not long outlive the Wannsee Conference. In May 1942, "the butcher of Prague," as he was nicknamed for the mass executions he had ordered as Hitler's "protector of Bohemia and Moravia," was assassinated by Czech freedom fighters. This, in turn, led to appalling reprisals against the Czech people.

In 1984, German filmmaker Heinz Schirk made the docudrama "The Wannsee Conference," which was released here in 1988 but largely went unnoticed.

Berenbaum now describes "Conspiracy" as "probably the most important presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust that we have. This is very different from virtually any other film presentation about the Holocaust. It gives you the evil, and it doesn't sweeten it. It's much tougher to take than 'Schindler's List.' It doesn't have the redeeming social value of the nobility of the human spirit."

Down to the Dirty Details: At Wannsee, Approving Hitler's Secret 'Final Solution' 
The Washington Post, May 13, 2001, by Patricia Brennan

As Hitler's high-ranking functionaries, both military and civilian, met in a villa outside Berlin to discuss the fate of the Jews under their authority, a star was rising: Gen. Reinhard Heydrich, an ambitious man who one day might have headed the Third Reich.

On Jan. 20, 1942, Heydrich, deputy to Heinrich Himmler, and Col. Adolf Eichmann, head of the SS Jewish Affairs Office, met with 15 officials—seven high-ranking officers of the feared SS elite and eight state secretaries of government ministries—to discuss implementing a plan that would be new to some of them.

HBO's "Conspiracy," a dramatization of that conference, airs Saturday at 9 p.m. and runs just under two hours, about the same length as the meeting at Wannsee. The opulent villa—previously owned by a Jew, according to the film—was a place that Heydrich hoped to claim for himself.

Kenneth Branagh plays Heydrich and Stanley Tucci is Eichmann. David Threlfall, Colin Firth, Jonathan Coy and Barnaby Kay co-star in the production, which was written by Lorin Mandel, directed by Frank Pierson and filmed in London and at Wannsee.

"People said that [Heydrich] would be extremely charming, but he had this strange combination of characteristics," said Branagh. "He was a very fine musician and a terrific fencer, a sort of sophisticated, suave, urbane Nazi creature, tall and blond. He combined the kinds of things that were Hitler's model."

On that day, Heydrich set about reviewing with the group a problem that beset the Third Reich and possible solutions. As the German army rolled over country after country during World War II, the Nazis were becoming responsible for more and more people, millions of them Jews. The sheer numbers were becoming overwhelming, making difficult the Nazis' goal to expel Jews from the living space—and indeed from every sphere of life—of the German people.

Jewish ghettoes were full. As other countries grew reluctant to take more of Germany's castoffs, deportation was becoming less of an option. Sterilization would prevent those numbers from growing, but it wouldn't solve the Nazis' problem—more than 11 million Jews, including 5 million from Russia.

As the Nazis saw it, even firing-squad executions were proving unsatisfactory. Ordering soldiers to line up Jews and shoot them so they fell into mass graves that they themselves had dug was adversely affecting troop morale.

As it turned out, Hitler's more efficient "final solution" was already under way.

In the film, after initial cordial greetings punctuated by the dramatic arrival of Heydrich, the officials gather around an oval table to discuss how to go about the ethnic cleansing of Germany. The meeting, which includes drinks and a buffet lunch—sumptuous fare during war time—is by turns good-natured (the officials rap on the table to show approval), pedantic, forceful and even bullying as Heydrich puts on a show of eliciting the participants' insights, concerns and suggestions.

"He seemed to have most things in his armory as far as arts of persuasion was concerned, but when charm didn't work, he was ruthless," said Branagh. "His force of personality, to some extent, rode roughshod over the others. Accounts from participants said that it was rougher and more brutal than the written protocol might suggest."

But Heydrich, to whom the Jews are simply "a storage problem," eventually lets the officials in on the new plan: mass deaths by extermination camps with poison-gas facilities disguised as showers, after which the bodies would be burned in ovens. Construction had begun two months earlier at Belzec and Chelmno in Poland. Heydrich was commandant of SS and police in the Lublin district of Poland.

