AMEN. IS THE BEST FILM ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST EVER MADE
On January 30, 2003, a film was released in Hollywood and soon nominated by the Political Film Society for best film exposé and best film on human rights for the year. A second review of that biopic/docudrama follows:
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, 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