Conspiracy

In 2001, HBO and the BBC co-produced a docudrama, Conspiracy, that won Emmys for lead actor Kenneth Branagh and writer Loring Mandel, who also won the Writers Guild of America top TV award. Supporting actor Stanley Tucci won the year's Golden Globe for TV movie work, and director Frank Pierson collected the Directors Guild award for TV movies. It should have been nominated for Business Management awards too: it's a shockingly illuminating demonstration of how to really run a conference.

In the film, as in reality, the January 1942 "Wannsee Conference" lasted 85 minutes, during which 13 leaders of the German Reich's relevant government departments and military forces reviewed proposals for a solution to the Jewish "question". They had been summoned, in line with instructions from Hitler, by SS chief Reinhard Heydrich, who reported to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler. Heydrich's right-hand man and "recording secretary" for the secret meeting was Col Adolf Eichmann, who officially reported to another attendee, Heinrich Muller, a Gestapo officer who reported to Heydrich.

Other attendees controlled armies in the troubled "Occupied Eastern Territories", or administered German government ministries (foreign, justice, four-year planning, chancellery). Their common problem was deciding what to do about the impending incorporation into the Reich of millions of Jews from the east, particularly the 5 million in Russia.

With deliberate irony, the opening chit-chat between attendees tells us that the exquisite Wannsee lakeland mansion used for the conference (and now a museum) had belonged to a Jew. Later, further chit-chat repeats contemporary gossip about Eichmann's possible Jewish blood. The biggest irony not noted in the screenplay would cover the Reich's failure to realise that Poles, Slavs, Russians, Gypsies, gays and many other undesirables would also need to be eliminated. Heydrich obviously took his instruction to deal with the Jewish Question first, as the priority issue distracting Germany from its war efforts; he wisely kept the conferees' attention focused on it alone.

The way the dialogue, director and Branagh present Heydrich, it would appear that he was a remarkably shrewd, skilled commander. His death soon after resulted from the after-effects of an assassination attempt conducted by two specially trained Czechs. They were "dropped from a British bomber", as one of the end captions further notes, advising the post-war situation of each attendee. Eichmann, we are told, assumed responsibility for his dead superior's work, "regarding it as matter of honour", but one wonders what might have happened in the Reich if Heydrich had survived.

Only one of the 30 copies of the official conference minutes was discovered after WW2, in the 1950s; its contents were amplified during Israel's questioning of Eichmann following his capture in Argentina in 1960. The screenplay apparently invents additional conversational asides and character quirks, and incorporates crude political and racist jokes. The overall impact of the attendees' remarks and conclusions is astonishing.

Only a couple of the assembled leaders display any qualms about the plans to mass-murder millions of people with ruthless efficiency. Precise calculations of transportation loads, potential ghetto prisoners' work skills, death-gas strength and comparative costs (bullets being too expensive to waste) are outlined with matter-of-fact crispness in the SS folder handed to each attendee at the conference table.

More of them acknowledge the impossibility (and the waste of valuable military resources) of relying on German soldiers to carry out the desired daily death tolls (around 20,000). After fast-tracked overviews of sterilisation options and the legal tangle prompted by consideration of mixed-race German Jews, the meeting is railroaded by Heydrich into acceptance of gassing all Jews who aren't temporarily useful as a needed labour force (which will also build its own gas chambers and furnaces).

Heydrich, played with superb smiling menace by Branagh, is ruthlessly effective as the conference convener. He'd ordained that it last less than two hours and it did, partly due to well-organised stage management from Eichmann, given an almost admirable image of tense bureaucratic efficiency by Tucci. The rest of the cast (British) deliver cameos that rarely exhibit cliched characters, especially Colin Firth (the Interior Ministry's legalistic purist and creator of the anti-Jew "Nuremberg Laws") and David Threlfall (a morally distressed senior civil servant).

Short, sharp, shocking and finely edited, with drama in facial close-ups and character confrontations, this TV movie earns favourable comparison with any feature film set in a jury room or wherever talking heads discuss big issues. MBA academics would do well (and be pilloried for so doing) to screen it for their students as an exemplar of conference control techniques and how to create unanimity for a carefully defined common goal.