Apologies about the HBO Watermarks. Copyright Content ID's were BRUTAL. Get 4 months extra on a 2 year plan here: nordvpn.com/animarchy It’s risk free with Nord’s 30 day money-back guarantee! Hello everyone, welcome to my review of the scariest movie ever made. Also possibly the riskiest video I've ever made and given my channel that is saying something. Everyone else is doing something sensible like uploading Lethal Company Funny Moments compilations. Yet here I am, talking about the Spicy Pinwheel Gang once again. Today we are taking a look at HBO's 2001 film "Conspiracy", a dramatization of the Wannsee Conference. The meeting at which the Holocaust was given its form by the various government officials of Nazi Germany. As you can imagine this topic is very dark, very disturbing and rather uncomfortable to watch especially if you are directly impacted by it. Which I most certainly am. Given current events in Israel/Palestine I understand that the comments section may be quite charged. But I kindly ask you all to behave yourselves. Thank you.
A friend of mine, who was in his class to become an attorney, once had a classmate ask their teacher “Why would the Jews follow the nazis to their deaths? Why didn’t they resist while going to their death” The professor asked everyone in the class to get up, pack their things. And follow him. A bit bewildered, they all got up, got their things and went out to the hallway. The professor then led them all down the hallway, unlocked another room, and asked everyone to get inside the dark room. The class did as he asked, and went inside. He then came in. Turned on the lights and said “I have just taken an entire class, of highly educated people, and with blind obedience, you all followed me into a room with no knowledge of what my intent was. That’s how it happened.”
Wow! Professor Level: Legend. And also they thought, “I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about?” Kinda like today. They’re gathering all of your data. I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about? They’re installing facial recognition cameras everywhere. I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about? They want to make currency digital so they could literally turn off your cash flow. I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about?
That's a level up from the Stanford experiment! Being disenfranchised l, and put into the ghettos appeared like a preamble to deportation. Because information was tightly controlled about the turning tide of the war, the Jews never have the hope they could fight back and succeed. Obviously, the Warsaw uprising was a reaction to the reality that the Nazis were loosing. Regardless, they still fooled into boarding the gas trucks, and trains taking them to the camps.
Ye but they still could beat up his ass if he tried to lock them in, attitude would be quite different if he was someone perceived as an enemy by the students, as nazi were to jews. Its a stupid and simplistic "explanation", something you would expect, at worst, from a kindergaten teacher, not from a college professor...
One of my favorite quotes from Hotel Rwanda is when Paul sends off videos of the active Genocide going on in his country and looks to the Colonel Oliver, a Canadian UN officer, and says, “They will finally see what is happening and come to help us”. The Colonel reluctantly looks at him and says “No they look at their TV and say ‘Oh that’s awful’ and then go right back to eating their dinners”.
To be honest, I’d rather ordinary people in wealthy countries did that than obsess over such atrocities to the point where they appoint themselves as the white/western saviors of all those other people who are too primitive to think for themselves. That just makes things worse in my opinion
@@eeyorehaferbock7870Well said, Romeo Dallaire was treated horribly, he and his men were abandoned and not given the support, tools, or authorization to be proper peace enforcers and stop the genocide.
Certain "horror movies" I can't watch because the way they're presented, it's as if the scenario depicted could happen for real. SAW, Hostel, human centipede, The Purge etc. Movies like Come and See and The Zone of interest (both amazing films) were horror in their innocuous domesticity and casual living while surrounded by suffering. The true mental cost of war and the realization you had been lied to.
@@eeyorehaferbock7870 I do agree with you that some people who obsess over what they're seeing and think they can help makes it worse, but it's not strictly white people or people from Western countries, it's some people in some first world countries that have superiority complexes and think money can fix all problems. But I will say-and the point I was making-was that the indifference of decision-makers causes the efforts of people (like Dallaire) on the ground to be hobbled sometimes with deadly consequences.
Colin Firth's character was the most terrifying for me, when he opposes the final solution, and then you hear why he does. It's not because he didn't want to kill all the jews, he absolutely did, it's because he rightly saw that the death camps would be seen as barbaric and would be opposed by everybody, and he preferred to simply chemically castrate them all and to have them die not with a bang, but a whimper. Then he goes on a rant about he is the most anti-semitic of all of them, because he doesn't indulge in nazi fantasies and lies, but from his view, he is the one actually confronting reality. He may not have been the most evil man in the room, but he was by far the most competent, and that amplified what evil he did advocate for. It was bone chilling.
@@Stile4aly No, it goes beyond administrative difficulties. He was concerned about the justified backlash that would inevitably occur with the creation of the death camps, and he also had a special concern for half jews. Here is a direct quote, not from the Colin Firth's character, but from the real Wilhelm Stuckart: "I have always maintained that it is extraordinarily dangerous to send German blood to the opposing side. Our adversaries will put the desirable characteristics of this blood to good use. Once the half Jews are outside of Germany, their high intelligence and education level, combined with their German heredity, will render these individuals born leaders and terrible enemies." He wanted a different way, a way to commit genocide with minimal legal, diplomatic, and military consequences. He was the least barbaric and bloodthirsty man at the table, yet came up with a way to execute the holocaust in a far more effective manner. Thank god they didn't listen to him.
He just wanted the same solution the Spanish Inquisition did with the jewish question; kick them all out. Let them be someone else's problem. And that Spain did back in the Renaissance, where the Jews just fled to Turkish and Italian lands where the Pope and the Ottoman Sultan welcomed them.
That speech from Colin Firth where he yells, “I wrote that law!” still gives me chills. And when Heydrich says how many can be killed in Auschwitz in a DAY, and all the laughing stops and the one guy gets sick…. It was like they even crossed Evil’s line.
Odd fact: Tom Hiddleston is in this movie. He's the guy on the phone right at the start of the movie who tells Eichmann "He's here, sir." He also says "Yes, sir" when Eichmann tells him not to take any calls. And those are his only lines.
Ken Branagh gave Hiddleston his career on a platter. He cast him as Loki. Before that they'd done a series together ('Wallander'), as well as this. Branagh even cast him as Hamlet on stage and gave him a very meaningful gift: The 'Red Book' - a bound copy of the play passed down from actor to actor, meant to commemorate the "best Hamlet of his generation". Branagh had earlier received it from Derek Jacobi. All of this is kind of funny to me, because while I like Hiddleston in the right part, I think he's rather limited. Terrific as Loki, but a dreadful Henry V and without a great deal of range. Nothing wrong with that. The right actor in the perfect role can do wonders, but Branagh is such an impeccable craftsman that I struggle to fully understand the love affair.
I find it interesting that Tucci’s characterization was so much like the real Eichmann- a tyrant to his subordinates, but a mouse in the company of his superiors. As one survivor of Buchenwald put it concerning the higher ups in the SS camp administration, “They were lords from below, but only vassals from above.”
"...a tyrant to his subordinates, but a mouse in the company of his superiors. ... lords from below, but only vassals from above.” Accurate description of the garden-variety bully.
“Come and See” was remarked as a terrifying movie, except instead of it being a behind the scenes movie like this one, “Come and See” is a fraction of the horrible show.
The craziest part of this film is Heydrich pitching his ideas to the committee under the guise of a collaborative effort but theres a point in the film where one by one every opponent of Heydrich's plan realize theyre not there to give their opinion. Theyre there to take orders. Its incredibly subtle and incredibly brilliant.
That part is a favorite of mine. The illusion of choice, the pretense, suddenly breaking down. Kenneth's change in tone was amazing. Again, living under an authoritarian regime in Iran it hit so close to me. The most significant part of it is, the others realizing the depths of manure they got themselves into. The culmination point of something they started but some had no idea this would be the end point. You see under authoritarianism some figures get into the whole thing thinking they're part of a more elite but still democratic process, that their opionions still matter while they have taken away the power of others. Others are in there under the illusion that some of the extreme positions were symbolic. Then comes a certain day when they face the reality of those choices, some cheer with glee because that's what exactly they wanted some have that moment of realization of the full weight and cost of their decisions. Of the men around that table, some probably took more joy in the how of the holocaust than the why. But some probably imagined "I just want a germany without a jewish population, we'll probably deport them or something, all this grandstanding and dehumanization is probably political theater". Between all of them I'm almost certain even in reality some of them were horrified when the reality hit them... that they made decisions that ultimately gave power to the kid of people that even they were horrified by. That there's no nice way of doing something deplorable, legal guy realizes he's been part of a system that erode even it's own laws, the very concept of law which he might've held in high regard that ultimately judicial horror or extrajudicidal horror did not matter to them. The guy who wants some kind of superficially less horrific way like castration as if it's any less abhorrent realizes he's now part of wholesale slaughter. And ultimately... that they were all part of giving away their powers to the kind of ideologues and downright sociopaths that they too are about to become the very victims of. It's why I love this movie, it's first and foremost, a cautionary tale in complacency and the unintended costs you'd be paying both out of your own pocket and out of pocket of others.
@@FPoP1911 This hits the nail, especially the part where some of them probably doesn't want to participate in a slaughter and just wanted a nationwide equivalent of a gated community.
“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” C.S.Lewis “The Screwtape Letters”.
I wonder how the staff of Bomber Command was dressed and coiffed and what their demeanor was when they planned the attacks on Hamburg, Pforzheim and Dresden. I'd guess their office was also sufficiently lit, their fingernails clipped and their faces shaved, etc. Do you think they ever raised voice or concern over the tens of thousands of non-combatants and children they would kill?
That's what was so striking about this film. It wasn't the rantings of a madman, but an organized, orchestrated, and planned massacre by a bunch of educated, articulate, sane men from a variety of agencies and organizations throughout the Nazi government. It's even stranger that events today are mimicking this rationalization in a various parts of the world even as I write this.
The closing statement reminded me of how this movie actually humanized Nazis in the way that, evil doesn't come with a horn and tail and dramatic music, it's very normal looking people in very normal looking situations.
A Holocaust survivor told me that they didn't believe the rumors. They knew the Germans of culture, leaders of thought in chemistry, nuclear physics, writing operas, and making classical music, she said it was unthinkable that such a learned and cultured people could do those things. Germany was the world's leader in so many fields, it was unthinkable.
@@sjb3460 That's because it didn't happen, it was made up as an excuse to attack their country and demoralize their people for daring to remove those who cannot be named from their governments that had created massive famine in their country from 1918 until that hero took power and removed them all and took care of their country and people.
What the Zionists have been doing to the poor Palestinians for the last 80 years is 100 times worse than the Holocaust… all you ever hear about is 6 million Jews when in reality it was closer to 400k & 20x times the amount of Russians were killed in the death camps and the war but you never hear about them. All you hear about is the inflated Jewish figure …more gypsies were killed by far than the Jews but all you ever hear is this ridiculous figure of 6 million Jews almost a century later…… you never hear about the other casualties. You never hear about the tens of thousands of Palestinians being systematically executed by the Zionist regime every month for the last day 80 years funded with hundreds of billions of dollars a year in free US tax dollars … the American public is even forced to pay for Israel’s universal healthcare while 1/3 of its taxpaying citizens are uninsured…. They’re not allowed to use the money to buy their own insurance. They have to buy it for the Zionist soldiers of Israel to commit genocide on Palestinians because Zionist long took control of the American and British political systems along with their banking and media and if you say anything or try to show the truth, you’re branded and anti-semi and your comments are taken down your channel is taken down but the truth is still getting out there despite their best effort to hide it!
Agreed! I've never quite understood the "humanizing" characterization, especially when it's used to object to making evil people "real", so to speak. Whether it's one of the people in the film analyzed here, or even Hitler himself--they're not extraterrestrials after all--they're human beings...and that's the point of the film really, the utter brutality humans can inflict upon each other. I agree with AnimarchyHistory in this sense...it's the scariest thing in the world.
The point of holding the mirror in front of people and saying "This could be you" is very underrated. What I notice a lot, especially as a German, is that Hitler and the Nazis are always portrayed as this almost mythical evil. The understandable lack of nuance and willigness to discuss the subject matter objectively - which means highlighting why people genuinely supported the Nazis, so the good people saw in them - has led to Hitler and the Nazis at large becoming so dehumanised that people have completely lost sight of how the NSDAP came into power in the first place. It creates a situation where those that shout "Never again!" the loudest are those that don't even know how it came to happen in the first place, how "mundane" it often was, the bureaucratic processes. People just being numbers, people who were brilliant lawyers, doctors, civil servants, generals, businessmen etc. that just went along with the system because they happened to be working inside of it, being not that into all those grand designs and visions. And then by the time they realised what they were in for, it was far, far too late. That's how you had even the rare case of SS-members ending up in the German resistance. Everyone wants to believe they would have been part of the resistance, but the truth is that if we had been born in those times, most of us would have behaved just like the rest of the population. Enthusiastic supports, people that were impartial, people that shut their eyes to reality because they couldn't deal with it, people that were against the regime but didn't dare resist because it meant risking their lives and the lives of their family etc.
Well, we ARE living in those times, just most of us are geographically not under threat by the party in question, and now there atrocities are streamed and tiktokd like comedy videos and the defenders of this genocide are basically like "theres nothing wrong with anything you're seeing, in fact youre not seeing it at all. The Nuremberg defense was "I was just following orders" The Nuremberg defense of the 21st century will be "Your honor I enjoyed every minute if of it, I dont see what the problem is, you're just prejudiced"
This, as a german myself I have to agree that I always see people from the outside, saying that Hitler and the Nazis were "uniquely german" and can't happen anywhere else (this is a legit video on youtube) or that they would have risen up in revolt and how unreasonable it was that germans just went along with it. (aka "If only the population had guns"...the population DID have guns, tons of them, but why "rise up" against a system that ultimately made your life a little better overall or barely impacted it because you lived in some village or small town) It is also not like the Nazis were parading around they were mass murdering jews. Yes, they said they need to go, and voilence against them happened, but most that people saw of it were "deportations", maybe a beating, maybe a labor-camp with appauling conditions for the prisoners (not unheard of at the time). Not everyone knew where they were going. And as you can see, even in INTERNAL ORDERS the nazi government used code speak, calling it the "final solution to the jewish question". While we know NOW what it meant, any contemporary person at the time would have assumed any number of things, such as "Oh, they probably mean where to put them all, right? Like Madagascar or something..." This was BY DESIGN. Goehring in his Pozan speech is famously quoted as saying that if they told people the full extend of their meassures, "all 82 million germans would walk up to the post with a jew under their arm, and say "yup, the jews suck and need to go, except this one. This one is alright."" Hindsight is always 20/20. And one look at the nations of today tells me that A LOT of people just go along with whatever their government does.Yes there might be protests here or there, but no full on, regime changing revolutions...most people just don't have the time for stuff like that or any interest in it. They might mutter "Biden stole the election" or "Trump is a neo-fascist." but are they ever going to do anything except complain? Nah...
