- Müller: Perhaps the judge has a special love for them?
- Klopfer: [mutters appreciatively] Yes, yes a special love for them... very good...
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: For whom? For Jews? Wonderful, you don't have my credentials. Forgive me, from your uniform I can infer that you're shallow, ignorant and naive about the Jews. Your line, what the party rants on about is how inferior they are, some-some-some sub-species, and I keep saying how wrong that is! They are sublimely clever. And they are intelligent as well. My indictments to that race are stronger and heavier because they are real, not uneducated ideology. They are arrogant and self-obsessed and calculating and reject the Christ and I will not have them pollute German blood!
- General Reinhard Heydrich: [tries to calm Stuckart down] Please, Doctor...
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: He doesn't understand! And neither do his people. Deal with the reality of the Jew and the world will applaud us. Treat them as imaginary phantoms, evil in human fantasies, and the world would have justified contempt for us! To kill them casually without regard for the law martyrs them, which will be their victory! Sterilization recognizes them as a part of our species but prevents them from being a part of our race. They'll disappear soon enough. And we will have acted in defense of our race and of our species and by the law! This fellow mentioned the law for the protection of German blood, *I wrote that law*! When you have my credentials then we'll talk about who loves the Jews and who hates them. Pigs don't know how to hate. I know, too, that when it comes to the half-mixed, that to kill them abandons that half of their blood which is German.
- Klopfer: I'll remember you.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: You should. I'm very well known.
- Heydrich: [to Lange] Politics is a nasty game. I think soldiering requires the discipline to do the unthinkable and politics requires the skill to get someone else to do the unthinkable for you.
- Lange: I have the real feeling I "evacuated" 30,000 Jews already, by shooting them, at Riga. Is what I did "evacuation"? When they fell, were they "evacuated"? There are another 20,000, at least, waiting for similar "evacuation". - I just think it is helpful to know what words mean... with all respect.
- [Kritzinger bangs the table in applause]
- Adolf Eichmann: If I might, I think it's unnecessary to burden the record...
- Heydrich: Yes! In my personal opinion, they are evacuated.
- Kritzinger: Explain!
- Heydrich: I have just done so.
- Kritzinger: That is not - no, that is contrary to what the Chancellery has been told. I have directly been assured - I have - that - purge the Jews, yes, but to annihilate them - that we have undertaken to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe - that possibility has personally been denied, to me, by the Führer!
- Heydrich: And it will continue to be.
- Adolf Eichmann: [puts on a record and listens to the music] Does it tear your heart out?
- Supervising Butler: [moved by the music] Beautiful, sir.
- Adolf Eichmann: I have never understood the passion for Schubert's sentimental Viennese shit.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: Can I - can I just say one word more? In the obligation, in the obligation to maintain a lawful society...
- Klopfer: Another lecture. Another lecture!
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: ...what we would be saying to those... Where we depart from the legal letter in deporting a Jew married...
- Klopfer: Good, deport them! Deport them!
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: ...to a German, a new law will be required...
- Klopfer: Write it! Why don't you write it?
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: Consider. Consider: the Jews are taken away. The German spouses will presumably inherit the property of the Jewish spouses, go to court, their death certificates will be applied for and what happens to your secret killings then? No matter what you call them? The secret is out, dear friends! Perhaps not inheritance; perhaps divorce, freedom to remarry. So a requisite divorce mechanism dealing with these marriages to be terminated becomes the Reich's responsibility to its German citizens.
- Klopfer: Fuck.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: I AM SPEAKING!
- Müller: [after the meeting, by the fireplace] What was the story you were going to tell me?
- Heydrich: Story?
- Müller: Kritzinger.
- Heydrich: Yes, he told me a story about a man he'd known all his life, a boyhood friend. This man hated his father. Loved his mother fiercely. The mother was devoted to him but the father used to beat him, demeaned him, disinherited him. Anyway, this boy grew to manhood and was still in his thirties when the mother died, this mother who had nurtured and protected him. She died. The man stood as they lowered her casket and tried to cry but no tears came. The man's father lived to a very extended old age, withered away and died when the son was in his fifties, I think, and at the father's funeral, much to his son's surprise, he could not control his tears. He was wailing, sobbing. He was apparently inconsolable. Lost, even. That was the story Krtizinger told me.
- Adolf Eichmann: I don't understand.
- Heydrich: No?
- [Eichmann shakes his head]
- Heydrich: The man had been driven his whole life by hatred of his father. When the mother died, that was a loss, When the father died, the hate had lost his object, then the man's life was empty. Over.
- Adolf Eichmann: Interesting.
