Review: In ‘Labyrinth of Lies,’ the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials Break a Conspiracy of Silence
Stephen Holden
The drama follows a young German prosecutor who faces stony resistance in bringing former death-camp functionaries to trial in the 1960s.
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The earnest post-Holocaust drama “Labyrinth of Lies” can be viewed as a sequel of sorts to “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the much-decorated 1961 Stanley Kramer film about the Nuremberg trials of the 1940s, in which top-ranking Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity. The trials are still imprinted in many people’s minds as the ultimate moment of reckoning, after which a horrific chapter of history was more or less closed and the world moved on. Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that.

“Labyrinth of Lies,” which opens in 1958, resurrects a later chapter in the aftermath of the Holocaust that has largely faded from view, at least for many Americans: the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, in which 22 former mid- and lower-level functionaries at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were tried for murder.

The trials ended a period of relative calm during the reconstruction of a divided Germany, when the prevailing attitude toward the Nazi past was a state of willful amnesia. Ordinary Germans who had joined the Nazi Party and committed atrocities returned to civilian life. A statute of limitations prevented prosecutions for war crimes, excepting murder.

The directorial feature debut of Giulio Ricciarelli, “Labyrinth of Lies” has the dogged tone of an honorable, well-made television movie from the late 1950s or early ’60s. Its most admirable trait is a refusal to sensationalize its subject. There are no flashbacks to grisly acts of torture and killing, no scenes of skeletal inmates huddled behind barbed wire.

Once the trials begin in 1963, witnesses are shown testifying, but their verbal accounts of what they endured are excerpted and made into a montage, their words camouflaged by Niki Reiser and Sebastian Pille’s soundtrack, which, although mournful, is never mawkish. There are no emotional meltdowns, no grandiose speeches.

The central character, Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling), a fictitious composite of three lawyers, is an idealistic new employee in the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, frustrated by his banal work in a traffic court. Through Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski), a journalistic acquaintance, he learns of Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), an Auschwitz survivor who has accidentally crossed paths with one of his wartime persecutors, who is now a schoolteacher. Radmann has never heard of Auschwitz, which the screenplay (by Mr. Ricciarelli and Elisabeth Bartel) pointedly reminds us, was not in Germany but in Poland.

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