I watched the movie after seeing this video and wasn't disappointed. However, while Heidrich was of course perfectly evil, the movie showed no particular signs of psychopathy. I don't agree with you or Animarchy History that this was a particularly good depiction of psychyopathy unless you mean psychopathy as an insult rather than a clinical diagnosis (which of course only a psychiatrist may authoritatively make).
The brilliance of his character and performance was that he wasn’t a typical psychopath. He was congenial, well-mannered, really quite disarming. But it’s his aims and “the glove is iron” attitude that arrests and shocks the viewer. You almost can’t believe these men are discussing what they are.
The most chilling part for me was the shot of the table which pans over the food, then lands on a guy sketching another man's face. They're talking about systematic murder, which they call "processing" the "contents", yet this guy is doodling out of boredom. Horrific.
When Gilderoy Lockhart, Caesar Flickerman, Mr Darcy, the newsreader and Posca from Rome, John Bates and Gibbs teamed up and talked a bit about genocide.
I remember something my scoutmaster said when as young teenagers we were deciding who the meanest people on earth were; the Germans, the Mongolians, the Ottomans, the Comanche, the Spaniards, etc. Scoutmaster quietly said, 'people are mean.'
I'm sorry, but that makes him sound really... dimwitted, I guess is the word? Like, the basic idea of people being mean is already understood, you were simply discussing who did it the best.
I like how, in Eichmann and Heydrich, we see different kinds of evil. Heydrich seems gleefully evil. He appears to be genuinely proud of the horrible stuff he's doing here. He can behave civil, and flamboyant, and charming. But, as soon as someone who's impeding his goals can't be persuaded with honeyed words, he drops the act, and becomes icy cold and threatening, with words like sharpened steel blades. Eichmann really does fit the phrase Hannah Arendt coined about him. "Banality of evil." He's like an evil accountant. He treats figuring out how to most effectively kill millions as merely a question of math and equipment. It doesn't matter to him in the slightest that it's human lives he's planning to end. To him, it's not a crime against humanity. It's a work assignment.
Liberals are the banality of evil. You think these men are evil because you’ve been brainwashed. You think US or UK generals were any better? We all know the Soviets we’re subhuman animals, communist, but even they had to make up lies about Germany to help shape the post war narrative. You’d think the eastern front didn’t need embellishments but the Soviets blamed all their massacres and death camps on the Germans. This has been proven. Even most “SS” massacres have now been proven false and were usually perpetrated by locals or communist partisans and blamed on the Germans
Bettina Stangneth, in 'Eichmann Before Jerusalem,' notes that Eichmann bragged about his role in Nazi Germany and the "legal murders" it allowed him to commit, once he was "safe" in Argentina.
If you think Eichmann was evil, his boss was WAY worse. Heinrich Himmler. He was the absolute epitome of that phrase "banality of evil", more so than Eichmann.
The horror of Conspiracy wasn’t the topic of the film. It was the tone of the film. It was a merry little luncheon meeting that decided the fates of millions of people. We can fathom the horror of the events at the camps easily enough. We can see that and process it. It is the happy little gathering where they share a meal while discussing mass murder so casually that gets down into our soul and turns our stomachs. It’s the laying out of silverware and the music playing that rips into you. It’s the maids and butlers going about their duties and the drivers having a snowball fight outside that makes it so horrific. It’s the innocence in the background that punctuates the horror. The casting was brilliant. The actors all had good reputations from other films, which made their roles in this film hit like a ton of bricks. Seeing Branagh & Tucci as Heydrich & Eichmann took your past memory of the actor’s previous roles and twisted it like a knife in your belly. Closing the film with classical music written by a German composer was just to cement your horror, just as it set the stage for the horror to come at the beginning, like the slices of bread on a sandwich at a Donner Party picnic. It was pure genius.
I love this movie as the best movie I've ever seen about the VP/director level of corporations. I've been in these types of meetings, meetings not of the upper top level executives, but of the level right below, the people who are in charge of representing the interests of their executive and their department. The meetings are filled with people who righteously stand up for their and their bosses' interests and prerogatives, where IT and Sales go head to head, and Marketing and Accounting sneak up to the side and try to get their own powers increased, all the while everyone try to say how each are the most supportive of the company's goals. Conspiracy shows that wonderfully. It's just that it talks about the murder of millions.
Ending with classical music was used effectively in punctuating that the impending violence is not a consequence of man's brutal nature, at least in the eyes of the men carrying it out. It's supposed to reinforce that the men that made these decisions viewed it not as an emotional and visceral reaction. The way we are conditioned to see violence. It's not a man cornered and fighting for his life. It's a men who are making dispassionate decisions after a long reasonable discussion. To me the horror is this single point that it makes. We feel that if you were able to truly communicate with someone doing something horrible, that you could reason with him and he would eventually do the right thing and show mercy. But what if it wasn't emotion that made him violent, but reason. How do you beg for reason from someone that reasoned himself into doing this. He doesn't view these actions as morally wrong. If moral fiber is a human universal, how terrifying would it be to consider they don't share in that. Suddenly you look at the situation and don't see a man begging for his life from another man, but instead see a zebra begging for its life to a crocodile
@@stephenwest6738 _"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"_ *C.S. Lewis* It's this supposed moral superiority that makes it so easy to dehumanize people whose lifes and interests collide with your beliefs and agenda and to turn them into something not just of less worth than you, but so inherently and inevitably evil and dangerous for everyone else that the idea of getting rid of them for good seems completely natural and even compelling.
It feels like Antony Starr's performance as Homelander takes a lot from Kenneth Branagh's portrayal. Slicked back blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and a smile more terrifying that any alien monster.
Yeah, homelander is honestly one of the most terrifying villains ever. Someone who can just slaughter thousands in the blink of an eye with a god complex and a short temper when he feels criticized. But he's also loved by many
So we were actually shown Conspiracy back to back with Schindler's list in my High School when we were 15. It was over the course of a few weeks because RME (a kind of Social Studies class in Scotland) was only 50 minutes a week. So I can speak from my experience as I remember it: We basically laughed along with and about Conspiracy, especially the crude jokes about x-raying peoples' balls and particularly Freisler's "they go in red and come out pink, now that's an improvement!" joke. The absolute absurdity of trying to define how much of a jew actually constituted a jew was also darkly comedic. Then Schindler's list came on. This was the very early 2010s when showing any sort of emotions as a guy got you slagged off as "gay", so we didn't. Some of the girls cried. We never talked about the film afterwards in our lunch breaks; this was very rare because we would ALWAYS reference or joke about the films in RME. I did notice the edgelord neo-nazi in our year ended up winding back and then dropping his schtick very quickly. The "go in red and come out pink" jokes stopped. The fact it happened over a few weeks really made it more impactful, I think. We got to develop our own edgy teenage in-jokes before getting the rug pulled from under us and being reminded that, yeah, this was about the mass industrialised slaughter of millions of people. I don't remember many films from RME but I remember those two.
@@V0NRH1NE It's not "so young." You can leave school, take an apprenticeship, vote, and get married in Scotland at 16; It's the first step of adulthood. Schindler's list has a BBFC 15+ rating, it is absolutely not age-inappropriate.
Based on the film, it is clear that Heydrich, Eichmann, and Muller knew what the outcome would be. Their job was to convince the rest of the room of this decision. Heydrich does so first through charm. Then, privately, though intimidation. He tells one attendee in a sidebar conversation, "you would be a difficult man to bring down. But you will be brought down." That conversation was started with a smile on his face before turning into a chilling warning. Eichmann uses facts. He is extremely well organized and has the data to support any argument he makes. It is difficult to argue with facts - especially when the other attendees are not as well prepared. What is horrifying about this movie is that we find ourselves rooting for Eichmann and Heydrich and against the lesser men in the room due to the latter's bubbling. That is, until Dr Stuckart begins his argument. This is when we realize the true gravity of the meeting.
I 100% agree this is the most terrifying movie I can think of. And it's for a number of reasons... yet there's no blood, no screaming or images of torture. It's just some guys at a meeting. This is how real horror happens.
@@Ellecram What always got me was the perpetrators. These guys weren't poorly educated country folk... essentially rednecks and hillbillies who just didn't know any better. Those people are bad enough but there's a certain amount of "They have no education, they're generally low IQ and just acting on what they've always been told." which makes their actions at least somewhat understandable. They're just doing what ignorant people do. In this case though it was well thought out and planned by lawyers, judges, doctors, professors, etc. Those highly educated people who we all kind of just trust to do the right thing. Those people absolutely knew better.... and they still did this s@$t. If people like that can do this kind of stuff God help us all. It's also why I don't blindly trust Lawyers, Judges, Doctors, etc. I know we're supposed to but I point to this as evidence that those highly educated 'professionals' can be just as messed up and wrong as any moron I've ever met.
A wonderful review of a fantastic film. As an addition to your closing quote, I am reminded of what the guide I had at Auschwitz said when we sat, emotionally drained, between what was left of the two main crematoria. “If you take one thing away, take this. This was not done by a nation of monsters. It was done by a nation of poets, composers, mathematicians, philosophers. If they could do it, anyone can. So ensure it will never happen again.”
@@esaias536 According to the best estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million people have died because of Marxism. How would you ensure that never happens again? Probably not by erecting a statue of Marx in Germany, right? And yet that was done 5 years ago.
@@bearcatXF - I hadn't heard about that. What sicko committee signed off on such an obscenity? Karl Marx was a thoroughly disgusting and evil man. His horror show politics have have brought misery and destruction to all who have been subjected to them. What's next on the agenda, a statue of "Der Fuhrer", smiling with right arm extended in a jaunty "sieg heil"?
I used to work in the Civil Service in my country. One Holocaust Memorial Day, a member of the HMD trust came to speak to us about the role of the German civil service in the holocaust, and it included minutes from this meeting. The same sense of creeping horror I felt at the similarity of the Wannsee conference to meetings we had had that very week is what you describe in this video. I will never forget it, even though I have since left government. The capability of banal and mundane human institutions to conduct such unimaginable horror is truly terrifying and should never be forgotten.
I used to work for the local council in a team that worked in the community with people with LD, Autism, mental health illnesses etc and as such team meetings were a weekly occurance. We worked there because our goal was to help people. However, some of the ways the managment and even some of the staff would talk about people and cases came accross as so benign and synical to me as an apprentice at the age of 20/21 that it made my skin crawl. They wanted to help them too, i believed that and still do, but the realisation eventually dawned on me years later that they had likely started out as determined and positive as i had done, only to be ground dowm by the bureaucracy and red tape and had simply settled into a near permanent state of moral ambiguity towards these fellow human beings we were supposed to be helping.
there's also a practical thing that if your job involves helping people in the worst of situations, you sort of have to emotionally distance yourself or you burn out. I think in geriatrics this becomes very prevalent, although one could argue our way of dealing with old people is a horror justified by bureaucracy
The horror of "Conspiracy", for me, was how "businesslike" they were throughout the meeting. The acting was top notch. I must have watched it over 50 times, and every time, it chills me to my bones.
I've visited the Wannsee House and that's exactly the emotion I felt going round the place. They sat down had a meeting in a nice large suburban house in a charming bit of Berlin and talked of organised genocide like a business
As a German we are confronted very early with this topic (for the better or worse is for you to decide). We watched the 1984 version of "Die Wannsee Konferenz" in Year 6. I am a massive horror fan but no movie will ever reach the horror of "Die Wannsee Konferenz". Mattausch is terrifying in his role
6. Klasse - 6th grade. Internationale Großproduktionen überspülen schnell, was im deutschspachigen Raum an cineastischer Durchdringung des deutschen 20. Jahrhunderts geschaffen wurde... Allerdings ist das jetzt ja zum Glück nicht mehr so. Noch vor etwa fünf Jahren fand ich hier auf UA-cam Kommentare á la: es gäbe ja kaum deutsche Kriegsfilme, die die deutsche Perspektive aufs Geschehen, das deutsche Erleben, erfahrbar machen würden...
they do that to make you hate your ancestors. Don't believe the lies of the Soviets and Allies, they had alot to gain framing the Germans for everything.
Anfang der 90er besuchte ich Dachau. Damals gab es noch ein Schild in der "Gaskammer" was sagte: "Gaskammer getarnt als 'Brausebad' - war nicht in Betrieb". Dachau - wie andere deutsche Lager- ist heute (seit den 60er vielleicht) nicht als "Todeslager" betrachtet. Der Holocaust-story zog weiter nach Osten. Weisst Du warum die "Hauptgaskammer" von Auschwitz wurde unterirdisch gebaut?
I've seen 'Die Wannsee Konferenz' on UA-cam with subtitles and it really makes me wish I could understand German because I could tell the subtitles weren't entirely accurate. Watching Conspiracy chills me more hearing it in my own language, hearing these words spoken in the ice-cut voice of Kenneth Branagh is just terrifying to me.
@@PedanticGaming No actual transcript of the Wannsee conference survived the war. The only record of the meeting was a copy of the minutes describing it. So the words you "hear spoken" by "icy Kenneth" are not what Heydrich or any other attendee said; they are the product of an American scriptwriter named Loring Mandel. There is no mention in the minutes of "gassing", "burning" or killing. Any such words coming out of the mouths of characters in "Conspiracy" are products of the mind of Mandel. Along these lines recall Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past."
That last image you showed was so perfectly played and fits with your entire video. When the image first came up, I thought, "oh! A group of friends appearing to be having a good time." Then the caption came up..... gods above Animarchy, very well played.
i remember having seen it before too but without any real context, and seeing it again in the the video and together with the point it hammered home genuinely sent shivers down my spine. the fact that there were people that experienced their time at the *auschwitz deathcamp* as "doing some 9 to 5 job for a few years" and after the war just kinda moving on with their life and doing something else and the true "mundane indiference" in all of that is real existential horror on its own.
It was taken at "Solahütte" - An SS retreat built and staffed by Auschwitz prisoners roughly 30km south. Significant portions of it are still standing to this day, largely because it was used postwar by the Polish Communist Party (although essentially abandoned in the 80's - sources differ).
I remember seeing this image from a documentary many years ago. It still frightens me that they are just regular people on both sides of the isle. The real monsters are us.
