Labyrinth of Lies (2014)

I watched this move (called "Im Labyrinth des Schweigens" in German.) It is a very good movie in terms of both the acting and the script. The film is based on real events. At the end of the 1950s most West Germans were more concerned with the economic boom than with what happened during World War 2. The main character, Johann Radmann (played by Alexander Fehling), is a public prosecutor who was too young to have anything to do with the war. He comes across information that the former  commander of the Auschwitz Death Camp is  teaching at a school in West Berlin. He wants to bring the man to justice, but runs into many obstacles along the way by those former Nazis in various positions of power. On top of the cover-up of this man Radmann learns just what happened at Auschwitz (he thought it was just a regular concentration camp.) There's a scene in the film where people in their 20s are asked if they had ever heard of "Auschwitz" and no one had even though it was the largest  death and concentration camp where 1.1 million people were murdered.

 

The film then goes into the process of gathering evidence, witness statements, etc. dealing with Auschwtiz and the numerous other SS members that worked there (especially Menegele.) There's also a scene that deals with the capture of Eichmann by the Mossad. The film also shows that even West German law protected former Nazis and had to be changed so that former Nazis could be brought to justice. In the end the film ends with the beginning of the  trials of several hundred former Nazis.

 

This movie shows just how German society was plagued with Nazis from the 1930s through the 1970s. Nazis lived out in the open, they receieved government pensions and there was a network to help them when they needed it. The British, French and Americans "tried" to de-natzify the Germans in their sectors at the end of the war, but spent more time on trying to stop the Soviet threat. When the Germans themselves then took over the running of things the majority were either former Nazis themselves or had Nazi relatives in their family and so did everything to focus attention elsewhere. The Soviet sector was really the only truely de-natizfied sector sicne the Russians simply deported everyone and anyone suspected of being a Nazi or even a non-Communist to the Gulags.

 

The fact that this movie is German with German actors and in German gives it more historical credit than if it was made in Hollywood. It is in one of those movies that every German should be forced to see since it shows that Germany and the Germans didn't fully account for the crimes of the Holocaust in 1945 as many believe. The murders of millions of innocent men, women and children were simply ignored by Germans from the top-down until the 1960s when the younger generation started questioning their parents and what they did during the war. Even today Germany has to deal with their Nazi past because their parents/grandparents/great-grandparents refused to. There are still Holocaust Trials being done that should have been done in the 1940s.