- Heydrich: That was Kritzinger's warning.
- Adolf Eichmann: What? That we should not hate the Israelites?
- Heydrich: No, that it should not so fill our lives; that when they are gone we have nothing left to live for. So says the story.
- [Eichmann and Muller make no reply, then Heydrich closes the monologue by unpretentiously saying]
- Heydrich: I will not miss them.
- Heydrich: We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for them to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate the race. That's farcical. Dead men don't hump, dead women don't get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way.
- Dr. Alfred Meyer: A communist, by definition, has a defect of reason.
- Dr. Roland Freisler: The Russian is not a communist, my friend. The Russian does not give a damn who runs things. I have lived amongst them. The Russian only cares he has a bottle of vodka to suck and some form of domestic animal life to fuck. Then he will happily sit in shit his whole life. That is *his* politics. I know those people. That is the distinction. I absolve the Jews of that!
- [first lines]
- Narrator: Adolph Hitler invaded Poland in September, 1939, starting WWII. By the winter of 1942, his armies were freezing and starving in the snows of Russia, where his best general had died of a heart attack, and America had entered the war. For the first time, Hitler's dream of a German empire to last 1,000 years was in doubt. While he hired and fired generals and the winter grew colder 15 of his officials were ordered from their commands and ministries to meet in a quiet lakeside residence in Wannsee, in Berlin, far from the crisis at the front. In two hours, these men changed the world forever. Only one record of what was said and done here survives from the wreckage of what was the Thousand-Year Reich.
- Adolf Eichmann: Now, last summer Reichsführer Himmler asked me to visit a camp up in Upper Silesia, called Auschwitz, which is very well isolated, and close to significant rail access. And we are turning that camp into a major center, solid structures (and here's where your Jewish labor comes into play, Herr Neumann, the Jews haul the bricks and they build the buildings themselves). And when the structures are complete, we expect to be able to process 2500... an hour. Not a day, an hour.
- Heydrich: And those numbers look a lot better.
- Luther: 2500 an hour?
- Hofmann: 2500?
- Adolf Eichmann: At 24 hours a day, that is 60,000.
- Kritzinger: 60,000 each day...
- Adolf Eichmann: That's 21,900,000 Jews a year, if ever there were that many.
- Heydrich: And we are also constructing the means of disposal, which will obviously depend upon the process of combustion.
- Adolf Eichmann: Yes, it'll be industrial in nature: large commercial gas-fed ovens, no residue to speak of.
- Müller: 60,000 Jews every day go up in smoke.
- Heydrich: We can achieve that. Imagine.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Sir, this is Neumann of the Four Year Plan, a close associate of Reichsmarschall Goering. Neumann, I introduce Dr. Klopfer, a close associate of the Brown Eminence.
- Erich Neumann: Brown... excuse me?
- Klopfer: I represent Martin Bormann, the Party Chairman of the Thousand Year Plan.
- Klopfer: And how is it you speak Hebrew? Or is it only Yiddish you speak?
- Adolf Eichmann: Well, I lived among them, I worked among them, and I picked up a few words; Jewish, Yiddish, not enough to speak. So I went in search of a rabbi - rabbi means "teacher", I came to find out - Look, may I tell you the Lord's honest truth? So many of our highest-ranking officers, whose responsibility it is to deal with the Israelites, they make no attempt to get inside the Jewish head - I went to visit this rabbi - old man, long beard - in his one-room flat. And when he saw me, his eyes grew as large as hen's eggs. I asked him to teach me his language, and he agreed, and he said that he would, but that he would charge me - of course. So, I applied to my commander for funds, and I was denied; now, I've run into this opposition all my life, so I paid my own money - very little, not much. And he taught me some vocabulary, letters of the alphabet. But looking back, I realize it was poor judgment on my part, because I could have so easily had the old man arrested - put into prison - and demanded lessons from him, in his cell, free of charge. One day, he was rounded up and shipped off because he had gone out unadvisedly. And I thought "That's so stupid... why are they so stupid?" Didn't he know that I would have protected him? At least until my lessons were complete.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I think I heard some of what I wrote in what you said.
- General Reinhard Heydrich: I think not.
- Heydrich: If there are indeed 'decent Jews' then before they are decent, and indeed after, they are Jews. No, first-degree exempted will be sterilized. No matter children, and eventually no more mixed blood, once and for all. It is important to know what words mean, but it is important to remember that a thousand years from now, no matter who holds the power, history will be written in those words.
- Heydrich: Emigration. The policy that will take the place of emigration, and we have collected enough practical experience to do it well, is evacuation.
- Hofmann: Which differs from emigration in what way? Evacuation to where?
