How Legal Demons Made A Pact
This is a 2001 HBO movie about the notorious 1942 Wannsee Conference of World War II, where the Nazi senior officers gathered together and reached an agreement on the evacuation plan of the European Jews, “the Holocaust”. The narrative, plotline and script of this movie remind me of 12 Angry Men, though they are profoundly different. I think every law student, legal professional and law practitioner should watch this movie. Why is that?
I think there are several highlights:
(1) How bureaucracy penetrates
(2) How an evil decision is made
(3) How a stakeholder is overpowered
(4) How legal training and methodology provide no immunity to viciousness
The movie spends most of its narrative depicts how people with less ill minds are overpowered by more forceful or charismatic personalities, higher hierarchy and superior social standing. “You would be a hard man to bring down, but not impossible.” The overwhelming and icy SS general Reinhard Heydrich warns a damfounded and relunctant Wilhelm Kritzinger, a high officer from Chancellery. Every person with a not-so-pleasantly-cooperative attitude is taken away, talked to, smoothed to obedience. As a person standing alone, Kritzinger cannot achieve a mission impossible to defy.
As meeting organizer, Kenneth Branagh’s performance of Reinhard Heydrich shows a ruthless will of order implementation in a stone-hearted soldier under skin of politeness and suavity. He is pure evil in his own right. He is championed by group of similar soldiers consider incomparable glory to “get the thing done”. When they finally get to the point of looking into the plan figures, all of them happily and satisfactorily accept.
Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, a renowned legal scholar, a German intellectual elite, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, appears exasperated and excited from the beginning when the idea of annihilation is thrown in front of the attendants. However, his emotional argument is not based on injustice and inhumanity of the proposal, but because “solving the problem of mixed marriages and persons of mixed blood will create endless administrative work.” He talks about burden to civil courts, supremacy of existing law, avoidance of subjective standard and judgment and lack of accuracy – this is a typical legal thinking and reasoning, however anyhow incredibly evil. The movie designs a special moment of his show of a contempt to the “layman”: “You pigs don’t know how to hate.” Justice is then broken down into some technical objections and considerations.
All in all, this meeting is not a discussion or an idea exchange, but an opinion and standing point buy-in.
I highly recommend it to everyone mature enough to understand, especially people major in law.
