TWO REVIEWS SEPARATED BY 20 YEARS
COSTA-GAVRAS’S AMEN DOCUMENTS THE NAZI HORRORS (February 15, 2023)
Many films have emerged recently to contradict those who have denied the Holocaust. Amen, directed by Constantine Costa-Gavras 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-Gavras’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 in part 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 to 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 addresses 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-Gavras, who is now seventy, and intermittent film footage of the rapid movement of trains to and from the death camps remind 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
AMEN. IS THE BEST FILM ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST EVER MADE (January 1, 2022)
Amen. begins during 1940, in early years of Nazi rule, when a Social Darwinistic decision was made to round up all disabled persons for execution. The biopic focuses on SS officer Lt. Kurt Gerstein (played by Ulrich Tukur), who observes his sister-in-law being hauled away for execution. Because he protests the executions to church leaders, noting that Christians are included, they denounce the program, which is called off. Next, filmviewers see Gerstein explaining to German soldiers in Poland that Zyklon is a chemical means to purify water so that they need not suffer from typhus-infected vermin found within water on the battlefield. However, he visits mass murders in the Belzec and Treblinka Nazi extermination camps, looking through a peephole at one camp to see how that the same chemical is being used to produce a gas that is used inside chambers filled with Jews. Shocked, he reports what he sees to church leaders in Germany, who seem less concerned because no Christians are being executed.
One of the Jesuit priests in the parish, Riccardo Fontana (Mathieu Kassovitz), has ties to a father with a position in the Vatican. He pursues the matter, trying to bring Gerstein and his testimony every step up the chain of command, all the way to the pope. Fontana, however, is a fictional character.
Two efforts are underway simultaneously in the film. One is the pathway to the pope filled with a variety of rationalizations (Jews are not Christians, evidence is speculative, the real enemy was communism, etc.) for failure to come to the aid of Jews. Even when Jews they are being rounded up in Rome, the church is silent, so Fontana puts on a Jewish symbol, enters a train bound for execution, is removed by a German physician (Ulrich Mühe), a friend of Gerstein who plays the role of Dr. Josef Mengele, and is used as someone to provide assistance at one of the death camps until he is gassed. After Germany surrenders, that friend later leaves for Argentina with the aid of the Catholic Church.
The second effort involves Gerstein directly trying to prevent as many deaths as he can. For example, he claims that one shipment of Zyklon is defective and must be buried. He tries to slow the executions, which Nazis want to proceed quickly, by insisting that a higher level of the gas would be dangerous for those cleaning up afterward. He also asks a friend in the government to slow the rail routes. Gerstein gives a detailed report to diplomats from the Dutch government-in-exile, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States as well as members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII.
The film dramatizes almost every element of the Holocaust—roundups, train travel, housing, being stripped before put into gas chambers. Included is a scene with bodies of previously exterminated Jews burning in a mass grave.
After the war he is arrested by the French military as a potential war criminal for trial at Nuremberg. While a prisoner, he writes up his account, known as the Gerstein Report, which is effectively used in war crimes trials. However, one day he is found to have committed suicide in his cell, though no investigation of the circumstances is undertaken.
The film is based in part on a 1963 play Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy) by Rolf Hochhuth. Because of the accusation that the Catholic Church was silent while Jews suffered, the film is controversial. A title at the end indicates that he was exonerated 20 years later, presumably when his actual role came to light.
Directed by Constantine Costa-Gavras, Amen. was nominated for awards in 2003 for best film exposé and best film on human rights. Although Amen. did not receive either award, the film is definitely worth viewing again at home for less than the cost of admission at film houses today. MH