This was a compelling story. The acting was good too. It didn't come off as cliche or overdetermined. I didn't know how it was going to end. When he quit his job as a prosecutor I thought that might be the end of the film. But he returns to his post and the film ends with the beginning of a trial of former Nazis. This is the third of good German films that have been screened in the US. I saw Phoenix which I thought was brilliantly done. Then I saw Victoria which is a bit hard to believe. Yet it was very avant garde and played to my sensibility of youth. The characters are all young guys and one young girl from Spain. It's story centers around a bank robbery gone horribly wrong. Tonight I watched Labyrinth of Lies. Another very good film that deals, like Phoenix, with the aftermath of the Holocaust.
In Labyrinth a young Lawyer sets out to investigate former SS for crimes committed at Aushwitz. He runs up against a myriad of obstacles. And after much research he finds out that so many people in Germany were Nazis to prosecute them all would be to indict most of the country. Yet he continues his quest to bring the war criminals to justice. Even though many people in Germany don't wish to know or look at the true extent of the crimes committed in the camps. The young Lawyer becomes obsessed with a Nazi doctor who did experiments on children. Unfortunately, the doctor gets away and dies in a swimming accident. Not in prison like he should have.
The film is a quick two hours. I enjoyed most of the film. The youthful post-War exuberance of the young characters is fun to watch. The lawyer and his friends always seem to be drinking and dancing. There is also talk of Germany as a young democracy. So much has been written about the Nazi period or Weimar. I think of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun which focuses on the immediate post-War years. And also his Berlin Alexanderplatz which is excellent. But I haven't seen any films about the prosecution of War criminals recently. Of course I've watched the Trials at Nuremberg. It's a classic. As is Spielberg's Schindler's List. I'm sure there are many more that I don't know of.
The point this film drills home is that so many people were complicit in Nazi crimes. How can they all be punished? Where does responsibility lie? With only Hitler and the higher ups? No. The foot soldiers were guilty too. And they had to be brought to justice. That's what this film shows. Germany's coming to grips with the extent of the Nazis crimes. It wasn't only Hitler, or the SS, it was also mechanics, bakers, and other people who carried out orders. They too are guilty.
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