Only Friedrich Kritzinger, ministerial director of the Reich Chancellery, appears to be significantly uncomfortable with the discussion. Still, when Heydrich tallies the group, Kritzinger says he won't oppose the plan.

There is some playing with words, "a certain caution about written material," said Branagh.

In the film, Rudolf Lange, who supervised the killing of 30,000 Jews at Riga, explains that "evacuation" is a euphemism for "extermination." "Sterilization" is "social re-engineering." There is much talk about "degrees of "mixed blood," what to do about Jews married to non-Jewish Germans and the administrative work to be sorted out.

Erich Neumann, who is in charge of the Reich's Four-Year Plan, is concerned about retaining enough workers in industries vital to the war effort, but he is the sort of man whom others tend to dismiss. Anyway, they tell him, most Jews don't know how to do manual labor and are a drain on the economy.

Interior State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart wants to make certain that the law will support their decisions. Stuckart had attended the 1935 conference that enacted the Nuremberg Laws (and was a co- author) proclaiming the legality of a Jewish-free society and economy. A show of hands reveals that, like Stuckart, many of the participants are lawyers.

As he bids the participants goodbye, Eichmann promises to provide edited transcripts and asks each man to read and then destroy his copy. But Undersecretary of State Martin Luther, of the Foreign Office, apparently kept his. In 1943, Americans reviewing German Foreign Office papers found the 16th copy of 30—stamped "Top Secret"—of the Wannsee Protocol, which refers to the gathering as a meeting about "the final solution of the Jewish question without regard to geographic borders."

As it happened, Eichmann remained influential in the Third Reich, but Heydrich died only four months later, in late May 1942, of wounds he suffered in Prague when Czech patriots tried to assassinate him. "His bravado, his arrogance of manner led him to drive in an open- topped car in Czechoslovakia—his aides asked him not to—and he did not vary his routes to work," said Branagh. "This was part of his contempt, that no one would have the stomach to kill him. There are conspiracy theorists who say there may have been foul play involved in what may have been wounds he might have recovered from.

"There was concern that he could have been the successor to Hitler. He was a man whose ambitions might not be easily assuaged. He did so much of the Nazi dirty work—he was a prime organizer behind Krystallnacht. He seemed to be a man without friends, had dirt on everyone, and was in a position to blackmail everyone. One of his techniques was to create bogus sexual scandals. He was efficient at collecting information...if there was anything unsavory."

The evacuation of millions of Jews to camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor was named Operation Reinhard to honor Heydrich.

Before the war, Adolf Eichmann had worked with Zionists to help as many Jews as possible emigrate to Palestine, which was under the control of the British. In 1944, skirting British law, he sent to Palestine his final evacuees, 1,000 Hungarian Jews.

After the war, Eichmann worked in Germany under a false name, then fled to Italy and later Argentina. In 1962, the Israeli Intelligence Service kidnapped him there and took him to Jerusalem, where he was tried and then executed.

At his trial, he testified of the Wannsee conference: "...the gentlemen convened their session, and then in very plain terms—not in the language that I had to use in the minutes, but in absolutely blunt terms, they addressed the issue, with no mincing of words.....The language was anything but in conformity with the legal protocol of clause and paragraph....The discussion covered killing, elimination and annihilation."

The Wannsee villa is now a Holocaust museum, memorial and conference site. It opened in 1992 on the 50th anniversary of the secret Nazi conference.

"We shot the exterior sequences there," said Branagh. "I'm glad we didn't do the interior scenes there. It was chilling enough to be around the real place. It does create a very strong atmosphere of place. Just to stand in the room where it happened gave one shivers. At all times you had to shake yourself to remember that what we were doing was not a fiction."

The Hollywood Reporter, May 17, 2001, by Ray Richmond

It isn't every day that you watch a film featuring not a single speaking role for a woman. Such is the case with "Conspiracy," a quietly haunting intellectual docudrama that imagines what it might have been like to be a fly on the wall in the war room while high-ranking members of Adolf Hitler's SS dispassionately plotted the extermination of Europe's Jewish population. It is decidedly not the feel-good movie of 2001 or a great Saturday night date movie to snuggle up with over microwave popcorn and a nice merlot. It does, however, pack the requisite wallop at a time when hate crimes remain an international problem.

