A local journalist (the one pointing at passersby and quizzing them) leads him to a generation of survivors ready to talk – if anyone were there to listen. The hero is a fictional, idealistic public prosecutor named Radmann (Alexander Fehling), who is shocked to learn the true nature of the Third Reich’s crimes. With time, only those on the lunatic fringe denied what happened at the camps, but the real question is why did it take so long? How is it possible that, after the Nuremberg trials and the publication of Anne Frank’s Diary, you could ask a 20-year-old in Frankfurt in 1958 “What happened at Auschwitz?” and get a blank stare in response? This is the question that Labyrinth of Lies tries to answer, and while the topic of mass delusion is fascinating, this film is too unfocused to turn it into compelling drama. (Elie Wiesel’s Night, first published in French in 1958, did not become the staple of Holocaust literature for decades.)Īlexander Fehling in Labyrinth of Lies. Soon after came Jean-François Steiner’s 1967 publishing sensation Treblinka, a shocking you-are-there account of the Final Solution gleaned from survivor accounts that isn’t frequently referenced today, but was quite important during its time. In 1964, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker was the first Hollywood film in which it was expected that audience members would understand the measure of the camp atrocities. Many consider the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 an attempt by the Jewish state of Israel to attain some sort of closure. “They don’t like to talk about it” was something a lot of first-generation Jewish Americans would say about their survivor parents. Some argue that the world never fully dealt with the horror of the Holocaust until the 1960s.
The wounded nation of West Germany is trying to rebuild, and their great ally (and financial backer) the United States is focusing all its energy on containing the Soviet Union. “The victors get to make up stories,” one shrugs. A 20-year-old woman shrugs, and even those who recall Auschwitz as a prison camp swat away half-remembered accusations of mass murder. The setting is a public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, 1958. “You there, what happened at Auschwitz?” So barks a pedantic exposition machine masquerading as a character in Giulio Ricciarelli’s well-meaning but bordering-on-inept historical drama Labyrinth of Lies.
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