One addition: The scariest movie is the german version of the movie called "Wannseekonferenz" from 1984 (conspiracy is a reimagining for the anglos). Why? Because it was made in the country by the people whos parents, who might very well still be alive by that point, commited the crime and were the parts in the machine the movie is about. Also the german version is more historically accurate because it actually follows the structure of the conference based on its original protocols and doesnt use artistic license to rewrite the order of events in the conference. Its a very minor difference but its what makes it better in my opinion. Technically speaking the movie from 1984 could have been watched by people that participated in the conference themselfs. At least two people were still alive when the movie aired: one of the NSDAP jurists and the female secretary. When the last main participant of the Conference died in 1987 he had the following in his obituary: "after a fulfilled life for the benefit of all who were in his sphere of influence" Yeah... A little "fun" fact at the end: The female secretary that wrote the protocol and directly worked for Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, would only shortly after in life turn out to be a lesbian and marry a german women she meet in soviet captivity with which she lifed together until her death. In Nazi Germany that would have been a crime that might have had her end up right next to the very people she worked to exterminate.
100% agree. Akthough both films are the same subject, I find Conspiracy to be too focused on Branaugh's 'presence' whereas Die Wannseekonferenz was much more about the 'Deed' than the people. Dietrich Mattausch's Heydrich was way more believable, as were they all, BECAUSE they were German with the German mindset. Branaugh et al. are just playing a part, while the German cast were re-enacting part of their history, which they did with consumate skill. Must have been a hard film to take part in . . .
The Russian film 'come and see' is another great and horrifying film made by the people who experienced the destruction of that era. The director lived through Stalingrad as a child. Brutal movie.
At the time WannseeKonferenz was made, one of the participants in the conference, Gerhard Klopfer, was still alive. Wonder if he saw it and what he thought of it?
I saw this when it was first released and it has stayed with me through the years. I agree with your summation of it - truly a horror movie of epic proportion. The cast, director, wardrobe, set design- everything is done with such attention to detail that you end up feeling like you are there. And have we learned our lesson from history? No.
It's nothing really. Just another dramatization for some sick sort of pleasure. The real horror was what really happened not a damn movie. Pontificating movie reviews are worthless. Go ahead and hate yourself and feel good about hating yourself is all this is about.
Yes, I've seen "Conspiracy." As a child, "Aliens" and "a nightmare on elm Street" scared the heck out of me, But I could always tell myself that they weren't real. In second grade, I was given an assignment over spring break to do a family tree. I will never forget the pain and horror in my mother and grandparents eyes when I started to ask about family members. The sad reality is that the mass murder of Jews began before the Wansee Conference. The Einsatzgruppen (SS special action squads) we're unleashed in September 1939 murdering Poles and Jews in the tens of thousands per day. The death camps were set up because taking people to the forest and shooting them in the thousands had delitrius effects on Germans and horrified Jimler.
That the Final Solution was already well under way was mentioned in the movie several times. "I have the very real feeling that I've already 'evacuated' several thousand Jews when I shot them in Riga, in Latvia." "If it is already built, then why this meeting? Why bother?" "Eleven million Jews -- even half that -- is asinine for the reasons that Dr. Meier mentioned: time, ammunition, manpower."
@@bobdollaz3391 What the Zionists have been doing to the poor Palestinians for the last 80 years is 100 times worse than the Holocaust… all you ever hear about is 6 million Jews when in reality it was closer to 400k & 20x times the amount of Russians were killed in the death camps and the war but you never hear about them. All you hear about is the inflated Jewish figure …more gypsies were killed by far than the Jews but all you ever hear is this ridiculous figure of 6 million Jews almost a century later…… you never hear about the other casualties. You never hear about the tens of thousands of Palestinians being systematically executed by the Zionist regime every month for the last day 80 years funded with hundreds of billions of dollars a year in free US tax dollars … the American public is even forced to pay for Israel’s universal healthcare while 1/3 of its taxpaying citizens are uninsured…. They’re not allowed to use their own tax money to buy their own insurance. They have to buy it for the Zionists Gestapo soldiers of Israel to commit genocide on Palestinians because Zionists long took control of the American and British political systems along with their banking and media and if you say anything or try to show the truth, you’re branded an “anti-Semite” and your comments are taken down your channel is taken down but the truth is still getting out there despite their best effort to hide it!
And then after all this, Quentin Tarantino thought it was a good idea to baseball bat and scalp average German soldiers because they’re all Nahtzis, but then also COMPLETELY OMIT Himmler from the plot of Inglourious Basterds. 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
The worst part is, slasher movies are not horror movies. Alfred Hitchcock once said the secret to a great horror film is not letting the audience see the monster. I agree.
It's pretty obvious you haven't seen many slashers then, as usually the killer's identity is kept a secret in most until the very end. Also Hitchcock's Psycho was more or less a precursor to the modern slasher, so you're just contradicting yourself.
The single most disturbing scene I've ever seen in cinema is a scene in the movie "Caberet" which is just of a small boy Singing. The thing that turned my blood cold was it was a boy in a Hitler Youth uniform, and at the start it's a normal, plasant tune sung in a beer garden only a little odd because of the Hitler Youth uniform. Then... people start joining in, at first it's just a few and nothing much changes. Then more and more join in, the tone of the song darkens, even more people join in and very soon everyone is bellowing along with the kid in what is a very clear recreation of a Nazi rally. Felt the chill down to my bones from that.
I completely agree. A terrifying scene depicted in the warm brightness of the sun no less! The alienation Sally finds herself in is a relief. Because had she joined in the song, it would have justly had the audience turn against her. And yet the indifference of her attitude to the shifting politics and morality of Germany suggest she might as well have. The true horrors inflicted by the few are excused by the indifference of the majority.
One of the supreme ironies of history - the greatest crime in history was planned in Interpol Headquarters. Yes, Heydrich wore many hats and, as Germany's most senior policeman, in 1942 he was also President of Interpol, and Wannsee was Interpol HQ.
@@065TimCommunism is no doubt a bad system of governance. And many communist nations have done horrid things. But ww2, is the largest war in history, and caused the deaths of millions. The Holocaust is the largest genocide in history that targeted huge groups of people. There is no doubt in my mind that it is the worst.
You hit the nail on the head with this one... Terrible acts are seldom ever committed by a single overlord with a grand scheme, but by the people who consider it a mundane addition to their regular work day... Keep making these videos Animarchy! You're saying what people need to realize is truth, and you're doing it in the best way possible
It is the boring, bureaucratic, dispassionate even, nature of a logistical meeting that discusses the murder of many millions of people, Jews, but not just them, that makes it so horrifying. The original German version from the 80s does that very well. It doesn't shy away from the squabling about different department heads wanting competency over certain topics, the details about which process should be done in double or tripple hard copies for which group, etc. All the tedious and boring stuff that make it chilling. There were no movie villains twirling their mustaches. Nobody screamed at anybody or even much raised their voices, nothing (movie) dramatic happened, exept of course for the outcome. These people are the same that you will today meet in any corporate middle management. This can happen again if we aren't very careful.
it’s not can happen, it has happened. A multitude of genocides happened post ww2. And I’d go as far as to say the modern state of Israel is either close to or is committing genocide in Gaza.
For me, what makes this movie so scary is how immersive it is. You don’t feel like a spectator, you feel like a participant. Also, the way the men discuss this “issue” like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do is terrifying.
I remember when this first aired we talked about this in class the very next day. No teacher started the discussion, we just talked about this among ourselves. It frightened a lot of us.
I'm so glad you decided to put in the real life portraits of these people. There are some people in the cast who are such eerily close matches to them that I have to wonder if getting cast in the roles of such horrid people gave the actors a bit of a...well, not a complex, but a little bit of a churn in their stomachs.
Kissing jewish ass by playing muh evil Germans? Dude you couldn't find a better carrier boost than this. Basically every Hollywood studio is now open for you
Thank you for making this. The movie has been stuck in my brain since I saw it ages ago. The casting is amazing. The other thing that struck me was the actual beauty of the film. The cleanliness of the snow and air, the beauty of the house, room, crystal, the crispness of the uniforms and suits, down to the calligraphy of the place cards.
I found it depressing but the two movies which really got to me were a 2016 movie originally called Wolyn, known in the west as Hatred and the 1985 Soviet film Come and See. They actually effected me for days.
I actually didn't like come and see. The scene when they're leaving the village and you get a brief shot of the bodies lined up against the barn is well done, and the ghoulish scene with the church near the end can make the fainthearted queasy, but my issue isn't with the content of the movie, but the direction and pacing. 30+ minutes of head-on face shots; Just awful. You waste, literally waste, five or ten minutes of screen time looking back and forth between the lead and the girl in the woods before the film remembers it has limited time and gets on with the story.@@marie_h1104
Similar terror comes from a film called the Wave. It demonstrates how quickly students in a high school experiment can fall into the allure of Authoritarianism. Its so shocking because every part of the students reactions are believable and possible. There is a draw to such unity and comradeship. There is a desire for us to find such strength in unity. This of course has complicated consequences that sweep so fast through our desires.
I saw the movie some time ago, and it gave the chills back then, and you're right: these actors gave me the same sensation as Ralph Fiennes portray of Amon Goerth: he's not a monster, he's just a mundane and mediocre bureaucrat with too much power in his hands and too much garbage on his head... just like a bunch of my current and former coworkers. Knowing that we are not differtent from this people is what will make us learn form those mistakes, hopefully
there's a difference in the fact that we ain't nazis, we don't think race is a social construct that define the individual (I mean some progressive movement in our current era do but nobody is taking them seriously)
I watched both these movies in social studies in high school. My teacher made the exact same point you made. Just how casually they protracted that meeting. How easy they discuss such atrocities. To this day I shiver when I think about it.
I get this because I have the same feeling every time I watch The Killing Fields, specifically the parts right around the fall of the capital when they're trying to get to safety and find a way for Dith Pran to evacuate with them. I think I've seen the full film a total of three times (once in school), and those scenes always provoke a sense of existential dread even when nobody is actually getting killed on screen.
It's been 20 years since I last tried, but this is the only movie that's instilled such a feeling of dread/fear that I couldn't finish. I was young, unrelated to the watching sort of in a horror kick at the time and running through my dad's history VHS... just thinking about it still gives me chills.
Threads was definitely the scariest movie I saw as a child. I was too young to understand the evil within then but as many of my generation will attest, the constant reminder of the threat of nuclear war through movies like that or ‘the day after’ felt very real to me then!
Yet Socialists are running around demanding it happen again, and it is happening in places. The flu lockdowns was a taste. Did you resist? Or did you call us crazy for resisting?
No doubt the last 30 minutes of Come and See, Idi i Smotri (1985) depicting the destruction of a Belarussian village and its inhabitants by the SS Brigade Dirlewanger is the scariest war film I have ever seen.
This is nothing compared to Come and See. Great, bleak, film that is well told in ways that Hollywood would never allow to show. Also RIP cow. Side note: even though I heard of the complaints regarding some of its hyperbole. I’m looking into that stuff before parroting the idea that it’s fake.
@@robs.2671I've read the book it was partially based on, horrifying. Also, alledgedly there was a scene they wanted to shoot at the end but couldn't, logistics, money and time-wise. The director and his crew initially wanted to end on a battle in the swamps near a forest, wjere everything was just chaos and pandemonium and both sides have been reduced to beasts.
I had to get out of bed to get on my computer and comment on this video for the algorithm, Ani. This is torture. How dare you make me be a semi-functioning college student.
From the thumbnail, I still had some uncertainty because it had been so long since I've seen it. But from how you were presenting the introductory argument and slowly making your way to your main point... that it was a horror "movie" that really happened... I became absolutely sure that yes. This was about Conspiracy. Bravo.
I was beginning to think that I was the only one who'd seen this film. I just happened to see it in the cheap bin at WalMart and thought I'd give it a try. After I watched it I just sat there stunned by what I had seen. We like to think that evil is easy to identify with horns, leering fangs or vicious claws but the truth is that true evil can be that man or women standing in line behind you talking on their phone waiting their turn to get their latte.
Agreed, I actually did a paper on it for an English class in college. My professor hadn't heard of it before, he actually watched it based on my paper and considered it film everyone should see. I got an A on that paper.
Yeah no two ways about it Come and See is most harrowing account of war . We say this film is terrible but happy to watch genocide play out in real time without given a shit . Even go along with it look at what Israel is doing an what our governments and shill media are telling us
In the Apple series Severance, Mrs Cobel states “The good news is that Hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is whatever humans can imagine they can usually create.” I’m not a quote person, but this struck me as one of the most truthful statements about humanity ever. I’m not a believer, so magical creatures don’t do anything for me. Real horror is what we do to each other ( and often in the name of our gods). Very well done. Thanks.
For me, it is HBO'S Chernobyl miniseries. What frightened me the most is the fact that the World(at least Europe) almost ended before I am even born. And we didn't know anything about it.
What some extra nightmare fuel? Chernobyl is definitely scary but only because it was the one accident that was too big for the KGB to properly cover up. The Soviet Union had numerous nuclear disasters that were covered up for decades including the previous worst nuclear disaster, the Kyshtym Disaster, BUT that's only talking about nuclear disasters. They also had numerous bioweapons outbreaks from their illegal program with their biggest one being the Sverdlovsk Anthrax leak.
For me its Come and See. When you realize that the film was filmed using live ammunition, that the director was actually a teenage partisan during the war, and that the real life carnage was on a scale non of us can really comprehend.
Ok... I thought I knew what I was getting into when I clicked on this video. But then the Burgundian lullaby started playing and my fucking heart rate went up and I thought I was about to have a fucking stroke. I don't think I've been so scared in a long time.
@@AnimarchyHistory I find myself interested to know you are a TNO fan, or at least aware of it. I'd absolutely love to hear you talk about it, I can't seem to find anyone who will actually just talk about it. The music as well being incredible, if you haven't already I'd recommend checking out Aiden George, TNO's most well known community musician. His version of the Burgundian Lullaby and the Hymn to Taboritsky are incredible, chilling and utterly terrifying.
@@moritamikamikara3879 Most people don't talk about TNO because even though its a well made mod, the horrors portrayed within are, best left forgotten. Especially if you play as burgundy.
I love the inclusion of the Burgundian Luluby at the beginning, namely for how it relates to the subject matter of both the movie and the source of the song. For those who don't know, it's made for a HOI4 mod called The New Order. In the mod, there's a country called Burgundy led by Heinrich Himmler which is a complete hell state where even the surveillance state of 1984 pales in comparison.
The late Alfred Hitchcock (of horror movie fame) was the 4th director to work on a british documentary of the Holocaust. After about 3 months he quit saying he couldn't take it any more as he suffered severe nightmares every night. In his words:" I make fiction movies, this is real-life! THIS is true horror! ". It took 2 more directors and months to complete the work.
Just wow... I don't think I had heard of this movie before this video, and what an experiance it was. You did a wonderful job with this video! One of the discussions that stood out to me were between Kritzinger and Lange where Lange tells him about the "evacuations" on the eastern front and Kritzinger replies "This is more than war. There must be a different word for this". Yes Kritzinger, that word starts with a G...
