Labyrinth of Lies review: Fascinating attempt to examine German amnesia about WWII
Labyrinth of Lies Labyrinth of Lies film Labyrinth of Lies review Auschwitz trials Alexander Fehling Giulio Ricciarelli
Paul Byrnes
The title seems to have been stiffened for audiences outside Germany. At home, this film was called Labyrinth of Silence (Labyrinth des Schweigens).
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The Sydney Morning Herald
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★★★★

The title seems to have been stiffened for audiences outside Germany. At home, this film was called Labyrinth of Silence (Labyrinth des Schweigens).

Given that it's about the 1963 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, where 22 Nazis were tried for their part in running the camp, language is important – but so is the desire not to scare off an audience.

There is much to like about the film, despite this pandering to domestic audience sensibilities. It's a fascinating attempt to examine German amnesia about the war, through the eyes of a young prosecutor, Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling), who's 28 when the movie opens in 1958, in Frankfurt am Main, in the state of Hessen.

Young girls are dancing in frilly petticoats to jaunty German pop music; many of the buildings are new. Only the occasional bomb site mars the optimism as Radmann rides his Vespa to work. He is blonde and keen, faithful to the words of his father, who disappeared on the Eastern front: "Always do the right thing".

He cannot ignore a journalist, Thomas Gnielka (Andre Szymanksi), who makes a scene in the foyer of the Public Prosecutor's office.

Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), a Jewish artist who survived Auschwitz, has spotted one of the camp guards teaching at a primary school. Which of you prosecutors will take the case, demands Gnielka?

The chief prosecutor, Friedberg (Robert Hunger-Buhler), tells him to go away. Johann contacts the journalist to find out more. His overall boss, the Hessen Attorney-General, Fritz Bauer (Gert Voss), encourages him, but nobody else wants to know.

Students of history may recognise that name. Fritz Bauer was a distinguished Jewish lawyer imprisoned by the Nazis in 1933. He was released and fled to Denmark, then Sweden, before returning to the law in Germany in 1949. He started the case that led to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, by getting the Federal Court to agree that the regional court in Frankfurt am Main could hear a case involving Auschwitz.

In 1959, Bauer appointed two young prosecutors, Georg Friedrich Vogel and Joachim Kugler, to investigate Auschwitz personnel.

In late 1963, they indicted 22 former members of the SS – not 19 as a credit says at the end of the film. This became the first trial of Nazis under German law, as opposed to international law used at the Nuremberg trials.

Seventeen were convicted, and those who could be shown to have killed at Auschwitz on their own initiative (as opposed to following orders) were given life sentences.

Thus, we might ask why Bauer is not the hero of this story, rather than Radmann, who never existed.

The answer is perhaps not as sinister as it might seem. Radmann may be an amalgam of the two young prosecutors mentioned above, and the film is about one man's progression from utter ignorance of his country's Nazi past to the point where he discovers too much, almost succumbing to the burden.

At the point late in the film where Radmann is wandering drunk in the streets asking random strangers, "Were you a Nazi?", we may ask if the filmmakers have gone too far, while acknowledging that this is exactly as far as they wanted to go.

The filmmaker intends a much bigger indictment than those few eventually put to trial. And yet, Radmann and his co-prosecutor Otto Haller (Johann von Bulow), find the scale of their task unmanageable.

Whereupon Bauer offers one of many pillars of wisdom weighing down his part of the script: we are not doing this to catch the killers but to establish a record of what they did and to remember the victims.

Otherwise they would have to indict the 8000 other SS personnel who went through Auschwitz, not to mention the other camps.

It's clear that the Italian director Giulio Ricciarelli, whose first feature this is, sees Bauer as the film's spiritual centre. Casting the now late Gert Voss, a distinguished classical actor, helps to achieve that aim.

A film built around Bauer might have told the story with more direct honesty and force, but he probably didn't try the actual cases, so they have had to invent this protagonist.

Fehling does a fine job as Radmann, who also carries a heavy weight, as a cypher for all the Germans who did not want to know what their fathers did in the war.