Many films have emerged recently to contradict those who have denied the Holocaust. Amen, directed by Constantine Garvas has trumped them all, providing specific documentation from an unwilling participant who supplied gas to the death camps, with a story based on a 1963 play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth. Kurt Gerstein (played by Ulrich Tukur), an officer in the SS, is a chemical engineer. His first job in the war is to transform unsafe, typhus-infected water into potable water so that soldiers in combat will have enough to drink. Indeed, the film begins exactly in the manner of Costa-Garvas's Z (1969), with a pep talk about how to wipe out vermin. Gerstein is in charge of the production and distribution of Zyklon, the disinfectant, which the Nazi Party subsequently approves as an agent to kill Jews and the others who were sent to the death camps. Early in the film, one of his nieces is killed in the so-called Compassionate Euthanasia campaign that gassed children who were mental defectives and those regarded as physically unfit. Upset because his niece could have been cured of her malady with proper medicines, Gerstein is relieved when protests from Catholic pulpits in Germany serve to end the campaign. When Gerstein later becomes an eyewitness to the death of Jews in a Belzen gas chamber, he thus believes that pressure from religious authorities will stop the Holocaust. Although he takes many steps to alert Catholic and Protestant leaders as well as American and Swedish authorities on what is happening, even obtaining written documentation to support his eyewitness accounts, he fails in his quest. His only success is to slow down the shipment of Zyklon on such pretexts as that the potency is compromised by leaks in the canisters containing the chemical. In Father Riccardo Fontana (played by Mathiew Kassovitz), a composite of several actual priests, he finds an ally with friends in high places in the Vatican, but also to no avail. Pope Pius XII (played by Marcel Iures) is eager for the Germans to destroy Bolshevism before he would address Nazi misrule. The Vatican's line in the sand is drawn only when German soldiers in Rome begin to round up Jewish converts to Catholicism, and the Germans presumably back off rather than risk papal condemnation at that point. Eventually, the fictional Jesuit Riccardo puts a Jewish symbol on his clerical robe, offering himself as a sacrifice, but the Vatican is more interested in his "blasphemy" than in his political statement. When Germany is defeated, Gerstein translates his documents into French, only to discover that he is among those indicted for war crimes. He responds to the indictment, a monstrous affront to all his efforts to stop the Holocaust, by hanging himself in his cell. Evil always triumphs in films by Costa-Garvas, who is now seventy, and intermittent film footage of the rapid movement of trains to and from the death camps reminds us that thousands were dying while the Vatican was dithering. Gerstein's superior officer (played by Ulrich Mühe), a nominal Catholic who was a willing participant in the Nazi horrors, saves Gerstein from a court martial, but after the war he is given sanctuary by the Catholic Church and safe conduct to Argentina; apparently his character is a surrogate for Dr. Josef Mengele. Titles at the end tell us that Gerstein's efforts were finally honored twenty years after his death. Yet the story itself took forty years to get to the screen, as the play in 1963 provoked riots in London, Paris, and West Berlin, and Catholic pressure prevented openings in New York and Rome. Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Amen as best film exposé and best film on human rights for 2003. MH

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Amen
by Rolf Hochhuth, Richard Winston, Clara Winston (Translator)