There is a palpable "12 Angry Men" aspect to "Conspiracy." Here, however, we have "15 Evil Men," and the setting isn't a jury room but an ornate mansion on the outskirts of Berlin on Jan. 20, 1942. The Third Reich's forces are on the march through Europe as 15 members of the Nazi officer inner circle arrive for a top-secret meeting. The subject: what to do about "the Jewish problem."

Loring Mandel's succinct, powerful script—culled from the only surviving copy of the meeting's minutes, aka the Wannsee Protocol—makes it clear that most of the German high commandants at the meeting viewed Jewish citizens as cockroaches in need of a good insecticide. That would come in the gas chambers of the death camps where Hitler's Final Solution (sketched into blueprint form at the meeting) was carried out with such efficient inhumanity and menace.

While "Conspiracy" is at times unbearably talky and overly descriptive, its spare style and unfettered, bare-bones direction by co-executive producer Frank Pierson serves to breathe vivid life into the unspeakable malevolence that was as much the Nazi emblem as was the swastika. The very routineness with which the players discuss the eradication of an entire race of people over food, booze and cigars is perhaps its most gut-wrenching aspect. It points out the stunning ease with which the seeds of mass evil can germinate and thrive.

Leads Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci turn in exceptional, restrained performances as the notorious SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich and the even more heinous SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann, respectively. It was Heydrich who presided over the infamous gathering, providing the subtle cajoling to gain agreement from those present on a strategy for getting rid of the Jews. At the outset, those present were careful to use transparent euphemisms like "evacuation" to describe the course of action. By the end of the 90-minute session, there was direct debate on the best way to "exterminate" as many as 60,000 European Jews a day.

There were few dissenting voices present among the 15 that fateful day. While  we can sense some silent ambivalence, only one man—Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger (well played by David Threlfall)—openly opposed the horrific plan. But he would be obliged to go along. Later, Kritzinger would be the only one of the 15 to publicly vilify the Holocaust.

Pierson's style of approximating a real-time dramatization of the meeting is effective, as is the consistent eye-level camera viewpoint engineered by director of photography Stephen Goldblatt. However, it is the words being uttered in "Conspiracy," not the way they are captured, that proves the compelling ingredient. The decision to eschew German accents or subtitles and have everyone speak in natural voice is off-putting at first but ultimately less staged.

When the Job Is Odious
Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2001, by David Gritten

It's hard to think of another actor who can so effectively convince laymen of the joys of his profession as Kenneth Branagh. He waxes lyrical about acting and actors, the process of putting on a show or rehearsing a film. There's a boyish enthusiasm about him when he talks this way. Here's an actor, it seems, who never encountered a role he didn't like.

Until now, that is. In the chilling new HBO drama "Conspiracy," which airs Saturday night at 9, Branagh plays Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler's most trusted lieutenants in the Third Reich; it was his job to set in motion the Final Solution, the extermination of millions of Jews across Europe in World War II.

To effect these plans, Heydrich convened a top-secret meeting of 14 high-ranking Nazi officers in a mansion at Wannsee, in Berlin's suburbs, in January 1942. "Conspiracy" is a dramatization of that meeting. Some officers around the table are uneasy when mass extermination enters the agenda, and voice objections. But as the meeting proceeds, it becomes clear that the Final Solution is not up for discussion. It is a policy approved at the highest level, and the task of the eerily persuasive Heydrich is to find a consensus among the group about its implementation.

"I found it disturbing to [portray]; the man," confided Branagh, over afternoon tea at a large central London hotel. "There's a spiritual revulsion against playing him. You don't want to be saying the things he was saying, or be part of his psyche. I found it got under the skin in an invasive way."

Still, Branagh plays Heydrich with verve. His hair dyed blond and swept back sleekly, he is the last person to arrive at Wannsee and makes a flamboyant entrance, immediately demonstrating his superiority. He goes on to run the meeting like the chairman of a corporation, sometimes showing deference and courtesy to other points of view, and frequently calling breaks for drinks and lunch to defuse tension, but ruthlessly proceeding toward a point where his 14 colleagues agree to genocide.