I almost feel like you could extend the lesson beyond just watching the movie You make it a 4 stage lesson, Step one, funny haha day, you teach them about the emu war. Step 2 a discussion on how they might handle the emu problem as a government, split them into groups and have them discuss a plan make them get into the logistics of it and such (if you have students you trust you can let them know and scatter them across groups to make the, historical, suggestions) Step 3. You watch the movie Step 4. You point out how similar the discussions were and how easy they came to their solutions (reveal any collaborators you had so nobody hates them)
Unfortunately, we know that this kind of stuff works because it's been tried and the results were suitably horrific and, it can be guessed at from suspiciously truncated post experiment summation, traumatized some kids. Interesting on paper, but I'd argue we shouldn't be conducting these kinds of things.
One of my favorites and an extremely underrated movie. My favorite scene is Colin Firth's warning to his countrymen that they are looking at their subjects as a cartoon while he is making a legal-based (however evil) argument against that emotional response. It's chilling and a reminder that these things don't happen in a vacuum.
Shaun of the dead is the most accurate zombie film. That being that the army would be able to kill all the zombie and save the day and you'd be safe so long as you dont leave you'r home and go to the pub lol
“What is real horror?” The reminder of the feeling of being both truly alone, truly powerless, and truly afraid. The reminder of that one time as a child when you realize there is nobody around to protect you, and you are at the mercy of whatever you cannot see in the dark. Skinamarink is honestly the most disturbing and terrifying thing I have witnessed in my life.
@@coxmosia1 Conspiracy and Come and See, are by far the two most horrifying films of all time. One shows the horror of indifference, the other shows the horror unleashed by that indifference, they are two parts of the same story.
The fact that you managed to describe my entire experience with this movie is brutal, especially the moment of cracking jokes, I felt so much guilt and disgust when I catch myself smiling at that, I think that's the point of the film I have to agree that this is what horror is regular men being authors of horrible actions
My personal pic for true horror has to be "Come and See" Made by people who lived it, and shocases the brutality in a way that feels like i could actually see it happening to me.
I got to go to that villa with school some years back. The striking thing is how peaceful the gardens are, and how nice the view across the river is, even on a grey autumn day. And how it's almost impossible to reconcile the reality of what happened there with the facts of where you are
I thought it'd be Come And See. I've heard it's the one that inspired Spielberg to make Schindler's List. An absolutely terrible, horrifying experience meant to make you actually believe it when you say "Never Again".
i would certainly put come and see in the same category, especially the final scene. the depiciton of how absolutely casual these groups went around murdering entire villages is in my opinion probably still the most faithful, if absolutely horrifiyng, portrail of the extermination in the east ever put to film.
Both are great and terrrifying in different ways. Come and See shows real monsters in action, explicitly. Conspiracy shows how easy we(and people close to us) can become or relate to real monsters. I dont have the stomach for watching Come and See again but definitelly enjoy watching Conspiracy again
it is better and more realistic. `Come and see ` is so realistic, so brutal and genuine that because it was `too realistic` for the Americans who since civil war never waged a war on their territory. Im slavic aldough not a russian .Im Serbian and Werhmacht did to many of our villages exactly what they did it to Belorussians. Shindler`s list is good movie but compared to come and see it is pretty mellow IMHO.Watched Come and See twice / first time at 14 years 1991 and then when i found it on YT.
This video has 2 outcomes in my day. Either I watch conspiracy after your video, or your video after conspiracy. Never seperate. Because to fail to rewatch this content over and over again is the root cause of forgetting why we defeated such evil in the first place.
I am so glad that someone highlighted the brilliance of this film. I don’t think it ever got enough credit when it was released. It was brilliant and something more people should see. Thank you for posting.
@@kneegerman2076 If people want to hate the Israeli government sure go ahead. I think there are worse governments in the region, but you can find stuff the hate the Israeli government for. Then you might have some banks and that’s a bit of miss for me personally. A lot of banks are well not the best. It makes no since to hate Jewish bankers over an American or Chinese banker. Your average Jew is probably an okay person. Hating all Jews or people of Jewish decent is kinda stupid. That’s like hating all Chinese people because of the ccp. The denial of the holocaust is what gets me. Since it clearly happened. Maybe some numbers were inflated by ether the Soviets or the USA, but it did happen. I’m going to use China again. It’s like people don’t like what the Israeli government is doing thus they start to hate the Jews. Then deny the holocaust. It’s like hating the CCP then denying the war crimes the Japanese did. It’s illogical just hate the governments.
This is one of my favourite films. The script is perfect, the casting stellar, and the acting impeccable. Kenneth Branagh's Heidrich is one of the most chilling portrayals of a genuine historical villain that I have ever seen.
@@jamesfaulkner9968 So you are totally against the very conclusion of this video? (from 54:00 ) Also whats makes a "villain" then... was it the educated, and sometimes rich, germans of the reserve police batailion From the Netflix: Ordinary Men: The "Forgotten Holocaust", that shot 1 man/woman/kid at a time, in the einsatzgruppen of the eastern front, when they could say no! You saw no, it was that one! man, that ordered it... And Heidrich was`t even in control of the einsatzgruppen or the some 13.000 germans that worked at any given time at Auswitch
I've always wanted a brutally accurate on-screen portrayal of Unit 731 and mind bending decent from horrifying medical experiments performed on individuals you no longer consider to be human to where the facility staff started playing horrific and brutal games with their prisoners and former test subjects that had no conceivable medical objective and were only carried out to satisfy the utterly perverted, psychopathic, and sadistic curiosities that had come to completely possess Unit 731's personnel and specifically its commander, General Shiro Ishii.
I have been saying this exact thing for almost 20 years...this Is the scariest movie I have ever seen...by far! Because it actually happened and to me the scariest part is the way they were so civilised on dealing with "the problem " ...
In 1984 I saw "Die Wannsee Conference" in a little Art Film theater in LA. My Jewish girlfriend became physically sick during the performance. I saw the film in theaters four times over the next two weeks. A brilliant film that has a edge that "Conspiracy" lacks. That being said I must report watching a brillant David Trelfall and the other cast members performe well over 25 times. A horrifying eulogy to German efficiency. Thank you so much for your review...
Yes, this West German production- made for tv- is a must-see before viewing Conspiracy. It is said the dialogue of this 1984 film is 95% from the minutes of the meeting the secretary wrote down, and the film’s length approximates the length of the actual conference that day, a day that would be the most consequential one for the six million civilian lives that would later be snuffed out before the war would be over. The German language makes it more chilling, i agree.
My grandfather was in the Ordnungspolizei during World War 2 and the real horror for him was knowing that some of the most brutal became police after the war was over.
It says a lot about HBO that they can make this and also the Chernobyl series - two great examples of true history horror. Too bad they also made, you know, Velma.
I remember the famous title from Ahrendt after the Nürnberg trials. "Banality of evil". Once death, murders, genocide, war crimes, and every other horror the SS, Wehrmacht, and Nazis committed becomes a banality a routine and just "doing your job, not minding what you are doing". This is where it gets horrendous, once you lose the innocence and see the violence as a common tool you can accomplish one of the most brutal and heinous crimes ever committed in the history of mankind.
I don't remember exactly how it went, but I remember hearing something along the lines of "the real monsters aren't some demon or zombie or supernatural entity but rather us. Humanity." That could never be more true especially in situations like this.
It's so chilling, seeing people calmly discuss the murder of millions of people and being more concerned about the logistics of making it efficient while keeping it a secret and never showing concern for the fact that they're discussing murdering millions of people. Anyone who tries to argue that the Axis were NOT the villains of WW2 need to open a history book.
Everyone had blood on thier hands. Fire bombing Germany, nuking Japan, internment camps in the US, secret torture prisons in the UK, gulags in Russia.. We are creeping very close to seeing these horrors again.
@@dannye7612 We’re talking about the side that was literally organizing the systemic murder of an entire race, along with everyone else that they saw as less than human. Compared to that? Even the Soviets could be heroic while fighting to defend their homeland.
@@dannye7612 You're not seriously trying to argue in favor the Axis right now, right? Tell me you're not trying to straw man to say the Axis were not the villains of WW2.
Apologies about the HBO Watermarks. Copyright Content ID's were BRUTAL.
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Hello everyone, welcome to my review of the scariest movie ever made. Also possibly the riskiest video I've ever made and given my channel that is saying something. Everyone else is doing something sensible like uploading Lethal Company Funny Moments compilations. Yet here I am, talking about the Spicy Pinwheel Gang once again.
Today we are taking a look at HBO's 2001 film "Conspiracy", a dramatization of the Wannsee Conference. The meeting at which the Holocaust was given its form by the various government officials of Nazi Germany. As you can imagine this topic is very dark, very disturbing and rather uncomfortable to watch especially if you are directly impacted by it. Which I most certainly am.
Given current events in Israel/Palestine I understand that the comments section may be quite charged. But I kindly ask you all to behave yourselves.
Thank you.
just out of curiosity any new Ukraine News Reels coming up?
@@unclesam1433 at the moment there are a bunch of history videos lined up. More Ukraine content will happen though. Count on that
Fuck yeah, keep up the great work.@@AnimarchyHistory
@@AnimarchyHistory What kind of history videos?
I’d love to see more content like this. Your work is always great, keep it up
A friend of mine, who was in his class to become an attorney, once had a classmate ask their teacher
“Why would the Jews follow the nazis to their deaths? Why didn’t they resist while going to their death”
The professor asked everyone in the class to get up, pack their things.
And follow him.
A bit bewildered, they all got up, got their things and went out to the hallway.
The professor then led them all down the hallway, unlocked another room, and asked everyone to get inside the dark room.
The class did as he asked, and went inside.
He then came in. Turned on the lights and said “I have just taken an entire class, of highly educated people, and with blind obedience, you all followed me into a room with no knowledge of what my intent was. That’s how it happened.”
Wow!
Professor Level: Legend.
And also they thought, “I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about?”
Kinda like today.
They’re gathering all of your data.
I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about?
They’re installing facial recognition cameras everywhere.
I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about?
They want to make currency digital so they could literally turn off your cash flow.
I never do anything wrong. What do I have to worry about?
And then everybody stood up and clapped
That's a level up from the Stanford experiment! Being disenfranchised l, and put into the ghettos appeared like a preamble to deportation. Because information was tightly controlled about the turning tide of the war, the Jews never have the hope they could fight back and succeed. Obviously, the Warsaw uprising was a reaction to the reality that the Nazis were loosing. Regardless, they still fooled into boarding the gas trucks, and trains taking them to the camps.
Ye but they still could beat up his ass if he tried to lock them in, attitude would be quite different if he was someone perceived as an enemy by the students, as nazi were to jews. Its a stupid and simplistic "explanation", something you would expect, at worst, from a kindergaten teacher, not from a college professor...
@@Runner2000Why didn't Obama or Biden axe the "Patriot Act", I wonder
One of my favorite quotes from Hotel Rwanda is when Paul sends off videos of the active Genocide going on in his country and looks to the Colonel Oliver, a Canadian UN officer, and says, “They will finally see what is happening and come to help us”. The Colonel reluctantly looks at him and says “No they look at their TV and say ‘Oh that’s awful’ and then go right back to eating their dinners”.
To be honest, I’d rather ordinary people in wealthy countries did that than obsess over such atrocities to the point where they appoint themselves as the white/western saviors of all those other people who are too primitive to think for themselves. That just makes things worse in my opinion
@@eeyorehaferbock7870Well said, Romeo Dallaire was treated horribly, he and his men were abandoned and not given the support, tools, or authorization to be proper peace enforcers and stop the genocide.
Certain "horror movies" I can't watch because the way they're presented, it's as if the scenario depicted could happen for real. SAW, Hostel, human centipede, The Purge etc.
Movies like Come and See and The Zone of interest (both amazing films) were horror in their innocuous domesticity and casual living while surrounded by suffering.
The true mental cost of war and the realization you had been lied to.
@@bobhill3941 I admittedly can’t tell if you agree with me or not.
@@eeyorehaferbock7870 I do agree with you that some people who obsess over what they're seeing and think they can help makes it worse, but it's not strictly white people or people from Western countries, it's some people in some first world countries that have superiority complexes and think money can fix all problems.
But I will say-and the point I was making-was that the indifference of decision-makers causes the efforts of people (like Dallaire) on the ground to be hobbled sometimes with deadly consequences.
Colin Firth's character was the most terrifying for me, when he opposes the final solution, and then you hear why he does. It's not because he didn't want to kill all the jews, he absolutely did, it's because he rightly saw that the death camps would be seen as barbaric and would be opposed by everybody, and he preferred to simply chemically castrate them all and to have them die not with a bang, but a whimper. Then he goes on a rant about he is the most anti-semitic of all of them, because he doesn't indulge in nazi fantasies and lies, but from his view, he is the one actually confronting reality. He may not have been the most evil man in the room, but he was by far the most competent, and that amplified what evil he did advocate for. It was bone chilling.
Thank you I was going to say the same thing about his character but you beat me to it and said it much better than I ever could.
His most telling statement
"Murdering them outside of the law makes them martyrs and that is there victory "
It wasn't even that he thought the camps would be brutal. He was more concerned about the administrative difficulties. Truly the banality of evil.
@@Stile4aly No, it goes beyond administrative difficulties. He was concerned about the justified backlash that would inevitably occur with the creation of the death camps, and he also had a special concern for half jews. Here is a direct quote, not from the Colin Firth's character, but from the real Wilhelm Stuckart:
"I have always maintained that it is extraordinarily dangerous to send German blood to the opposing side. Our adversaries will put the desirable characteristics of this blood to good use. Once the half Jews are outside of Germany, their high intelligence and education level, combined with their German heredity, will render these individuals born leaders and terrible enemies."
He wanted a different way, a way to commit genocide with minimal legal, diplomatic, and military consequences. He was the least barbaric and bloodthirsty man at the table, yet came up with a way to execute the holocaust in a far more effective manner. Thank god they didn't listen to him.
He just wanted the same solution the Spanish Inquisition did with the jewish question; kick them all out. Let them be someone else's problem. And that Spain did back in the Renaissance, where the Jews just fled to Turkish and Italian lands where the Pope and the Ottoman Sultan welcomed them.
That speech from Colin Firth where he yells, “I wrote that law!” still gives me chills.
And when Heydrich says how many can be killed in Auschwitz in a DAY, and all the laughing stops and the one guy gets sick….
It was like they even crossed Evil’s line.
There's an expression for it: moral event horizon.
@@Siathuantyvm....I needed that word
Odd fact: Tom Hiddleston is in this movie. He's the guy on the phone right at the start of the movie who tells Eichmann "He's here, sir." He also says "Yes, sir" when Eichmann tells him not to take any calls. And those are his only lines.
