Many
films have emerged recently to contradict those who
have denied the Holocaust. Amen,
directed by Constantine Garvas has trumped them all,
providing specific documentation from an unwilling
participant who supplied gas to the death camps,
with a story based on a 1963 play The Deputy by
Rolf Hochhuth. Kurt Gerstein (played by Ulrich Tukur),
an officer in the SS, is a chemical engineer. His
first job in the war is to transform unsafe, typhus-infected
water into potable water so that soldiers in combat
will have enough to drink. Indeed, the film begins
exactly in the manner of Costa-Garvas's Z (1969),
with a pep talk about how to wipe out vermin. Gerstein
is in charge of the production and distribution of
Zyklon, the disinfectant, which the Nazi Party subsequently
approves as an agent to kill Jews and the others
who were sent to the death camps. Early in the film,
one of his nieces is killed in the so-called Compassionate
Euthanasia campaign that gassed children who were
mental defectives and those regarded as physically
unfit. Upset because his niece could have been cured
of her malady with proper medicines, Gerstein is
relieved when protests from Catholic pulpits in Germany
serve to end the campaign. When Gerstein later becomes
an eyewitness to the death of Jews in a Belzen gas
chamber, he thus believes that pressure from religious
authorities will stop the Holocaust. Although he
takes many steps to alert Catholic and Protestant
leaders as well as American and Swedish authorities
on what is happening, even obtaining written documentation
to support his eyewitness accounts, he fails in his
quest. His only success is to slow down the shipment
of Zyklon on such pretexts as that the potency is
compromised by leaks in the canisters containing
the chemical. In Father Riccardo Fontana (played
by Mathiew Kassovitz), a composite of several actual
priests, he finds an ally with friends in high places
in the Vatican, but also to no avail. Pope Pius XII
(played by Marcel Iures) is eager for the Germans
to destroy Bolshevism before he would address Nazi
misrule. The Vatican's line in the sand is drawn
only when German soldiers in Rome begin to round
up Jewish converts to Catholicism, and the Germans
presumably back off rather than risk papal condemnation
at that point. Eventually, the fictional Jesuit Riccardo
puts a Jewish symbol on his clerical robe, offering
himself as a sacrifice, but the Vatican is more interested
in his "blasphemy" than in his political
statement. When Germany is defeated, Gerstein translates
his documents into French, only to discover that
he is among those indicted for war crimes. He responds
to the indictment, a monstrous affront to all his
efforts to stop the Holocaust, by hanging himself
in his cell. Evil always triumphs in films by Costa-Garvas,
who is now seventy, and intermittent film footage
of the rapid movement of trains to and from the death
camps reminds us that thousands were dying while
the Vatican was dithering. Gerstein's superior officer
(played by Ulrich Mühe), a nominal Catholic
who was a willing participant in the Nazi horrors,
saves Gerstein from a court martial, but after the
war he is given sanctuary by the Catholic Church
and safe conduct to Argentina; apparently his character
is a surrogate for Dr. Josef Mengele. Titles at the
end tell us that Gerstein's efforts were finally
honored twenty years after his death. Yet the story
itself took forty years to get to the screen, as
the play in 1963 provoked riots in London, Paris,
and West Berlin, and Catholic pressure prevented
openings in New York and Rome. Accordingly, the Political
Film Society has nominated Amen as
best film exposé and best film on human rights
for 2003. MH
I
want to comment on this film |
Amen
by Rolf Hochhuth, Richard Winston, Clara Winston
(Translator)
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