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COSTA-GARVAS'S AMEN DOCUMENTS
THE NAZI HORRORS
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.
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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
FINAL
BALLOTING FOR BEST POLITICAL FILMS OF 2002
Many films were pre-nominated
for Political Film Society awards for 2002. Since
Political Film Society rules require the number of
nominated films to be reduced to no more than five
in each category, members voted in January to narrow
the choices. To submit your vote now, CLICK
HERE.
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