“Labyrinth of Lies” tells the story of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials
Given the profusion of Holocaust stories that have been told through film, it is surprising that the fascinating slice of German postwar history featured in the new film “Labyrinth of Lies” — the 1963-65 Auschwitz trials that charged hundreds of Germans with abetting Hitler’s Final Solution by working at the notorious concentration camp — hasn’t yet been explored in a feature film until now.
Yet perhaps even more startling is the central historical fact that director Giulio Ricciarelli exposes in “Labyrinth of Lies”: that in 1958, 12 years after the Nuremberg trials that publicly prosecuted leading Nazi officials, there remained a widespread lack of awareness, or willful denial, among the majority of everyday Germans of the abominable crimes that took place at Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people died.
‘No one wants to know’
“No one asks questions because no one wants to know,” says fiery real-life journalist Thomas Gnielka (played by Andre Szymanski) in one of the movie’s early scenes, confronting Frankfurt’s old-guard prosecutors.
Gnielka’s insistence, and the film’s central premise — that Auschwitz personnel slipped back into the public sector after committing unspeakable offenses and that the German justice system failed to deal with their crimes — upends our contemporary assumption that Germans’ eyes were opened to their nation’s horrors soon after the war ended.
“Labyrinth of Lies,” Ricciarelli’s first full-length film, was a hit in Europe and positively received at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was recently selected as Germany’s submission to be nominated for this year’s Academy Award for best foreign film.
“I am half Italian but grew up in a Germany where in school a lot of war information was taught — we even visited the camps,” said Ricciarelli, 50, by phone, who splits his time between Munich and Berlin. “When (co-screenwriter) Elizabeth Bartel approached me about this idea, based on a news article she had read, I could not believe I had no idea what had happened.
“Before working on this film I would have described Germany totally differently, as starting to deal with its past right after 1945. And the truth is that for almost 18 years they instead tried everything to deny and sweep it under the rug. A whole generation grew up in a generation of silence.”
“Labyrinth” stars the 34year-old German stage and screen actor Alexander Fehling (“Inglourious Basterds,” “Young Goethe in Love”) as Johann Radmann, an idealistic young attorney who is a composite of the three men who prosecuted the Auschwitz defendants.
This fall, Fehling will become much better known to American audiences, as Carrie’s (Claire Danes) new love interest on the hit Showtime series “Homeland.”
SS officer to teacher
Once the young prosecutor is radicalized by learning that a former SS officer is teaching at a local elementary school, Radmann doggedly pursues witness accounts of the crimes committed by the 8,000 Germans who worked at Auschwitz — of “all those who didn’t say no” — and long-overdue justice in court.
Fehling is in nearly every scene in “Labyrinth,” which Ricciarelli calls “a classically structured hero’s journey.”
Radmann believes the trial will catalyze Germany’s confrontation with its past, and “his thinking is first very black and white. We see humility grow. When asked in the beginning, ‘Do you want every son to ask his father if he was a murderer?’ Radmann says yes.
But later, standing at Auschwitz, he admits, ‘I don’t know what I would have done.’ ”
Ricciarelli says that the more he meticulously researched the trials, including conversations he and Fehling had with surviving prosecutor Gerhard Wiese, the more passionate he became about “making this film to acknowledge the enormous efforts of a group of individuals to change society by confronting these terrible truths. The cultural narrative at the time, as dictated by Chancellor (Konrad) Adenauer, was ‘Let’s draw a line under the past and look forward.’
“The whole government was made up of former Nazis, and there was absolute resistance to having these trials. The amazing thing about Prosecutor-General Fritz Bauer (a Jew and socialist who was imprisoned in a camp in Poland in 1933, and is played in the film by Gert Voss) was he initiated the trial not for revenge. He really wanted the young republic to open its eyes to what had happened, to strengthen them against it ever happening again.”
The script incorporates real witness testimonies from the ’60s trial transcripts, “trying to be as correct and historically accurate as possible, yet takes liberties with Radmann’s emotional life. We wanted to make an entertaining and emotional cinematic experience, and not just a history lesson.”
The story incorporates a love story between Radmann and a dressmaker played by Friederike Becht, and even injects some humor into the solemn Sisyphean task of pinning war crimes charges on thousands of one’s countrymen.
‘Very, very moving’
Ricciarelli describes “Labyrinth’s” European and Canadian screenings as “very, very moving. I knew we had a strong story, but it was astonishing to me how much this issue, this silence, was all still alive in families. One woman at a Q&A said she had a box of her grandfather’s things and it remained locked because she was too afraid to open it and learn what he did during the war. An old man at a screening stopped me and said, ‘Thank you for this. My father was one of the bad ones.’ That is very moving for a filmmaker.
“In Toronto, a lot of survivors’ families were in the audience and they told me how overwhelming the silence was by their grandparents, just as profoundly for the victims as for the perpetrators. I love that quote from Faulkner: ‘The past is not over. It’s not even past.’ ”