Ken Branagh gave Hiddleston his career on a platter. He cast him as Loki. Before that they'd done a series together ('Wallander'), as well as this. Branagh even cast him as Hamlet on stage and gave him a very meaningful gift: The 'Red Book' - a bound copy of the play passed down from actor to actor, meant to commemorate the "best Hamlet of his generation". Branagh had earlier received it from Derek Jacobi.
All of this is kind of funny to me, because while I like Hiddleston in the right part, I think he's rather limited. Terrific as Loki, but a dreadful Henry V and without a great deal of range. Nothing wrong with that. The right actor in the perfect role can do wonders, but Branagh is such an impeccable craftsman that I struggle to fully understand the love affair.
I remember when I first watched this movie and saw him and had to pause it immediately to Google it. He looks so young!
I find it interesting that Tucci’s characterization was so much like the real Eichmann- a tyrant to his subordinates, but a mouse in the company of his superiors. As one survivor of Buchenwald put it concerning the higher ups in the SS camp administration, “They were lords from below, but only vassals from above.”
"...a tyrant to his subordinates, but a mouse in the company of his superiors. ... lords from below, but only vassals from above.”
Accurate description of the garden-variety bully.
You know many Jewish journalists has proven these accounts to be false? How can one be in a camp, yet had resided in Britain for years? Kinda odd
@@igotfriendsinlowplaces2971bro what are you talking about?
@@eddiemoran8044 maybe look into stuff before commenting, bro
@@igotfriendsinlowplaces2971 Eichman never lived in Britain. So once again what are you talking about
“Come and See” was remarked as a terrifying movie, except instead of it being a behind the scenes movie like this one, “Come and See” is a fraction of the horrible show.
And so well made too
A top 10 film for me
What did you think of the zone of interest? Has that same nonchalant, business as usual towards human tragedy...
That was absolutely horrific and remained in my mind...a long time
Scarring film I'll not soon forget.
The craziest part of this film is Heydrich pitching his ideas to the committee under the guise of a collaborative effort but theres a point in the film where one by one every opponent of Heydrich's plan realize theyre not there to give their opinion. Theyre there to take orders. Its incredibly subtle and incredibly brilliant.
That part is a favorite of mine. The illusion of choice, the pretense, suddenly breaking down. Kenneth's change in tone was amazing. Again, living under an authoritarian regime in Iran it hit so close to me.
The most significant part of it is, the others realizing the depths of manure they got themselves into. The culmination point of something they started but some had no idea this would be the end point. You see under authoritarianism some figures get into the whole thing thinking they're part of a more elite but still democratic process, that their opionions still matter while they have taken away the power of others. Others are in there under the illusion that some of the extreme positions were symbolic. Then comes a certain day when they face the reality of those choices, some cheer with glee because that's what exactly they wanted some have that moment of realization of the full weight and cost of their decisions.
Of the men around that table, some probably took more joy in the how of the holocaust than the why. But some probably imagined "I just want a germany without a jewish population, we'll probably deport them or something, all this grandstanding and dehumanization is probably political theater". Between all of them I'm almost certain even in reality some of them were horrified when the reality hit them... that they made decisions that ultimately gave power to the kid of people that even they were horrified by. That there's no nice way of doing something deplorable, legal guy realizes he's been part of a system that erode even it's own laws, the very concept of law which he might've held in high regard that ultimately judicial horror or extrajudicidal horror did not matter to them. The guy who wants some kind of superficially less horrific way like castration as if it's any less abhorrent realizes he's now part of wholesale slaughter.
And ultimately... that they were all part of giving away their powers to the kind of ideologues and downright sociopaths that they too are about to become the very victims of.
It's why I love this movie, it's first and foremost, a cautionary tale in complacency and the unintended costs you'd be paying both out of your own pocket and out of pocket of others.
@@FPoP1911you nailed it!
And General Muller was there watching for those who did not get with the program would be in big trouble and later would have to answer to him.
When that dude just spaces out looking out the window and they tell him to sit back down, absolutely chilling...
@@FPoP1911 This hits the nail, especially the part where some of them probably doesn't want to participate in a slaughter and just wanted a nationwide equivalent of a gated community.
“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint.
It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result.
But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
C.S.Lewis “The Screwtape Letters”.
I wonder how the staff of Bomber Command was dressed and coiffed and what their demeanor was when they planned the attacks on Hamburg, Pforzheim and Dresden. I'd guess their office was also sufficiently lit, their fingernails clipped and their faces shaved, etc.
Do you think they ever raised voice or concern over the tens of thousands of non-combatants and children they would kill?
That's what was so striking about this film. It wasn't the rantings of a madman, but an organized, orchestrated, and planned massacre by a bunch of educated, articulate, sane men from a variety of agencies and organizations throughout the Nazi government.
It's even stranger that events today are mimicking this rationalization in a various parts of the world even as I write this.
Hilarious comin` from a Catholic and I was raised Catholic myself!
@@aspieanarchist5439 Lewis was Anglican, not Catholic.
The Screwtape Letters is one of those forgotten literary gems.
The closing statement reminded me of how this movie actually humanized Nazis in the way that, evil doesn't come with a horn and tail and dramatic music, it's very normal looking people in very normal looking situations.
A Holocaust survivor told me that they didn't believe the rumors. They knew the Germans of culture, leaders of thought in chemistry, nuclear physics, writing operas, and making classical music, she said it was unthinkable that such a learned and cultured people could do those things. Germany was the world's leader in so many fields, it was unthinkable.
@@sjb3460 That's because it didn't happen, it was made up as an excuse to attack their country and demoralize their people for daring to remove those who cannot be named from their governments that had created massive famine in their country from 1918 until that hero took power and removed them all and took care of their country and people.
What the Zionists have been doing to the poor Palestinians for the last 80 years is 100 times worse than the Holocaust… all you ever hear about is 6 million Jews when in reality it was closer to 400k & 20x times the amount of Russians were killed in the death camps and the war but you never hear about them. All you hear about is the inflated Jewish figure …more gypsies were killed by far than the Jews but all you ever hear is this ridiculous figure of 6 million Jews almost a century later…… you never hear about the other casualties. You never hear about the tens of thousands of Palestinians being systematically executed by the Zionist regime every month for the last day 80 years funded with hundreds of billions of dollars a year in free US tax dollars … the American public is even forced to pay for Israel’s universal healthcare while 1/3 of its taxpaying citizens are uninsured…. They’re not allowed to use the money to buy their own insurance. They have to buy it for the Zionist soldiers of Israel to commit genocide on Palestinians because Zionist long took control of the American and British political systems along with their banking and media and if you say anything or try to show the truth, you’re branded and anti-semi and your comments are taken down your channel is taken down but the truth is still getting out there despite their best effort to hide it!
Agreed! I've never quite understood the "humanizing" characterization, especially when it's used to object to making evil people "real", so to speak. Whether it's one of the people in the film analyzed here, or even Hitler himself--they're not extraterrestrials after all--they're human beings...and that's the point of the film really, the utter brutality humans can inflict upon each other. I agree with AnimarchyHistory in this sense...it's the scariest thing in the world.
They were humans after all... :(
"No secret cabal of vampires" sounds like something a vampire in a secret cabal would say....
Yep....
😂😂😂
Good one.
Gotem good
Ssshh...
The point of holding the mirror in front of people and saying "This could be you" is very underrated. What I notice a lot, especially as a German, is that Hitler and the Nazis are always portrayed as this almost mythical evil. The understandable lack of nuance and willigness to discuss the subject matter objectively - which means highlighting why people genuinely supported the Nazis, so the good people saw in them - has led to Hitler and the Nazis at large becoming so dehumanised that people have completely lost sight of how the NSDAP came into power in the first place. It creates a situation where those that shout "Never again!" the loudest are those that don't even know how it came to happen in the first place, how "mundane" it often was, the bureaucratic processes. People just being numbers, people who were brilliant lawyers, doctors, civil servants, generals, businessmen etc. that just went along with the system because they happened to be working inside of it, being not that into all those grand designs and visions. And then by the time they realised what they were in for, it was far, far too late. That's how you had even the rare case of SS-members ending up in the German resistance.
Everyone wants to believe they would have been part of the resistance, but the truth is that if we had been born in those times, most of us would have behaved just like the rest of the population. Enthusiastic supports, people that were impartial, people that shut their eyes to reality because they couldn't deal with it, people that were against the regime but didn't dare resist because it meant risking their lives and the lives of their family etc.
Perfectly stated!
And it's happening again, with the rise of nationalism in the US, UK, and many places in Europe.
Well, we ARE living in those times, just most of us are geographically not under threat by the party in question, and now there atrocities are streamed and tiktokd like comedy videos and the defenders of this genocide are basically like "theres nothing wrong with anything you're seeing, in fact youre not seeing it at all.
The Nuremberg defense was "I was just following orders"
The Nuremberg defense of the 21st century will be "Your honor I enjoyed every minute if of it, I dont see what the problem is, you're just prejudiced"
History repeats itself.
This, as a german myself I have to agree that I always see people from the outside, saying that Hitler and the Nazis were "uniquely german" and can't happen anywhere else (this is a legit video on youtube) or that they would have risen up in revolt and how unreasonable it was that germans just went along with it. (aka "If only the population had guns"...the population DID have guns, tons of them, but why "rise up" against a system that ultimately made your life a little better overall or barely impacted it because you lived in some village or small town)
It is also not like the Nazis were parading around they were mass murdering jews. Yes, they said they need to go, and voilence against them happened, but most that people saw of it were "deportations", maybe a beating, maybe a labor-camp with appauling conditions for the prisoners (not unheard of at the time). Not everyone knew where they were going. And as you can see, even in INTERNAL ORDERS the nazi government used code speak, calling it the "final solution to the jewish question". While we know NOW what it meant, any contemporary person at the time would have assumed any number of things, such as "Oh, they probably mean where to put them all, right? Like Madagascar or something..." This was BY DESIGN. Goehring in his Pozan speech is famously quoted as saying that if they told people the full extend of their meassures, "all 82 million germans would walk up to the post with a jew under their arm, and say "yup, the jews suck and need to go, except this one. This one is alright.""
Hindsight is always 20/20. And one look at the nations of today tells me that A LOT of people just go along with whatever their government does.Yes there might be protests here or there, but no full on, regime changing revolutions...most people just don't have the time for stuff like that or any interest in it. They might mutter "Biden stole the election" or "Trump is a neo-fascist." but are they ever going to do anything except complain? Nah...
Kenneth Branagh as Hiedrich is the greatest singular performance of a psychopath I’ve ever seen.
He did look fabulous in his Hugo Boss dapper uniform.
Good hair cut too.
clean cut sharply dressed.
As they mostly always are.@@stephenpmurphy591
The best looking uniform ever
I watched the movie after seeing this video and wasn't disappointed. However, while Heidrich was of course perfectly evil, the movie showed no particular signs of psychopathy. I don't agree with you or Animarchy History that this was a particularly good depiction of psychyopathy unless you mean psychopathy as an insult rather than a clinical diagnosis (which of course only a psychiatrist may authoritatively make).
The brilliance of his character and performance was that he wasn’t a typical psychopath. He was congenial, well-mannered, really quite disarming. But it’s his aims and “the glove is iron” attitude that arrests and shocks the viewer. You almost can’t believe these men are discussing what they are.
The most chilling part for me was the shot of the table which pans over the food, then lands on a guy sketching another man's face. They're talking about systematic murder, which they call "processing" the "contents", yet this guy is doodling out of boredom. Horrific.
Sounds familiar since 2020.
You know this is Soviet propaganda, yea?
@@igotfriendsinlowplaces2971 what is?
Just don't forget that this is a fiction drama, propaganda and interpretation by some Hollywood director
@@igotfriendsinlowplaces2971 does the sovietunion still exist? possible, you have "propaganda" instead of a brain.....
When Gilderoy Lockhart, Caesar Flickerman, Mr Darcy, the newsreader and Posca from Rome, John Bates and Gibbs teamed up and talked a bit about genocide.
The cast man. THE CAST.
And Blue Leader from Rogue One was Josef Buhler.
@@AnimarchyHistorynow I have to see this movie. Though which Mr. Darcy? Mini series or movie ?
@@seppo532It’s available to watch as a movie on formerly HBO, now Max
Also stars the back of Tom Hiddlestone’s head.
I remember something my scoutmaster said when as young teenagers we were deciding who the meanest people on earth were; the Germans, the Mongolians, the Ottomans, the Comanche, the Spaniards, etc. Scoutmaster quietly said, 'people are mean.'
People are mean, in both senses of the word, and each sense equals the other.
The Scots, of course!
I'm sorry, but that makes him sound really... dimwitted, I guess is the word? Like, the basic idea of people being mean is already understood, you were simply discussing who did it the best.
@@therobustempyrean1436 Thou art sage! More wisdom, please.
I like how, in Eichmann and Heydrich, we see different kinds of evil.
Heydrich seems gleefully evil. He appears to be genuinely proud of the horrible stuff he's doing here. He can behave civil, and flamboyant, and charming. But, as soon as someone who's impeding his goals can't be persuaded with honeyed words, he drops the act, and becomes icy cold and threatening, with words like sharpened steel blades.
Eichmann really does fit the phrase Hannah Arendt coined about him. "Banality of evil." He's like an evil accountant. He treats figuring out how to most effectively kill millions as merely a question of math and equipment. It doesn't matter to him in the slightest that it's human lives he's planning to end. To him, it's not a crime against humanity. It's a work assignment.
Liberals are the banality of evil. You think these men are evil because you’ve been brainwashed. You think US or UK generals were any better? We all know the Soviets we’re subhuman animals, communist, but even they had to make up lies about Germany to help shape the post war narrative. You’d think the eastern front didn’t need embellishments but the Soviets blamed all their massacres and death camps on the Germans. This has been proven. Even most “SS” massacres have now been proven false and were usually perpetrated by locals or communist partisans and blamed on the Germans
Bettina Stangneth, in 'Eichmann Before Jerusalem,' notes that Eichmann bragged about his role in Nazi Germany and the "legal murders" it allowed him to commit, once he was "safe" in Argentina.
@@Alan_Duval kinda like David Ben Gurien bragging about r@ping and killing Arab Christians
Only if you're a Jew or have been brainwashed by their propaganda.
If you think Eichmann was evil, his boss was WAY worse. Heinrich Himmler. He was the absolute epitome of that phrase "banality of evil", more so than Eichmann.
The horror of Conspiracy wasn’t the topic of the film. It was the tone of the film. It was a merry little luncheon meeting that decided the fates of millions of people.