Most of the Nazi officers who attended Wannsee were obscure names—the exception being Adolf Eichmann, who was tried and executed for his war crimes in Jerusalem in 1961. He is played in "Conspiracy" by the cast's one American actor, Stanley Tucci; most of the others (including Colin Firth as an uneasy Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, state secretary of the interior) are stage-trained British actors.

Director Frank Pierson (who won an Oscar as screenwriter of "Dog Day Afternoon" and who directed "Truman" and "Citizen Cohn" for HBO) placed most of the action of "Conspiracy" inside the meeting room—which was reconstructed at Shepperton Studios, near London, with four walls, to the exact dimensions of the original. (Exterior scenes at the beginning and end were shot at Wannsee.)

With several extended scenes and long tracking shots, it feels like a play being filmed. The eye-level camera angles underline the feeling for viewers of being present in that room. After rehearsing, it was shot in 21 days.

"I think the experience got under the skins of everyone involved in it," Branagh recalled. "You'd rehearse moments, and a piece of dialogue would hit home. We partly coped with it all through a lunatic Monty Python humor. When I read the script, my reaction was jaw-dropping astonishment at the tone of this meeting and the apparently easy, casual quality to the discussion of the fate of an entire race across Europe. Yet it felt like the quiet political infighting of a board meeting at a big company.

"Being around that casual tone, and the manner in which the material was dealt with was as shocking as one's exposure to more obviously horrific elements of the Holocaust itself. This was a job, farmed out by a Führer who had decided issues like this could be delegated. It was all about logistics, and those people 'round the table were irritated. It was an annoyance, all that administration being brought in to solve this Jewish problem. 'Oh, it had to be done, but what an annoyance.' That was the attitude."

Because of this contrast between the exasperated, morally indifferent manner in which these Nazis contemplated the Final Solution, and the unimaginable awfulness of its consequences, Pierson and his cast chose to play down the melodrama inherent in the Wannsee meeting.

"Conspiracy" screenwriter Loring Mandel said Pierson and editor Peter Zinner became interested in doing the movie after they saw a subtitled 1984 Austrian-German docudrama, "The Wannsee Conference."

Initial research revealed that minutes of the conference contained no direct quotes. The filmmakers then did extensive independent research on the meeting and the background of all the participants. Loring said he turned in his first draft in the fall of 1996.

Several years and many redrafts later, "Conspiracy" flirts with being undramatic for much of its 87-minute length. As the Nazi officers arrive at Wannsee to be greeted by Eichmann, much is made of their repetitive "Heil Hitler!" salutes—to the extent they become creepily amusing. The camera lingers over the food and drink consumed at the meeting, and the place settings; Hannah Arendt's memorable phrase about "the banality of evil" often comes to mind.

"The idea was to stay away from being theatrical, and resist the lure of easy melodrama," said Branagh. "There was no desire to catch great moments. It's obvious from the way it was written that some of the information deserved to ring on the air a bit, but Frank tried to take that out."

Another problem for Branagh was finding anything in Heydrich's character or upbringing that might explain his cold-blooded willingness to undertake genocide on such a horrific scale: "But nothing in his background supplied any clues. He had a loving, supportive family. There seemed to be no traumatic incidents in childhood, no sibling rivalry. In some ways he was an ideal Nazi—he was an excellent musician, an Olympian fencer.

"One of the questions you have to try and answer is some definition that allows you to play the character of the man you're playing. But I discussed this with Stanley Tucci, and he felt the same about Eichmann as I felt about Heydrich. You feel there's nothing there.

"There was no compassion inside Heydrich. He had dirt on all fellow Nazis. Hitler and Himmler knew he was a lethal weapon who was happy to do all the dirty jobs. Anything no one else wanted to do, delving into moral backwaters, he had no problem with. Playing him, I felt if he had been asked to eradicate Eskimos, cabinet-makers or gymnasts he would have proceeded with the task in the same way, with the same passionless, soulless quality."

For all his personal reservations about playing a character such as Heydrich, Branagh is happy to have been a part of "Conspiracy."

"I thought it was an important story to be told," he said. He was also impressed by the attitude of HBO Films, a company he believes is now tackling substantial stories that might have once found a natural home at major movie studios. "It's hard to imagine ['Conspiracy']; being financed in a feature context," he noted, "or for it to have been cast with the kind of actors we had. It was not about trying to be starry or grab attention.

