Labyrinth of Lies

Cast

Plot

It's 1958, Johann Radmann is a young and idealistic public prosecutor who takes an interest in the case of Charles Schulz, a former Auschwitz extermination camp commander, who is now teaching at a school in Frankfurt am Main. Radmann is determined to bring Schulz to justice, but he finds his efforts frustrated because many former Nazis serve in the government, and they look out for each other.

His boss, the prosecutor-general Fritz Bauer, puts him in charge of investigating former workers at the Auschwitz camp. The U.S. occupation forces give him access to their files and he discovers there were 8,000 of them. He goes after Josef Mengele, who is living in Argentina but flies back to West Germany at will to visit his family. After officialdom block his attempt to issue an arrest warrant, his boss warns him off and tells him to stick to the small fry. The department then invites Mossad agents to visit, and shares its information with them. As a result, Adolf Eichmann is kidnapped and tried in Israel. Having pulled off this coup, Israel declines to pursue Mengele.

Meanwhile, Radmann allows himself to be seduced by Marlene, a seamstress who, benefiting from his connections, is able to start a business as a dress designer. He is brought to a crisis when he discovers that his own father was in the Nazi party. After he tells her that her father too was in the Nazi Party she breaks it off with him. By the end of the film there is a chance she will have him back. He resigns his official post and goes to work for an industrialist. There he is again confronted with the question of do what is right, or do what the system needs and wants you to do.

When he finds this means working with a colleague who had defended a former Nazi he was investigating, he walks out, his idealism suffering its hard encounters with the world. At every turn the "system" wants compliance. He wants justice. He comes to understand that the only thing that can hope to meet the horror is not "justice", but attention to the lives and stories of those who suffered the injustice. Growing out of the simplistic right/wrong moralizing, he comes to understand life as more complex and seeks to repair all the damages, large and small, he inflicted in his zeal.

After going to Auschwitz to say kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer, for a friend's two daughters who were killed there, he goes back to work for the West German state prosecutor. The film ends with the opening of the trial of several hundred former Auschwitz workers.

Accolades

At 2014's Les Arcs European Cinema Festival, the film received a Special Mention from the Jury, and won the Prix du Public (audience award).