We can fathom the horror of the events at the camps easily enough. We can see that and process it. It is the happy little gathering where they share a meal while discussing mass murder so casually that gets down into our soul and turns our stomachs. It’s the laying out of silverware and the music playing that rips into you. It’s the maids and butlers going about their duties and the drivers having a snowball fight outside that makes it so horrific. It’s the innocence in the background that punctuates the horror.
The casting was brilliant. The actors all had good reputations from other films, which made their roles in this film hit like a ton of bricks. Seeing Branagh & Tucci as Heydrich & Eichmann took your past memory of the actor’s previous roles and twisted it like a knife in your belly.
Closing the film with classical music written by a German composer was just to cement your horror, just as it set the stage for the horror to come at the beginning, like the slices of bread on a sandwich at a Donner Party picnic. It was pure genius.
I love this movie as the best movie I've ever seen about the VP/director level of corporations.
I've been in these types of meetings, meetings not of the upper top level executives, but of the level right below, the people who are in charge of representing the interests of their executive and their department. The meetings are filled with people who righteously stand up for their and their bosses' interests and prerogatives, where IT and Sales go head to head, and Marketing and Accounting sneak up to the side and try to get their own powers increased, all the while everyone try to say how each are the most supportive of the company's goals.
Conspiracy shows that wonderfully. It's just that it talks about the murder of millions.
Ending with classical music was used effectively in punctuating that the impending violence is not a consequence of man's brutal nature, at least in the eyes of the men carrying it out. It's supposed to reinforce that the men that made these decisions viewed it not as an emotional and visceral reaction. The way we are conditioned to see violence. It's not a man cornered and fighting for his life. It's a men who are making dispassionate decisions after a long reasonable discussion. To me the horror is this single point that it makes. We feel that if you were able to truly communicate with someone doing something horrible, that you could reason with him and he would eventually do the right thing and show mercy. But what if it wasn't emotion that made him violent, but reason. How do you beg for reason from someone that reasoned himself into doing this. He doesn't view these actions as morally wrong. If moral fiber is a human universal, how terrifying would it be to consider they don't share in that. Suddenly you look at the situation and don't see a man begging for his life from another man, but instead see a zebra begging for its life to a crocodile
@@stephenwest6738 _"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"_ *C.S. Lewis*
It's this supposed moral superiority that makes it so easy to dehumanize people whose lifes and interests collide with your beliefs and agenda and to turn them into something not just of less worth than you, but so inherently and inevitably evil and dangerous for everyone else that the idea of getting rid of them for good seems completely natural and even compelling.
The 1984 version was more realistic
@@hethyrworldwatch the 1984 German made. Film it’s worth it
It feels like Antony Starr's performance as Homelander takes a lot from Kenneth Branagh's portrayal. Slicked back blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and a smile more terrifying that any alien monster.
Wow the actual similarities are striking. Good catch
The scariest part of the boys to me is those random little close ups of homelanders face where all you can hear is that ear piercing sound.
As sad and true as it is it isnt because he is a supe but because he is a flawed human experiment. That's all he is
Yeah, homelander is honestly one of the most terrifying villains ever. Someone who can just slaughter thousands in the blink of an eye with a god complex and a short temper when he feels criticized. But he's also loved by many
The only difference is that Kenneth Branagh's Reinhard Heydrich had way more charisma than Homelander.
So we were actually shown Conspiracy back to back with Schindler's list in my High School when we were 15. It was over the course of a few weeks because RME (a kind of Social Studies class in Scotland) was only 50 minutes a week. So I can speak from my experience as I remember it:
We basically laughed along with and about Conspiracy, especially the crude jokes about x-raying peoples' balls and particularly Freisler's "they go in red and come out pink, now that's an improvement!" joke. The absolute absurdity of trying to define how much of a jew actually constituted a jew was also darkly comedic.
Then Schindler's list came on. This was the very early 2010s when showing any sort of emotions as a guy got you slagged off as "gay", so we didn't. Some of the girls cried. We never talked about the film afterwards in our lunch breaks; this was very rare because we would ALWAYS reference or joke about the films in RME. I did notice the edgelord neo-nazi in our year ended up winding back and then dropping his schtick very quickly. The "go in red and come out pink" jokes stopped.
The fact it happened over a few weeks really made it more impactful, I think. We got to develop our own edgy teenage in-jokes before getting the rug pulled from under us and being reminded that, yeah, this was about the mass industrialised slaughter of millions of people. I don't remember many films from RME but I remember those two.
Schindlers List may not be conventionally “scary”, but it depicts real, stark horror better than any other film I’ve seen. It’s a masterpiece.
Ever wonder why they show you that so young? If not its worth thinking about.
Care to elaborate? Sounds like you have some hidden agenda there in your line of questioning.@@V0NRH1NE
@@V0NRH1NE It's not "so young." You can leave school, take an apprenticeship, vote, and get married in Scotland at 16; It's the first step of adulthood. Schindler's list has a BBFC 15+ rating, it is absolutely not age-inappropriate.
@@RogueAkai I was shown it was 13 here, but it doesn't matter, its indoctrinating young people with propaganda.
Based on the film, it is clear that Heydrich, Eichmann, and Muller knew what the outcome would be. Their job was to convince the rest of the room of this decision. Heydrich does so first through charm. Then, privately, though intimidation. He tells one attendee in a sidebar conversation, "you would be a difficult man to bring down. But you will be brought down." That conversation was started with a smile on his face before turning into a chilling warning.
Eichmann uses facts. He is extremely well organized and has the data to support any argument he makes. It is difficult to argue with facts - especially when the other attendees are not as well prepared.
What is horrifying about this movie is that we find ourselves rooting for Eichmann and Heydrich and against the lesser men in the room due to the latter's bubbling. That is, until Dr Stuckart begins his argument. This is when we realize the true gravity of the meeting.
I 100% agree this is the most terrifying movie I can think of. And it's for a number of reasons... yet there's no blood, no screaming or images of torture. It's just some guys at a meeting. This is how real horror happens.
I have watched this movie many times.
The brutal ease exhibited during these horrifying discussions of genocide still haunts me at every viewing.
@@Ellecram What always got me was the perpetrators. These guys weren't poorly educated country folk... essentially rednecks and hillbillies who just didn't know any better. Those people are bad enough but there's a certain amount of "They have no education, they're generally low IQ and just acting on what they've always been told." which makes their actions at least somewhat understandable. They're just doing what ignorant people do. In this case though it was well thought out and planned by lawyers, judges, doctors, professors, etc. Those highly educated people who we all kind of just trust to do the right thing. Those people absolutely knew better.... and they still did this s@$t. If people like that can do this kind of stuff God help us all. It's also why I don't blindly trust Lawyers, Judges, Doctors, etc. I know we're supposed to but I point to this as evidence that those highly educated 'professionals' can be just as messed up and wrong as any moron I've ever met.
I'd rank Come and See as an even more terrifying horror movie. It depicts Nazi "anti-partisan operations" in 1943 Belorussia.
As I have said I would rather use the word uncanniness, it fits betterand in some case gives you more chills than horror.
Far worse things have been done in meetings in America and the events depicted by this movie are fake anyway
A wonderful review of a fantastic film. As an addition to your closing quote, I am reminded of what the guide I had at Auschwitz said when we sat, emotionally drained, between what was left of the two main crematoria.
“If you take one thing away, take this. This was not done by a nation of monsters. It was done by a nation of poets, composers, mathematicians, philosophers. If they could do it, anyone can. So ensure it will never happen again.”
Why was the "main gas chamber" of Auschwitz (that would have been the structure under Krema II) built below ground level?
I promise to ensure it never happens again. Please tell me how, though.
@@esaias536 According to the best estimates somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million people have died because of Marxism.
How would you ensure that never happens again?
Probably not by erecting a statue of Marx in Germany, right?
And yet that was done 5 years ago.
@@bearcatXF -
I hadn't heard about that. What sicko committee signed off on such an obscenity? Karl Marx was a thoroughly disgusting and evil man. His horror show politics have have brought misery and destruction to all who have been subjected to them. What's next on the agenda, a statue of "Der Fuhrer", smiling with right arm extended in a jaunty "sieg heil"?
@@bearcatXFwe should stop celebrating einstein then, his scientific discoveries is what made the atomic bomb possible.
I used to work in the Civil Service in my country. One Holocaust Memorial Day, a member of the HMD trust came to speak to us about the role of the German civil service in the holocaust, and it included minutes from this meeting. The same sense of creeping horror I felt at the similarity of the Wannsee conference to meetings we had had that very week is what you describe in this video. I will never forget it, even though I have since left government. The capability of banal and mundane human institutions to conduct such unimaginable horror is truly terrifying and should never be forgotten.
I used to work for the local council in a team that worked in the community with people with LD, Autism, mental health illnesses etc and as such team meetings were a weekly occurance.
We worked there because our goal was to help people. However, some of the ways the managment and even some of the staff would talk about people and cases came accross as so benign and synical to me as an apprentice at the age of 20/21 that it made my skin crawl.
They wanted to help them too, i believed that and still do, but the realisation eventually dawned on me years later that they had likely started out as determined and positive as i had done, only to be ground dowm by the bureaucracy and red tape and had simply settled into a near permanent state of moral ambiguity towards these fellow human beings we were supposed to be helping.
there's also a practical thing that if your job involves helping people in the worst of situations, you sort of have to emotionally distance yourself or you burn out. I think in geriatrics this becomes very prevalent, although one could argue our way of dealing with old people is a horror justified by bureaucracy
Being "economical" with human living quality, some people say
Get a proper job
@@paulg0170 You are slaves to history
@@paulg0170 Piss off.
The horror of "Conspiracy", for me, was how "businesslike" they were throughout the meeting. The acting was top notch. I must have watched it over 50 times, and every time, it chills me to my bones.
Same here.
At least one plot summary I read emphasized that those big shots decided the final fate of millions “over a rich buffet of hors d’ouvres”.
Oh yeah there are a lot of tips and tricks on "good" bureaucracy and meeting management in there. Which makes it more chilling.
I've visited the Wannsee House and that's exactly the emotion I felt going round the place. They sat down had a meeting in a nice large suburban house in a charming bit of Berlin and talked of organised genocide like a business
Agreed. The Nazis had something seriously wrong with them.
The acting talent on display in this film is amazing
Yes, it is. I have watched it several times just to appreciate the performances.
"I represent the 4 year plan"
"I represent the 1,000 year plan"
As a German we are confronted very early with this topic (for the better or worse is for you to decide). We watched the 1984 version of "Die Wannsee Konferenz" in Year 6. I am a massive horror fan but no movie will ever reach the horror of "Die Wannsee Konferenz". Mattausch is terrifying in his role
6. Klasse - 6th grade.
Internationale Großproduktionen überspülen schnell, was im deutschspachigen Raum an cineastischer Durchdringung des deutschen 20. Jahrhunderts geschaffen wurde... Allerdings ist das jetzt ja zum Glück nicht mehr so.
Noch vor etwa fünf Jahren fand ich hier auf UA-cam Kommentare á la: es gäbe ja kaum deutsche Kriegsfilme, die die deutsche Perspektive aufs Geschehen, das deutsche Erleben, erfahrbar machen würden...
they do that to make you hate your ancestors. Don't believe the lies of the Soviets and Allies, they had alot to gain framing the Germans for everything.
Anfang der 90er besuchte ich Dachau. Damals gab es noch ein Schild in der "Gaskammer" was sagte: "Gaskammer getarnt als 'Brausebad' - war nicht in Betrieb".
Dachau - wie andere deutsche Lager- ist heute (seit den 60er vielleicht) nicht als "Todeslager" betrachtet.
Der Holocaust-story zog weiter nach Osten.
Weisst Du warum die "Hauptgaskammer" von Auschwitz wurde unterirdisch gebaut?
I've seen 'Die Wannsee Konferenz' on UA-cam with subtitles and it really makes me wish I could understand German because I could tell the subtitles weren't entirely accurate. Watching Conspiracy chills me more hearing it in my own language, hearing these words spoken in the ice-cut voice of Kenneth Branagh is just terrifying to me.
@@PedanticGaming No actual transcript of the Wannsee conference survived the war. The only record of the meeting was a copy of the minutes describing it. So the words you "hear spoken" by "icy Kenneth" are not what Heydrich or any other attendee said; they are the product of an American scriptwriter named Loring Mandel.
There is no mention in the minutes of "gassing", "burning" or killing. Any such words coming out of the mouths of characters in "Conspiracy" are products of the mind of Mandel.
Along these lines recall Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past."
That last image you showed was so perfectly played and fits with your entire video. When the image first came up, I thought, "oh! A group of friends appearing to be having a good time." Then the caption came up..... gods above Animarchy, very well played.
i remember having seen it before too but without any real context, and seeing it again in the the video and together with the point it hammered home genuinely sent shivers down my spine. the fact that there were people that experienced their time at the *auschwitz deathcamp* as "doing some 9 to 5 job for a few years" and after the war just kinda moving on with their life and doing something else and the true "mundane indiference" in all of that is real existential horror on its own.
It was taken at "Solahütte" - An SS retreat built and staffed by Auschwitz prisoners roughly 30km south. Significant portions of it are still standing to this day, largely because it was used postwar by the Polish Communist Party (although essentially abandoned in the 80's - sources differ).
I remember seeing this image from a documentary many years ago. It still frightens me that they are just regular people on both sides of the isle. The real monsters are us.
u didn't see it coming tho?
I also not ethat there is a subtantial number of women, which is most frightenings.
@@michelletheado Ah yes recycling of camps
communism is still a good ideology allowed in most states.
One addition: The scariest movie is the german version of the movie called "Wannseekonferenz" from 1984 (conspiracy is a reimagining for the anglos).
Why? Because it was made in the country by the people whos parents, who might very well still be alive by that point, commited the crime and were the parts in the machine the movie is about.
Also the german version is more historically accurate because it actually follows the structure of the conference based on its original protocols and doesnt use artistic license to rewrite the order of events in the conference. Its a very minor difference but its what makes it better in my opinion.
Technically speaking the movie from 1984 could have been watched by people that participated in the conference themselfs. At least two people were still alive when the movie aired: one of the NSDAP jurists and the female secretary.
When the last main participant of the Conference died in 1987 he had the following in his obituary: "after a fulfilled life for the benefit of all who were in his sphere of influence" Yeah...
A little "fun" fact at the end: The female secretary that wrote the protocol and directly worked for Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, would only shortly after in life turn out to be a lesbian and marry a german women she meet in soviet captivity with which she lifed together until her death. In Nazi Germany that would have been a crime that might have had her end up right next to the very people she worked to exterminate.
Agree everyone should watch the german version
100% agree.
Akthough both films are the same subject, I find Conspiracy to be too focused on Branaugh's 'presence' whereas Die Wannseekonferenz was much more about the 'Deed' than the people.
Dietrich Mattausch's Heydrich was way more believable, as were they all, BECAUSE they were German with the German mindset.