"There's an audience for these kinds of stories, certain kinds of serious, not solemn films. HBO has found a creative identity, which is drawing filmmakers and actors because of the freedom it offers and the originality of the material."

The Evil of Wansee: 'Conspiracy' covers meeting to decide the the Final Solution
Tribune Media Services, 13 May 2001

Adolf Hitler may have gotten the most blame for it, but he was not the architect of the so-called Final Solution. A 90-minute meeting of Third Reich officials set the groundwork for one of history's most heinous cases of mass murder, and that World War II gathering is recalled in 'Conspiracy,' a new HBO movie debuting Saturday (9 p.m.). Filmed partially at the German villa where the conclave took place, it stars Kenneth Branagh as Reich security Chief Reinhard Heydrich, and Stanley Tucci ('Winchell') as his deputy, Adolf Eichmann.

Along with 13 other men, they paid a top-secret visit to a mansion in Wansee (outside Berlin) to determine the potential fates of millions of European Jews under Nazi rule. The plan was one of extermination, which Heydrich approached clinically—in terms of numbers and equipment—in explaining it to the others. Colin Firth ('Bridget Jones's Diary') and David Threllfall also appear in the drama.

"For those like me who were unaware of the Wansee Conference," Branagh says, "this story should be appalling, astonishing and fascinating at the same time. Everyone knows the horrors of the actual execution of the Holocaust, but I didn't know of the actual moment when it was set in motion, or of the nature and brevity of the conference."

In a stage and screen career that has spanned such roles as Hamlet and Henry V, esteemed actor-director Branagh maintains Heydrich is one of the most disturbing to him. "It was very hard to understand, from biographical information and any psychological conclusions you might draw, what happened to his humanity. The man seemed to be without pity or conscience, and I'd never encountered anything like his relish of the pursuit of power without coming across some kind of comprehensible, human dimension."

HBO Depicts Nazi Meeting that Changed History
Orlando Sentinel, May 9, 2001

Actors will always tell you that the bad guys are much more fun to play than the good ones. Stroking their beards, peering out from black capes, hovering menacingly in the shadows—all that's good for the actor's soul.

But what if the villain is an attractive spit-and-polish bureaucrat with no gleeful hisses or histrionic threats? Then it's not so fun.

To play a villain well one must identify with him, says actor Kenneth Branagh, who says his darkest dude was Iago in Othello. That is, until now.

The Irish-actor stars as SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich in HBO's production of Conspiracy, premiering May 19 at 9 p.m.

Inside the part of Iago are motivations that seem all too-human, says Branagh. But to portray the man who detonated the Nazi plan for exterminating the Jews, that's another matter. Heydrich seems to be "without soul, without conscience," says Branagh, "and one of the disturbing elements of playing it was to discover that. In many ways, I hope there is little of yourself that you can bring to it. And part of the drama of it, part of the intoxication of it, is to see this sort of naked exercise in power."

Heydrich was the subordinate of Heinrich Himmler, and in January 1942 he called a meeting of 14 of Germany's chief officials to draft a solution to the "Jewish problem." What was decided in that secret meeting was to reverberate to the ends of the Earth for all time. The swift and efficient extermination of an entire race was their goal; how they would manage that was outlined in clinical detail. The session lasted less than two hours. Minutes of the meeting—known as the Wannsee Protocol—were carefully edited by Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, who was head of the SS Jewish Affairs Office and Heydrich's co-conspirator. Only 30 copies were disseminated.

With the collapse of Nazi Germany all copies disappeared except one, which was discovered in the files of the Foreign Office in 1947. Those minutes are the basis for Conspiracy, which is directed by Frank Pierson and filmed in a room exactly like the one where the meeting took place.

There was a side of Heydrich that relished the rush of power, thinks Branagh. "He was enjoying, it seemed, a craven exercise in absolute power. This is both chilling, it's also very gripping. But to play it is very, very disturbing and unusual—unusual and unsettling for the actor....It was very disturbing. I suppose you could end up saying he was a fantastically efficient executor of an absolutely extraordinary, awful and desperate plan. But it was very hard to find what was human inside him."

