Conspiracy, directed by Frank Pierson

Director Frank Pierson. Review by Helen Porter

I recently plucked up courage to watch this film, which I have had on my shelves since I bought it in a charity shop a couple of years ago. It is a hard watch but essential viewing, increasingly so with the resurgence of fascism in the world.

There is no violence in the film. Instead it is devoted entirely to a chillingly ‘civilised’ (for the most part) discussion. In January 1942 the SS summoned the military and civilian leaders of the Third Reich to a two-hour meeting at the Wannsee, Berlin, and there they agreed upon the Final Solution to ‘the Jewish problem’.

The drama consists of the interaction between those who are entirely ruthless and those few who are, relatively, repulsed by the logical conclusion; but all of them work from the premise that they are deciding the fate of an ‘inferior species’. The script is not invented. It comes from the only surviving copy of the SS minutes of the proceedings.

What sent me to the film was a book I had just read – the autobiography of the Czech pianist and harpsichordist Zuzana Růžičková (One Hundred Miracles: a memoir of music and survival). She spent many of her teenage years in three different concentration camps during the Holocaust. Alongside the unimaginable horrors she describes, there is one almost equally shocking scene where she is between Auschwitz and Belsen but working as slave labour, rebuilding bomb-damaged Hamburg. After fainting she is carried to the manager’s office, where he expressed his surprise: ‘That looks like a human! She really is a human child!’ – such a measure of how people had been indoctrinated to think Jews were beneath human.

I struggled, and failed, to find ‘that of God’ in the men in that meeting (several of whom were released after the war and lived ‘normal’ lives for decades after). Our duty now is to not turn away from what is happening in our own time. While the most obvious parallel might be the Uighurs in ‘re-education’ camps in China, in Europe we have our own alarm bells to hear – the rise of the AFD in Germany, Vox in Spain, Chega in Portugal; the removal of judges in Hungary (indeed the attacks on the judiciary here – ‘Enemies of the People’?); the treatment of homosexuals as lesser citizens in much of eastern Europe; the demonisation of Muslims; the official, and officially encouraged, hostility to migrants. One of the suggestions in the recent Home Office brainstorm on ways of solving ‘the migrant problem’ was that we should install a wave machine in the Channel, to beat back the cockleshell craft of those desperate enough to attempt the crossing. Indeed we have a ‘clandestine channel threat commander’. Extinction Rebellion has been threatened with classification as an ‘organised crime’ group. And the government’s latest guidance on school curricula requires schools to not use resources from any organisation that has advocated abolishing capitalism.

I would like to see a viewing of Conspiracy on every A-Level history syllabus. I would recommend it to every film club. And for Quakers to do what we have always done – to keep our eyes wide open to what is happening.

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