Branaugh et al. are just playing a part, while the German cast were re-enacting part of their history, which they did with consumate skill.
Must have been a hard film to take part in . . .
The Russian film 'come and see' is another great and horrifying film made by the people who experienced the destruction of that era. The director lived through Stalingrad as a child. Brutal movie.
Agree!🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪
At the time WannseeKonferenz was made, one of the participants in the conference, Gerhard Klopfer, was still alive. Wonder if he saw it and what he thought of it?
I saw this when it was first released and it has stayed with me through the years. I agree with your summation of it - truly a horror movie of epic proportion. The cast, director, wardrobe, set design- everything is done with such attention to detail that you end up feeling like you are there. And have we learned our lesson from history? No.
It's nothing really. Just another dramatization for some sick sort of pleasure. The real horror was what really happened not a damn movie. Pontificating movie reviews are worthless. Go ahead and hate yourself and feel good about hating yourself is all this is about.
@@deker0954Uhh, an edgelord. How novel.
Yes, I've seen "Conspiracy." As a child, "Aliens" and "a nightmare on elm Street" scared the heck out of me, But I could always tell myself that they weren't real. In second grade, I was given an assignment over spring break to do a family tree. I will never forget the pain and horror in my mother and grandparents eyes when I started to ask about family members.
The sad reality is that the mass murder of Jews began before the Wansee Conference. The Einsatzgruppen (SS special action squads) we're unleashed in September 1939 murdering Poles and Jews in the tens of thousands per day. The death camps were set up because taking people to the forest and shooting them in the thousands had delitrius effects on Germans and horrified Jimler.
Bist du Jüdischer?
That the Final Solution was already well under way was mentioned in the movie several times.
"I have the very real feeling that I've already 'evacuated' several thousand Jews when I shot them in Riga, in Latvia."
"If it is already built, then why this meeting? Why bother?"
"Eleven million Jews -- even half that -- is asinine for the reasons that Dr. Meier mentioned: time, ammunition, manpower."
@@bobdollaz3391 What the Zionists have been doing to the poor Palestinians for the last 80 years is 100 times worse than the Holocaust… all you ever hear about is 6 million Jews when in reality it was closer to 400k & 20x times the amount of Russians were killed in the death camps and the war but you never hear about them. All you hear about is the inflated Jewish figure …more gypsies were killed by far than the Jews but all you ever hear is this ridiculous figure of 6 million Jews almost a century later…… you never hear about the other casualties. You never hear about the tens of thousands of Palestinians being systematically executed by the Zionist regime every month for the last day 80 years funded with hundreds of billions of dollars a year in free US tax dollars … the American public is even forced to pay for Israel’s universal healthcare while 1/3 of its taxpaying citizens are uninsured…. They’re not allowed to use their own tax money to buy their own insurance. They have to buy it for the Zionists Gestapo soldiers of Israel to commit genocide on Palestinians because Zionists long took control of the American and British political systems along with their banking and media and if you say anything or try to show the truth, you’re branded an “anti-Semite” and your comments are taken down your channel is taken down but the truth is still getting out there despite their best effort to hide it!
And then after all this, Quentin Tarantino thought it was a good idea to baseball bat and scalp average German soldiers because they’re all Nahtzis, but then also COMPLETELY OMIT Himmler from the plot of Inglourious Basterds. 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Loki was so mischievous that he was even at the Wannsee conference.
The worst part is, slasher movies are not horror movies. Alfred Hitchcock once said the secret to a great horror film is not letting the audience see the monster. I agree.
Agreed, ive never been scared by a slasher movie
He was certainly a genius, shame he took such bad care of himself.
They are economic people, so they choose to use modern industry to kill beggars!
It's pretty obvious you haven't seen many slashers then, as usually the killer's identity is kept a secret in most until the very end. Also Hitchcock's Psycho was more or less a precursor to the modern slasher, so you're just contradicting yourself.
Yeah they are horror movies.Hush
The single most disturbing scene I've ever seen in cinema is a scene in the movie "Caberet" which is just of a small boy Singing. The thing that turned my blood cold was it was a boy in a Hitler Youth uniform, and at the start it's a normal, plasant tune sung in a beer garden only a little odd because of the Hitler Youth uniform. Then... people start joining in, at first it's just a few and nothing much changes. Then more and more join in, the tone of the song darkens, even more people join in and very soon everyone is bellowing along with the kid in what is a very clear recreation of a Nazi rally. Felt the chill down to my bones from that.
I remember that. Spine chilling.
I completely agree. A terrifying scene depicted in the warm brightness of the sun no less! The alienation Sally finds herself in is a relief. Because had she joined in the song, it would have justly had the audience turn against her. And yet the indifference of her attitude to the shifting politics and morality of Germany suggest she might as well have. The true horrors inflicted by the few are excused by the indifference of the majority.
oy vey
One of the supreme ironies of history - the greatest crime in history was planned in Interpol Headquarters. Yes, Heydrich wore many hats and, as Germany's most senior policeman, in 1942 he was also President of Interpol, and Wannsee was Interpol HQ.
"the greatest crime"
Said who? You? It's probably not even in top 10
@@kneegerman2076 What? How does systematic killing of more than 6 million humans is not the greatest crime
@@kneegerman2076 My emotion told me to disagree with you.
Than my knowledge of communism kicked in...
@@065TimCommunism is no doubt a bad system of governance. And many communist nations have done horrid things. But ww2, is the largest war in history, and caused the deaths of millions. The Holocaust is the largest genocide in history that targeted huge groups of people. There is no doubt in my mind that it is the worst.
You hit the nail on the head with this one... Terrible acts are seldom ever committed by a single overlord with a grand scheme, but by the people who consider it a mundane addition to their regular work day...
Keep making these videos Animarchy! You're saying what people need to realize is truth, and you're doing it in the best way possible
A morally bankrupt billionaire is nothing compared to 1 billion morally bankrupt office drones.
It is the boring, bureaucratic, dispassionate even, nature of a logistical meeting that discusses the murder of many millions of people, Jews, but not just them, that makes it so horrifying. The original German version from the 80s does that very well. It doesn't shy away from the squabling about different department heads wanting competency over certain topics, the details about which process should be done in double or tripple hard copies for which group, etc. All the tedious and boring stuff that make it chilling. There were no movie villains twirling their mustaches. Nobody screamed at anybody or even much raised their voices, nothing (movie) dramatic happened, exept of course for the outcome. These people are the same that you will today meet in any corporate middle management. This can happen again if we aren't very careful.
Like millions of others , wouldn't be to arsed if it happened again.
it’s not can happen, it has happened. A multitude of genocides happened post ww2. And I’d go as far as to say the modern state of Israel is either close to or is committing genocide in Gaza.
For me, what makes this movie so scary is how immersive it is. You don’t feel like a spectator, you feel like a participant.
Also, the way the men discuss this “issue” like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do is terrifying.
Good is stronger than evil, but evil is easier. Good requires us to take action, evil only requires our indifference.
evil doom come always at its own hands.
Holocaust was a wrong morally legally and economically.
I remember when this first aired we talked about this in class the very next day. No teacher started the discussion, we just talked about this among ourselves. It frightened a lot of us.
The propaganda took a hit on yall
I'm so glad you decided to put in the real life portraits of these people. There are some people in the cast who are such eerily close matches to them that I have to wonder if getting cast in the roles of such horrid people gave the actors a bit of a...well, not a complex, but a little bit of a churn in their stomachs.
Kissing jewish ass by playing muh evil Germans? Dude you couldn't find a better carrier boost than this. Basically every Hollywood studio is now open for you
Thank you for making this. The movie has been stuck in my brain since I saw it ages ago.
The casting is amazing. The other thing that struck me was the actual beauty of the film. The cleanliness of the snow and air, the beauty of the house, room, crystal, the crispness of the uniforms and suits, down to the calligraphy of the place cards.
I found it depressing but the two movies which really got to me were a 2016 movie originally called Wolyn, known in the west as Hatred and the 1985 Soviet film Come and See. They actually effected me for days.
Wolyn, amazing movie
Agreed; Come and See is a brutal movie, but it is beautifully done.
I actually didn't like come and see. The scene when they're leaving the village and you get a brief shot of the bodies lined up against the barn is well done, and the ghoulish scene with the church near the end can make the fainthearted queasy, but my issue isn't with the content of the movie, but the direction and pacing. 30+ minutes of head-on face shots; Just awful. You waste, literally waste, five or ten minutes of screen time looking back and forth between the lead and the girl in the woods before the film remembers it has limited time and gets on with the story.@@marie_h1104
@@marie_h1104and you think it’s not Soviet propaganda? Good lord you sweet summer child 😂
@@igotfriendsinlowplaces2971 "good lord", "propaganda"--brain, leave your rotten fingers off the keyboard..
I can't even begin to describe my love hate relationship with 28 Days Later. It actually terrifies me.
I like it Finland saved the Day in the end 😊
Hello
It's ok but it's not as scary as that.
For me its the main theme music.... OMFG!
Similar terror comes from a film called the Wave. It demonstrates how quickly students in a high school experiment can fall into the allure of Authoritarianism. Its so shocking because every part of the students reactions are believable and possible. There is a draw to such unity and comradeship. There is a desire for us to find such strength in unity. This of course has complicated consequences that sweep so fast through our desires.
I believe Morton Rhue is the author of the novel. great writer, has written some equally realistic novels that are all worthwile reading.
The Wave is based on a real experiment in the US.
It was called the Third Wave, and was almost identical to how the movie portraied it.
Millions of Soviet POW's were at this time being left to die in camps with no food. The genocides were working in parallel.
I saw the movie some time ago, and it gave the chills back then, and you're right: these actors gave me the same sensation as Ralph Fiennes portray of Amon Goerth: he's not a monster, he's just a mundane and mediocre bureaucrat with too much power in his hands and too much garbage on his head... just like a bunch of my current and former coworkers.
Knowing that we are not differtent from this people is what will make us learn form those mistakes, hopefully
there's a difference in the fact that we ain't nazis, we don't think race is a social construct that define the individual (I mean some progressive movement in our current era do but nobody is taking them seriously)
@@valentinlageot4101 Take a look at the early State Constitutions, and the Naturalization Acts before 1954
"....just like a bunch of my current and former co-workers"
But not you? Not us? Never us? Right?
@@liambrennan7410 I like to think that I have independent thoughts, but you're right, everyone is susceptible to this kind of indoctrination
I watched both these movies in social studies in high school. My teacher made the exact same point you made. Just how casually they protracted that meeting. How easy they discuss such atrocities. To this day I shiver when I think about it.
🙄
Same thing Gates, Soros, and others discuss the fate of all of us.
Read Numbers 31 : 14 - 18
Then read Deuteronomy 7.
I get this because I have the same feeling every time I watch The Killing Fields, specifically the parts right around the fall of the capital when they're trying to get to safety and find a way for Dith Pran to evacuate with them. I think I've seen the full film a total of three times (once in school), and those scenes always provoke a sense of existential dread even when nobody is actually getting killed on screen.
It's been 20 years since I last tried, but this is the only movie that's instilled such a feeling of dread/fear that I couldn't finish. I was young, unrelated to the watching sort of in a horror kick at the time and running through my dad's history VHS... just thinking about it still gives me chills.
I was surprised when it was made. Communists are rarely shown in a negative light. Only Nazies are evil.
Truly the most horrifying film depiction of all time… a board meeting that could have been an email
Threads was definitely the scariest movie I saw as a child. I was too young to understand the evil within then but as many of my generation will attest, the constant reminder of the threat of nuclear war through movies like that or ‘the day after’ felt very real to me then!
Threads is by far the scariest film ever
It was the milk bottles melting. I lay in bed rigid with fear afterwards.
It is very real to most people in the middle east.
Only difference is the source of radiation.
"Never again" should mean: never again *for anyone.*
How can it be never again when it never happened?
And yet it doesn’t, maybe you should question why that is ?
@@victordogeman because we're destined for mass expiration
Yet Socialists are running around demanding it happen again, and it is happening in places. The flu lockdowns was a taste. Did you resist? Or did you call us crazy for resisting?
It happens today. Read the news from the UN and you'll see this is only a drop in the bucket of humanity's cruelty.
I struggle to decide if Conspiracy or Come And See is scarier. They go about it in very different ways, but both are deeply affecting.
No doubt the last 30 minutes of Come and See, Idi i Smotri (1985) depicting the destruction of a Belarussian village and its inhabitants by the SS Brigade Dirlewanger is the scariest war film I have ever seen.
When Burgundian lullaby starts playing it gives me chills.
This hour spent watching this video was 110% worth it.
Come and See is even more terrifying. Literally gave me nightmares
Seconding this, Come and See is like an even bleaker version of "All quiet on the westerm front" mixed in with horror elements
Watch this before come and see
This is nothing compared to Come and See. Great, bleak, film that is well told in ways that Hollywood would never allow to show. Also RIP cow.
Side note: even though I heard of the complaints regarding some of its hyperbole. I’m looking into that stuff before parroting the idea that it’s fake.
@@gr-8166 I have read that cattle mutilations occur only in some "police jurisdictions"--the ones where insurance will pay for the deceased cattle
@@robs.2671I've read the book it was partially based on, horrifying. Also, alledgedly there was a scene they wanted to shoot at the end but couldn't, logistics, money and time-wise. The director and his crew initially wanted to end on a battle in the swamps near a forest, wjere everything was just chaos and pandemonium and both sides have been reduced to beasts.
I had to get out of bed to get on my computer and comment on this video for the algorithm, Ani. This is torture. How dare you make me be a semi-functioning college student.
Any half-decent interest in world-history will do that from time to time. Don't blame AMI, it goes with the territory (human society).
If you're watching on your phone you can also comment using that. Glad to help.
From the thumbnail, I still had some uncertainty because it had been so long since I've seen it. But from how you were presenting the introductory argument and slowly making your way to your main point... that it was a horror "movie" that really happened... I became absolutely sure that yes. This was about Conspiracy. Bravo.
I was beginning to think that I was the only one who'd seen this film. I just happened to see it in the cheap bin at WalMart and thought I'd give it a try. After I watched it I just sat there stunned by what I had seen. We like to think that evil is easy to identify with horns, leering fangs or vicious claws but the truth is that true evil can be that man or women standing in line behind you talking on their phone waiting their turn to get their latte.
The idea that evil is the work of monsters or demons is the greatest boon real evil has ever enjoyed.
@@SewardWriter TBF the Holocaust may as well have been done by demons in human skin.
A strong contender, but Come and See still rests for me as the scariest WW2 movie.
Agreed, I actually did a paper on it for an English class in college. My professor hadn't heard of it before, he actually watched it based on my paper and considered it film everyone should see. I got an A on that paper.