Semantics That Set Evil in Motion
Financial Times, May 5, 200, by Euny Hong- Koral

More devastating than Claude Lanzmann's Shoah or Elie Wiesel's Night, or any Holocaust survivor's testimony, is the architecture and legal language of Hitler's Final Solution itself.

The terms of the solution were hammered out over a buffet lunch at the lakeside village of Wannsee, near Berlin, on January 20 1942.

The 15 participants left no stone unturned in defining the ins and outs of Goering's infamous 1941 mandate to his second-in-command, SS General Reinhard Heydrich (Goering was not present at the Wannsee meeting): "I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard to organisational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe."

Of the 30 copies made of the transcript, only one copy survived, which was discovered in the files of the Reich Foreign Office in 1948.

Conspiracy, a new HBO production, is based on a powerful, simple idea. It recreates the infamous meeting at Wannsee, and is based almost exclusively on the transcript itself, dramatised in real-time: the film lasts for 90 minutes, which is approximately the same duration as the meeting on which it is based.

There is no background score, no embellishment. Director Frank Pierson (screenwriter for Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke) explains his strategy to make the audience feel like a fly on the wall at the meeting: "The camera was never above or below eye level." (HBO, Saturday May 19 at 9pm ET.)

The men sit around the boardroom table, calligraphic name placards and water pitchers before them, with a silent stenographer in the background.

They proceed in a laconic, no-nonsense fashion, as though they are management consultants trying to determine how to lay off employees in the face of an imminent corporate merger.

General Heydrich (played by Kenneth Branagh) leads the meeting. He explains that Germany is facing the one drawback of world conquest: it continually increases its Jewish population as it annexes neighbouring lands. "Germany acquired 2.5m Jews when we conquered Poland, and we will get 5m more when we take Russia," he says.

Emigration of the Jews is not a solution, because: "Who will take them? Even in the US, as Jews are whispering in Roosevelt's ear, they turn them away."

Then, with studied rhetoric, he announces: "From Lapland to Libya, from Vladivostok to Belfast, no Jews. Not one." It elicits an approving table-thumping.

The next item on the agenda is an incredibly baroque discussion, meant to clarify the sections of the Nuremberg laws that defined, in legal terms, who was to be considered a Jew.

The Wannsee participatants agree readily enough that the "first-degree mixed" Jews—those possessing "two or more Jewish grandparents"—must be sterilised. Will they consent to this? 

SS OberfuhrerGerhard Klopfer (played by Ian McNiece), state secretary of the party chancellery, says: "Why not, they've already had their cocks clipped."

The real debate is over the definition of a "second-degree mixed Jew". Heydrich proposes that a Jew can be excepted, unless "he is Jewish-looking or sounding".

Confusion arises. One participant furrows his brow: "Are we talking about third-degree Jews?" Heydrich attempts to elucidate, which further underscores the absurdity of the debate: "A mixed second, third exception."

The performers convey their inner state through the subtlest of gestures. The astonishingly versatile Colin Firth plays Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, the jurist who co-wrote the Nuremberg laws. As the SS representatives mangle the letter of the law he wrote, he simmers steadily, attempting vainly to interrupt, until at last he explodes.

The ostensible topic is the Jewish question, but it becomes clear that Heydrich has pulled off a sleight of hand. Any semblance of a democratic exchange of ideas has been a farce. This is a power struggle, in which the SS subversively takes control through word play and intrigue—not by screaming and banging their shoes on the table.

These are not the caricatured, comically stentorian Nazis of a Steven Spielberg film. On the contrary, as the actors interpret it, this meeting is a game of steel nerves.

All the participants attempt to hide their discomfort when discussing the efficacy of gas chambers. Heydrich mentions amusedly that one of the effects of the carbon monoxide gas is that the bodies turn pink. At this point, General Otto Hofmann, chief of the race and settlement, excuses himself from the table, mumbling: "Shouldn't have mixed wine with whisky."

One participant quotes Goethe in an attempt to get his cohorts into the proper, iron-fisted spirit of things: "Theory is grey, whereas action is green." This programme demonstrates that quite the reverse is true: theory is a form of action, and mere semantics are sufficient to set evil in motion.

