"One meeting. Six million lives"

"One of the greatest crimes against humanity was perpetrated in just over an hour"

Summary:

On January 20th 1942, 15 men gathered in a villa on the outskirts of Berlin to feast on food and drink and discuss their business at hand. An hour and a half later, the Final Solution had been planned, sealing the fate of millions of European Jews.

Conspiracy: The Meeting at Wannsee stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich, Stanley Tucci as Adolf Eichmann and Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart. It recreates one of the most infamous gatherings in world history - the meeting at Wannsee, outside Berlin, when the administrative apparatus of the Third Reich was mobilised by Reinhard Heydrich to set in motion the detailed plans of the Final Solution.

Adolf Eichmann prepared 30 top-secret copies of the meeting’s minutes. By the fall of the Reich, they had all disappeared or been destroyed - all but one.

Conspiracy is based on the sole surviving copy of the “Wannsee Protocol,” which was found in the files of the Reich’s Foreign Office. It is one of the few written “proofs” of the extent of Hitler’s plans to annihilate all of European Jewry.

Filmed in London and Germany 2000.

The film was produced for the premium cable network HBO, where it first aired on May 19, 2001.

Conspiracy premiered April 30 at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. May 7 the film screened in Chicago and later on in N.Y. at the Council on Foreign Affairs.

(TV Movie)

For anyone who would relegate Conspiracy to a one-time event that could never be repeated, Firth would remind you of some current-day conflicts taking place in Europe and Africa. "I am reading a book on Rwanda at the moment," he says, "and it is remarkable to me how many parallels there are. The Balkans might be a more fitting comparison," he adds, and stories of Serbs being tried for war crimes related to ethnic cleansing continue to pop up on the news. As Firth points out, the Germans at Wannsee "weren't doing it in the spirit of passion, but because they felt it was necessary and that their lives would not be better until they got rid of an entire race of people. The same sort to normalization of what is absolutely unthinkable is still happening today." [Entertainment Guide, May 2001]

Full credits here

	Some info on Wilhelm Stuckart who Colin plays in the film Conspiracy: Stuckart was born 1902 in Wiesbaden [Germany] and studied law in Frankfurt am Main and Munich. Already a right-wing extremist, Stuckart joined the Nazi party in 1922 and participated in the Hitler Munich putsch in 1923. Stuckart became the Nazi party's legal adviser in 1926, and a judge in 1930. He had to resign in 1932 because of his political affiliations, but his career revived with the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933. He became, successively, state secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Church Affairs (1933), a member of the Prussian State Council (1933),and secretary of state in the Reich Ministry of the Interior (1935). As head of the department for constitutional and legislative matters Stuckart headed the general administration, local administration police administration, administration of officials, public health, welfare, geodetic system, sport system and the Reich Labor Service. Stuckart was instrumental in helping to draft the Nuremberg Laws (1935). and he joined the SS in 1936. In 1942, he participated in the Wannsee conference, at which he warmly endorsed the plans for the "final solution" the compulsory sterilization of all "non-Aryans" and the dissolution of mixed marriages. In racial matters, Stuckart was even more extreme than Reinhard Heydrich. Arrested in May 1945, Stuckart denied attending the Wannsee Conference. In April 1949, he was sentenced to prison for 3 years and 10 months. He was released in 1949, and died 1953 in an automobile accident that was rumored to have been the work of a group taking revenge on Nazi war criminals. [Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and The Simon Wiesenthal Center online]

Runtime: 96 min

Country: UK / USA

Language: English / German

Color: Color

Certification: Australia:M / Singapore:PG / Spain:13 / USA:R

MPAA Rating: R (Restricted: under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian)

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Some information courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.

Also with thanks te Colin Firth Career Timeline