- Heydrich: Let us postpone that question for a while.
- Klopfer: To hell, one hopes.
- Lange: Many already have.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Do they even have a hell?
- Heydrich: They do now. We provide it.
- Kritzinger: Lange?
- Lange: Yes, sir?
- Kritzinger: Who were those 30,000 you say you shot, when you say, YOU shot?
- Lange: In Riga, Latvia. 27,800 I have some responsibility for. And stood by with my men and allowed Latvian civilians to kill in mobs. I received memos directing the, one would say "evacuation" of Jews who, shot and buried in soil and corpses, managed to crawl out, still alive. Not exactly war, is it? And gas chambers about to come?
- Kritzinger: What gas chambers? Gas chambers?
- Lange: I hear rumours, yes.
- Kritzinger: This is more than war. Must be a different word for this.
- Lange: Try "chaos".
- Kritzinger: Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.
- Lange: I studied law as well.
- Kritzinger: And how do you apply that education to what you do?
- Lange: It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.
- Adolf Eichmann: This meeting is not taking place. You will take no calls for anyone at this meeting. Unless the Führer calls. And he won't.
- Heydrich: Nietzsche advises the secret to enjoying life is to live dangerously.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: He enjoyed it so much he went mad.
- Klopfer: I take it that you do not get good food up in Krakow?
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: If all of Berlin eats like you, it's no wonder we have shortages.
- Heydrich: [the meeting is near a close, and Heydrich is listening to everyone's decision] Do we have any disputes left to face here either with my authority or with that we have agreed? General?
- Müller: Let us astonish Charles Darwin.
- Klopfer: [raises glass] I second the motion. It is our most important war.
- Heydrich: Sir?
- Kritzinger: We are discussing the inevitable and bringing it about in the most practical way under one command. I have no dispute with that, I understand the realities. And indeed, count on my support.
- Hofmann: With the understanding that consideration will be given to my proposal, yes. Proceed.
- Dr. Georg Leibbrandt: I defer to the SS.
- Dr. Alfred Meyer: If you are to do it, then force-feed it. Speed it along. Our situation, such as in Warsaw, is difficult, edging towards disastrous. Thank you.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: ...Oh, yes. What can I say? My enthusiasm is boundless.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Obviously.
- Heydrich: Sorry?
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I trust my enthusiasm is clear, is apparent. Yes!
- Heydrich: Neumann?
- Erich Neumann: I would like to know that adequate labor will still be available...
- Heydrich: On a case-by-case basis. Major Lange?
- Lange: [as Heydrich continues to get a final word from everyone around the table] Yes.
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: I would like to urge that speed that Dr. Meyer asked of you. The Poles are not as disciplined a population as we Germans. And I will report our will of the group to the Governor General.
- Heydrich: He will understand that I'm relieving him of a burden. Colonel?
- SS.Col. Eberhard 'Karl' Schöngarth: I thoroughly approve and I'm anxious to start. I look forward to working with your office, and yours, Colonel.
- Dr. Roland Freisler: The sooner, the better.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I'm sorry, why can't you shoot them?
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: Didn't you just hear him? It is the worst thing for our soldiers to be doing. They are women, they are children. And soldiers have a sense of honor, sir.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: There's plenty of honor in following orders.
- Lange: Sir, would you care to join my group?
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Enthusiastically!
- Heydrich: No.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I will.
- Heydrich: No, you will not. 11 million, even half that number, executed in small batches, would be asinine to undertake for the reasons Dr. Meyer mentioned. Inefficient use of time, manpower, bullets. No. As Major Lange will learn, gas if much more efficient, and less public.
- Erich Neumann: I've done the arithmetic. The real size of the labor force is already a million less than the figures show.
- Dr. Georg Leibbrandt: The economic considerations are not the only considerations, you see.
- Erich Neumann: I'll say they're not. Have you done the extrapolations?
- Dr. Georg Leibbrandt: My friend, with due respect, may I say, "Fuck the extrapolations?"
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: The law of the Reich...
- Klopfer: We made the law we need. Why am I telling you this? How many lawyers are in this room? Raise your hand.
- [Almost half of those present raise their hands. Klopfer raises his own and makes Kritzinger do the same]
- Klopfer: Oh, Jesus Christ! It's worse than I thought.
- [Chuckle around the table]
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: [referring to Heydrich] Did you ask him?
- Klopfer: Ask him what?
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: Does he have little Jewish blood?
- Klopfer: No. Not yet.
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: Inform me when he answers.
- Klopfer: That's what I heard. Grandmother or a grandfather?
