“Labyrinth of Lies” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It is content to be a chilly, disquieting study of a society in a state of denial until the truth is bared. This is freighted with symbolism Marlene’s business flourishes when the wives of former Nazis become her principal clientele.īut “Labyrinth of Lies” doesn’t belabor such moral subtleties or try to make a grand statement about good Germans versus bad. “Labyrinth of Lies” shoehorns in a love story between Radmann and Marlene (Friederike Becht), a gifted young dressmaker. The prosecutor crashes a family banquet Mengele, as we now know, was never apprehended, and the film portrays the guests at that dinner as tacit conspirators in helping him evade capture. In one of the creepiest scenes, Radmann learns that Mengele, who fled to South America, has secretly returned to Germany under a pseudonym for the funeral of a family member in Günzburg. There comes a point when he is sidetracked by his obsession with capturing the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and bringing him to justice. Those confronted with committing atrocities in the past smugly trot out the familiar defense that they had no choice and were just following orders.Īs Radmann pursues his research, evidence of what might be called a national conspiracy of silence accumulates. It is difficult to believe that in the 1950s so many Germans born after 1930, like Radmann, knew little if anything about Auschwitz, even though many older family members belonged to the Nazi Party and some even worked at the camp. Bauer wears an expression of wide-eyed, infinitely sad knowledge of evil. He is encouraged in his investigations by Fritz Bauer, a real-life prosecutor wonderfully played by Gert Voss, who died in 2014 and to whom the film is dedicated. Studying the voluminous files stored at the United States Army Document Center, Radmann finds his worst fears substantiated. Voicing his frustration that thousands of former Nazis went unpunished and simply returned to ordinary life after the war, he encounters stony-faced indifference and hostility, although the only outright threat is a rock imprinted with a swastika thrown through a window. When he sets out to prosecute the teacher, Radmann faces stern resistance. Ricciarelli and Elisabeth Bartel) pointedly reminds us, was not in Germany but in Poland. Radmann has never heard of Auschwitz, which the screenplay (by Mr. Through Thomas Gnielka (André Szymanski), a journalistic acquaintance, he learns of Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), an Auschwitz survivor who has accidentally crossed paths with one of his wartime persecutors, who is now a schoolteacher.
The central character, Johann Radmann ( Alexander Fehling), a fictitious composite of three lawyers, is an idealistic new employee in the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, frustrated by his banal work in a traffic court. There are no emotional meltdowns, no grandiose speeches. Once the trials begin in 1963, witnesses are shown testifying, but their verbal accounts of what they endured are excerpted and made into a montage, their words camouflaged by Niki Reiser and Sebastian Pille’s soundtrack, which, although mournful, is never mawkish. There are no flashbacks to grisly acts of torture and killing, no scenes of skeletal inmates huddled behind barbed wire. Its most admirable trait is a refusal to sensationalize its subject. The directorial feature debut of Giulio Ricciarelli, “Labyrinth of Lies” has the dogged tone of an honorable, well-made television movie from the late 1950s or early ’60s. A statute of limitations prevented prosecutions for war crimes, excepting murder. Ordinary Germans who had joined the Nazi Party and committed atrocities returned to civilian life. The trials ended a period of relative calm during the reconstruction of a divided Germany, when the prevailing attitude toward the Nazi past was a state of willful amnesia. “Labyrinth of Lies,” which opens in 1958, resurrects a later chapter in the aftermath of the Holocaust that has largely faded from view, at least for many Americans: the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, in which 22 former mid- and lower-level functionaries at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were tried for murder. The trials are still imprinted in many people’s minds as the ultimate moment of reckoning, after which a horrific chapter of history was more or less closed and the world moved on. The earnest post-Holocaust drama “ Labyrinth of Lies” can be viewed as a sequel of sorts to “ Judgment at Nuremberg,” the much-decorated 1961 Stanley Kramer film about the Nuremberg trials of the 1940s, in which top-ranking Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity.
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