“Conspiracy''
Variety, May 8, 2001, by Army Archerd

“They have the biggest balls in the business.''

That's Stanley Tucci talking about HBO. Tucci plays Adolf Eichmann in HBO Film's “Conspiracy,'' the story of the 90-minute meeting Jan. 20, 1942, of 15 members of the German High Command at Wannsee, outside Berlin, to decide the annihilation of over four million Jews—by industrialized murder.

It is a journey into the heart of evil. In a cold, blood curdlingly-matter-of-fact discussion, the exact method of murder is agreed upon. There is no physical and/or visual depiction of what they discuss or of what is to come, namely the Holocaust and its victims. The film is riveting and I defy anyone to turn away from the screen when any of the principals, led by Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich and Tucci as Eichmann, are on camera.

Frank Pierson directed and never once does he have cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt shoot above or below eye level. You are there in the company of these 15 men during this awesome, nay gruesome, page in history.

And this HBO film is ONLY the beginning. Screenwriter Loring Mandel is now writing the sequel to ''Conspiracy,'' which is called “Complicity.'' It's the story of a similar meeting, this time between leaders of the U.S. and Great Britain, a year later in Bermuda. By that time, 80% of the four million Jews had already been eliminated according to the detailed blueprint set forth at Wannsee.

The historic meeting which “Complicity'' dramatizes—which HBO has already OK'd to follow  “Conspiracy''—was, per Mandel, held to discuss what action the U.S. and/or Britain should take “to mollify public opinion which had grown (against the Nazi murder machine)'' but, Mandel says, “the secret purpose was to put on a show while agreeing to do nothing.''

Mandel says it was Breckinridge Long of the U.S. State Dept. who was the mastermind of the meeting and the one responsible for the policy of not admitting Jewish refugees. He kept the news from getting to the State Department. Long, per Mandel, didn't feel ``Eastern European Jews were the kind of people the U.S. should bring into our country.''

“When I listened to Patrick Buchanan's campaign speeches, I could hear Breckinridge Long talking in the background,'' Mandel says.

Characters who will be portrayed in ``Complicity'' include: FDR, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Sumner Welles, Henry Morgenthau Jr., George Backer, publisher of the N.Y. Post, Sen. Scott Lucas, Rep Sol Bloom, Josiah Dubois and Randolph Paul of the Treasury Dept., Ben Hecht and Chaim Weizmann.

“Conspiracy'' premiered April 30 at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. The Museum's historian, Dr. Michael Berenbaum, was a major contributor to the film's factual background. Monday night the film screened in Chicago at Northwestern University and Tuesday night it screens at the Skirball Center in L.A., and on Thursday in N.Y. at the Council on Foreign Affairs.

Tucci will attend the N.Y. screening. He told me, ``I really want people to watch this movie. These are some of the best actors I have ever worked with. And one of the most interesting parts I have ever played—to play someone that awful, in such a murderous way but like in a business meeting!''

“Conspiracy'' was eight years in the making, director Frank Pierson admitted to me. He credits HBO Films president Colin Callender for giving the greenlight to the pic after Pierson tried to raise the $ to make it as in indie feature. He credits Mandel for "one of the best scripts I've ever had the pleasure of reading and the privilege of directing. He was there during two weeks of rehearsals and on the set all the time.''

The script is an exact reproduction of the tape of that fateful meeting. Editor Peter Zinner, Pierson's longtime friend and coworker, who escaped from Vienna, July 4, 1938, had seen the Austrian-German film “Die Wannseekonferenz'' and originally brought it to Pierson's attention.

“When I saw it I was stunned,'' Zinner told me. "I said to Frank, it had to be made (by us). And I insisted on editing it.''

Pierson reacted similarly after viewing the Austrian-German pic. “I was mesmerized. I've got to do it,'' he said. "I've got to get it more exposure.''

Zinner helped Pierson produce the HBO'er with Frank Doelger. The Wannsee site is now a Holocaust Museum. The HBO film crew shot there for five days, during which tours going through the museum were shocked at the sight of Nazi uniforms on some of the actors.

Pierson hopes there is some way to get this HBO picture into movie theaters, though the multiple showings on HBO itself may bring it an even bigger audience.