Yeah no two ways about it Come and See is most harrowing account of war . We say this film is terrible but happy to watch genocide play out in real time without given a shit . Even go along with it look at what Israel is doing an what our governments and shill media are telling us
anything the soviets made they made for propaganda.
Bunch of Brit’s acting like Germans isn’t very convincing
Come and See has no British actors. They’re all Belorussian or Russian.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See
An incredible film, and a peerless, pertinent analysis thereof. My favorite video of yours yet, Pac!
In the Apple series Severance, Mrs Cobel states “The good news is that Hell is just the product of a morbid human imagination. The bad news is whatever humans can imagine they can usually create.”
I’m not a quote person, but this struck me as one of the most truthful statements about humanity ever.
I’m not a believer, so magical creatures don’t do anything for me. Real horror is what we do to each other ( and often in the name of our gods).
Very well done. Thanks.
For me, it is HBO'S Chernobyl miniseries. What frightened me the most is the fact that the World(at least Europe) almost ended before I am even born. And we didn't know anything about it.
What some extra nightmare fuel? Chernobyl is definitely scary but only because it was the one accident that was too big for the KGB to properly cover up. The Soviet Union had numerous nuclear disasters that were covered up for decades including the previous worst nuclear disaster, the Kyshtym Disaster, BUT that's only talking about nuclear disasters. They also had numerous bioweapons outbreaks from their illegal program with their biggest one being the Sverdlovsk Anthrax leak.
For me its Come and See. When you realize that the film was filmed using live ammunition, that the director was actually a teenage partisan during the war, and that the real life carnage was on a scale non of us can really comprehend.
what an exaggeration.
@@officernealy How about US military secretly spraying bacteria over San Francisco , or when US bombers lost two nuclear bombs in North Carolina?
Yes we knew very soon when the fallout started to descend all over Europe and the Sovietunion finally could not avoid to admit what had happened.
Ok... I thought I knew what I was getting into when I clicked on this video.
But then the Burgundian lullaby started playing and my fucking heart rate went up and I thought I was about to have a fucking stroke.
I don't think I've been so scared in a long time.
I’m glad my trick worked.
@@AnimarchyHistory I find myself interested to know you are a TNO fan, or at least aware of it.
I'd absolutely love to hear you talk about it, I can't seem to find anyone who will actually just talk about it.
The music as well being incredible, if you haven't already I'd recommend checking out Aiden George, TNO's most well known community musician.
His version of the Burgundian Lullaby and the Hymn to Taboritsky are incredible, chilling and utterly terrifying.
@@moritamikamikara3879 Most people don't talk about TNO because even though its a well made mod, the horrors portrayed within are, best left forgotten. Especially if you play as burgundy.
I love the inclusion of the Burgundian Luluby at the beginning, namely for how it relates to the subject matter of both the movie and the source of the song. For those who don't know, it's made for a HOI4 mod called The New Order. In the mod, there's a country called Burgundy led by Heinrich Himmler which is a complete hell state where even the surveillance state of 1984 pales in comparison.
I'd love a more story based game set in this setting
@@soptop1641Honestly, I’d read some alt history novels set in the New Order-Verse.
It's incredible that the mod's creator manage to come up with a coherent answer to the question what if hitler but worse
@@spartanalex9006 my personal idea would be to have a espionage based rpg game set in this world sort of little bit xcom like
and because the internet loves to be "contrarian," Burgundy and Taboritsky are the two most popular factions
One of the best, most thorough overview/analysis I've ever come across of a historical film; sincerely well done!
The late Alfred Hitchcock (of horror movie fame) was the 4th director to work on a british documentary of the Holocaust. After about 3 months he quit saying he couldn't take it any more as he suffered severe nightmares every night. In his words:" I make fiction movies, this is real-life! THIS is true horror! ". It took 2 more directors and months to complete the work.
Just wow...
I don't think I had heard of this movie before this video, and what an experiance it was.
You did a wonderful job with this video!
One of the discussions that stood out to me were between Kritzinger and Lange where Lange tells him about the "evacuations" on the eastern front and Kritzinger replies "This is more than war. There must be a different word for this".
Yes Kritzinger, that word starts with a G...
I almost feel like you could extend the lesson beyond just watching the movie
You make it a 4 stage lesson,
Step one, funny haha day, you teach them about the emu war.
Step 2 a discussion on how they might handle the emu problem as a government, split them into groups and have them discuss a plan make them get into the logistics of it and such (if you have students you trust you can let them know and scatter them across groups to make the, historical, suggestions)
Step 3. You watch the movie
Step 4. You point out how similar the discussions were and how easy they came to their solutions (reveal any collaborators you had so nobody hates them)
Sounds horribly effective.
Unfortunately, we know that this kind of stuff works because it's been tried and the results were suitably horrific and, it can be guessed at from suspiciously truncated post experiment summation, traumatized some kids. Interesting on paper, but I'd argue we shouldn't be conducting these kinds of things.
One of my favorites and an extremely underrated movie. My favorite scene is Colin Firth's warning to his countrymen that they are looking at their subjects as a cartoon while he is making a legal-based (however evil) argument against that emotional response. It's chilling and a reminder that these things don't happen in a vacuum.
Shaun of the dead is the most accurate zombie film. That being that the army would be able to kill all the zombie and save the day and you'd be safe so long as you dont leave you'r home and go to the pub lol
The is no problem in this world that can't be resolved over a nice cup of tea.
“What is real horror?”
The reminder of the feeling of being both truly alone, truly powerless, and truly afraid.
The reminder of that one time as a child when you realize there is nobody around to protect you, and you are at the mercy of whatever you cannot see in the dark.
Skinamarink is honestly the most disturbing and terrifying thing I have witnessed in my life.
I keep hearing how chilling that film Come and see is, I know it’s a foreign film but it gets props like no other.
You'll most likely only watch it one time. It's that Brutal of a film.
@@coxmosia1 Conspiracy and Come and See, are by far the two most horrifying films of all time.
One shows the horror of indifference, the other shows the horror unleashed by that indifference, they are two parts of the same story.
It's like a Disney compared to _The men behind the sun._
@@Dexter037S4 That's a great way to think about it.
@@Dexter037S4 and both are just some cheesy propaganda movies from two biggest liars in history: British and Soviets.
It begins at 8:27, you're welcome
😂😂😂
The fact that you managed to describe my entire experience with this movie is brutal, especially the moment of cracking jokes, I felt so much guilt and disgust when I catch myself smiling at that, I think that's the point of the film I have to agree that this is what horror is regular men being authors of horrible actions
Why are you making things up?
It’s a movie. What normal person would feel personal disgust while watching a dramatization?
@@ortis_solis5700It’s almost like movies cause emotions in people? Who’dve thought!
@@natebox4550 yes exactly friend! Very effective propaganda
@@ortis_solis5700 Movies causing emotions = propaganda now? Wow times are changing.
One of the first movies I streamed on Prime I was torn between just how good a movie it was and just how horrible the subject matter was.
Cheers DB Cooper
You mentioned this movie, i immediately watched it before finishing this video... and youre right, this movie is terrifying
Watch threads
@@mustiesalop123A I watched that movie a long time ago
A minor point about _Threads:_ It's on the same tier of realism as the Fallout series of games, although for different reasons.
My personal pic for true horror has to be "Come and See"
Made by people who lived it, and shocases the brutality in a way that feels like i could actually see it happening to me.
I got to go to that villa with school some years back. The striking thing is how peaceful the gardens are, and how nice the view across the river is, even on a grey autumn day. And how it's almost impossible to reconcile the reality of what happened there with the facts of where you are
I thought it'd be Come And See. I've heard it's the one that inspired Spielberg to make Schindler's List. An absolutely terrible, horrifying experience meant to make you actually believe it when you say "Never Again".
i would certainly put come and see in the same category, especially the final scene. the depiciton of how absolutely casual these groups went around murdering entire villages is in my opinion probably still the most faithful, if absolutely horrifiyng, portrail of the extermination in the east ever put to film.
I thought it would be men behind the sun.
I thought the same...
Both are great and terrrifying in different ways. Come and See shows real monsters in action, explicitly. Conspiracy shows how easy we(and people close to us) can become or relate to real monsters. I dont have the stomach for watching Come and See again but definitelly enjoy watching Conspiracy again
it is better and more realistic. `Come and see ` is so realistic, so brutal and genuine that because it was `too realistic` for the Americans who since civil war never waged a war on their territory. Im slavic aldough not a russian .Im Serbian and Werhmacht did to many of our villages exactly what they did it to Belorussians. Shindler`s list is good movie but compared to come and see it is pretty mellow IMHO.Watched Come and See twice / first time at 14 years 1991 and then when i found it on YT.
This video has 2 outcomes in my day. Either I watch conspiracy after your video, or your video after conspiracy. Never seperate. Because to fail to rewatch this content over and over again is the root cause of forgetting why we defeated such evil in the first place.
my eyes lit up the minute you brought up threads, I watched that movie not long ago, and it was amazing
The mere mention of Heydrich legitimately sends chills down my spine.
As it should. Take it as a sign that you still have some goid humanity left in your.
The room by Tommy Wiseau was real horror.
I am so glad that someone highlighted the brilliance of this film. I don’t think it ever got enough credit when it was released. It was brilliant and something more people should see. Thank you for posting.
The Horror...of indifference.
Excellent job and you are brave enough to bring it right up to date.
Brave for what? Repeating the same mainstream talking points of the last 50 years?
@@kneegerman2076Yes, with rising anti-semitism it is necessary to bring up the past. People have short memories.
@@kneegerman2076 You completely missed my point.
@@zyaggho9185 it's almost like there is a reason behind "antisemi" and not just cause
@@kneegerman2076 If people want to hate the Israeli government sure go ahead. I think there are worse governments in the region, but you can find stuff the hate the Israeli government for. Then you might have some banks and that’s a bit of miss for me personally. A lot of banks are well not the best. It makes no since to hate Jewish bankers over an American or Chinese banker.
Your average Jew is probably an okay person. Hating all Jews or people of Jewish decent is kinda stupid. That’s like hating all Chinese people because of the ccp.
The denial of the holocaust is what gets me. Since it clearly happened. Maybe some numbers were inflated by ether the Soviets or the USA, but it did happen. I’m going to use China again. It’s like people don’t like what the Israeli government is doing thus they start to hate the Jews. Then deny the holocaust. It’s like hating the CCP then denying the war crimes the Japanese did. It’s illogical just hate the governments.
This is one of my favourite films. The script is perfect, the casting stellar, and the acting impeccable. Kenneth Branagh's Heidrich is one of the most chilling portrayals of a genuine historical villain that I have ever seen.
me as well.
not a "villain"... Just a man, an evil man yes, but just a man... That is my take from this
@@Fetishmale I'd say he's the very definition of a villain in an historical context. Being a villain does not preclude one from being a man.
@@jamesfaulkner9968 So you are totally against the very conclusion of this video? (from 54:00 ) Also whats makes a "villain" then... was it the educated, and sometimes rich, germans of the reserve police batailion From the Netflix: Ordinary Men: The "Forgotten Holocaust", that shot 1 man/woman/kid at a time, in the einsatzgruppen of the eastern front, when they could say no! You saw no, it was that one! man, that ordered it... And Heidrich was`t even in control of the einsatzgruppen or the some 13.000 germans that worked at any given time at Auswitch
I've always wanted a brutally accurate on-screen portrayal of Unit 731 and mind bending decent from horrifying medical experiments performed on individuals you no longer consider to be human to where the facility staff started playing horrific and brutal games with their prisoners and former test subjects that had no conceivable medical objective and were only carried out to satisfy the utterly perverted, psychopathic, and sadistic curiosities that had come to completely possess Unit 731's personnel and specifically its commander, General Shiro Ishii.
So great that this movie gets a long review. Also, the freaking cast in this!
I have been saying this exact thing for almost 20 years...this Is the scariest movie I have ever seen...by far! Because it actually happened and to me the scariest part is the way they were so civilised on dealing with "the problem " ...
In 1984 I saw "Die Wannsee Conference" in a little Art Film theater in LA. My Jewish girlfriend became physically sick during the performance. I saw the film in theaters four times over the next two weeks. A brilliant film that has a edge that "Conspiracy" lacks. That being said I must report watching a brillant David Trelfall and the other cast members performe well over 25 times. A horrifying eulogy to German efficiency. Thank you so much for your review...
Yes, this West German production- made for tv- is a must-see before viewing Conspiracy. It is said the dialogue of this 1984 film is 95% from the minutes of the meeting the secretary wrote down, and the film’s length approximates the length of the actual conference that day, a day that would be the most consequential one for the six million civilian lives that would later be snuffed out before the war would be over. The German language makes it more chilling, i agree.
My grandfather was in the Ordnungspolizei during World War 2 and the real horror for him was knowing that some of the most brutal became police after the war was over.
It says a lot about HBO that they can make this and also the Chernobyl series - two great examples of true history horror. Too bad they also made, you know, Velma.
All 3 are propaganda...
@@bdleo300You have a strange definition of propaganda.
Velma was its own kind of horror.
The reason why they can use very close up and quick cut between dialogue is because pretty much all of the actors are theatrical trained.
I remember the famous title from Ahrendt after the Nürnberg trials. "Banality of evil". Once death, murders, genocide, war crimes, and every other horror the SS, Wehrmacht, and Nazis committed becomes a banality a routine and just "doing your job, not minding what you are doing". This is where it gets horrendous, once you lose the innocence and see the violence as a common tool you can accomplish one of the most brutal and heinous crimes ever committed in the history of mankind.
I don't remember exactly how it went, but I remember hearing something along the lines of "the real monsters aren't some demon or zombie or supernatural entity but rather us. Humanity." That could never be more true especially in situations like this.
It's so chilling, seeing people calmly discuss the murder of millions of people and being more concerned about the logistics of making it efficient while keeping it a secret and never showing concern for the fact that they're discussing murdering millions of people.
Anyone who tries to argue that the Axis were NOT the villains of WW2 need to open a history book.
Everyone had blood on thier hands. Fire bombing Germany, nuking Japan, internment camps in the US, secret torture prisons in the UK, gulags in Russia.. We are creeping very close to seeing these horrors again.
Have you considered the possibility that there were no heroes? Only villains?
@@dannye7612 We’re talking about the side that was literally organizing the systemic murder of an entire race, along with everyone else that they saw as less than human.
Compared to that? Even the Soviets could be heroic while fighting to defend their homeland.
@@CdrChaos So are you denying that the Allies engaged in heinous war crimes as well?
@@dannye7612 You're not seriously trying to argue in favor the Axis right now, right? Tell me you're not trying to straw man to say the Axis were not the villains of WW2.