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: His father. That is the rumor. And if it is true, how happy would he be to tell you?
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: I will tell you this: When cholera hits the ghettos, and typhoid, your tattoos won't protect you from shitting your guts out until you dry up and die. Then tell me about infallibility.
- [last lines]
- Narrator: Col. Eichmann carefully edited the stenographic record of the conference. Copies were distributed to the participants to be read and then destroyed.
- Narrator: General Heydrich flew back to his headquarters in Czechoslovakia where, in a few terrible weeks, he had earned the nickname: The Butcher of Prague. In the spring, two Czech patriots trained to assassinate him and dropped from a British bomber succeeded in wounding him. In reprisal, thousands of Czechs were rounded up and shot. Heydrich's wounds grew infected, he fell into a coma and died.
- Narrator: Eichmann, as Heydrich's deputy for Jewish affairs was left to finish what they had begun at Wannsee. He considered it a matter of honor.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Do you expect the men serenely to submit to being sterilized?
- Klopfer: Why not? They've already had their cocks clipped.
- Dr. Roland Freisler: [Referring to the side affects of gassing with carbon monoxide] The Jews go in red and come our pink. Now, that is progress!
- Kritzinger: No, that is not, that is contrary to what the Chancellory has been told! I have been told, I have... Purge the Jews, yes. But,to annihilate them... That we have undertaken to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe? No, that possibility has personally been denied, to me, by the Führer!
- Heydrich: And it will continue to be.
- Kritzinger: Yes, I understand. Yes. He will continue to deny it.
- Heydrich: My apologies. Do you accept my apologies?
- Kritzinger: Of course.
- [opening the conference]
- Heydrich: So to begin. We have a storage problem in Germany, with these Jews.
- General Reinhard Heydrich: I *love* this house. Seeing it from the air you can appreciate the architect, and when the war is over it will be my home.
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: Are they underway?
- Adolf Eichmann: Not yet Sir.
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: Who is late?
- Dr. Roland Freisler: We are.
- SS Maj.Gen. Heinrich Müller: Who is missing?
- Adolf Eichmann: General Heydrich, Sir. But he's on his way.
- Dr. Roland Freisler: He will have his grand entrance.
- Erich Neumann: I hear we're counter-attacking. Reichenau has got them out of the trenches...
- Dr. Wilhelm Kritzinger: Reichenau is dead. Let us not gossip like maids at the market.
- Klopfer: [leaving after the meeting] You certainly know how to throw a party.
- Adolf Eichmann: Thank you.
- Klopfer: Shalom!
- Heydrich: If there are 'decent Jews' then before they are decent, and indeed after, they are Jews. No, first-degree exempted will be sterilized. No more children, and eventually no more mixed blood, once and for all. It is important to know what words mean, but it is important to remember that a thousand years from now, no matter who holds the power, history will be written in those words.
- Erich Neumann: Neumann, Director, Office of the Four-Year Plan.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: For Goering?
- Erich Neumann: For Reichsmarshal Goering, yes, his office. And you, sir?
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Luther, and what is your plan? Where will we be in four years, do you think? Living in the White House?
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: I find the plan unworkable. I find the plan personally insulting. I have given years to codifying the laws regarding interracial marriage. Now I'm presented with this clumsy, forgive me, unworkable structure. My work, these laws, any legal code worthy of the name, restricts the enforcers of law as well as its subjects. There are some things you cannot do.
- Heydrich: As you see it.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: What I see is all I have to contribute here.
- Adolf Eichmann: And the - carbon monoxide, what it does is... The bodies come out pink. The gas turns them pink.
- SS.Col. Eberhard 'Karl' Schöngarth: [laughing] That's a nice touch.
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: If it is already built, what is this meeting? Why bother?
- Heydrich: The system has shown that it works. It will work for you. It is settling in. The method is now defined.
- Dr. Roland Freisler: The Jews go in red and come out pink. That is progress.
- [laughter around the room]
- Kritzinger: It is night in Moscow already. Soon, it will be dark here. Do you think we'll ever see the dawn in our lifetime?
- Hofmann: Come spring, we'll be on the move again...
- Adolf Eichmann: [berating a group of young soldiers outside passing the time by having a snowball fight] STOP IT! Stop it!
- [all stop and stand at attention, Eichmann approaches one]
- Adolf Eichmann: You! What are you doing? You're in uniform!
- Soldier: I'm sorry, sir. It just seemed to happen.
- Adolf Eichmann: [angrily slaps him across the face] Not in uniform, nothing ever "just happens".
- Müller: Have you ever seen an animal with two heads? They do not live. You want to see Bormann and Goering fight it out?