If at work, you receive such a task, your parents oppose you to do it, your colleagues all stand up to stop it, and public opinion is also putting pressure on you... Will you still stick with it?
This movie tells the story of a young man who competes with everyone: "The Labyrinth of Silence"
1958, Frankfurt Prosecutor's Office, Germany.
John is a prosecutor who has just joined the company.
Like all newcomers to the workplace, he is passionate about his work and always wants to do justice. However, the reality is very bone-chilling, and the cases to be dealt with every day are some traffic violations.
On this day, a reporter from the procuratorate came.
Holding a copy of the whistleblower material, he angrily shouted in the hall: A murderer has now run to the middle school to become a history teacher! We went to three police stations to report the case, but no one accepted it! Is there still a royal law?
The reporter asked the prosecutor at the scene for help, but strangely, the prosecutors all shook their heads...
Someone advised him: don't toss it, it's useless to engage in these...
The crowd dispersed, and a curious John picked up the material from the trash can.
He found that the records of the alleged teachers, from 1939 to 1945, were all blank.
He ran to the national archives to check, only to find out that this person had concealed his past experience when he was hired, he was a Nazi during World War II, and had been stationed at Auschwitz.
In the times we live in, anyone who knows a little about the history of World War II knows about concentration camps and the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis...
We all know that Germans respect history and are good at reflection.
After the war, Germany's two successive prime ministers knelt down in front of Jewish monuments and confessed their mistakes.
But in Germany in 1958, young Germans who grew up after the war knew very little about the history that had just passed less than 20 years.
Auschwitz, the maddening name, sounded to John, and the millions of young Germans of his time, as nothing more than a detention camp, a place where Jews temporarily lived.
Why is that?
Because in the whole of German society at that time, no one mentioned this.
Those who were Nazis do not say, and those who have been persecuted do not say.
When John was told that millions of people had been murdered at Auschwitz, he was shocked.
This young man, full of a sense of justice, decided to do something big: to thoroughly investigate Auschwitz and take all the former Nazis who had killed people in the concentration camps to court.
This "Labyrinth of Silence" was released in Germany in 2014, with a Douban score of 7.7.
The protagonist of the film is fictional, but the things he is involved in have real archetypes.
This was the great event in German history: the Frankfurt Trials.
In 1963, West Germany brought to court 19 SS members who had been stationed at Auschwitz to bring to justice the Nazis' crimes against the Holocaust during World War II.
For the trial, prosecutors and judges consulted more than 4,000 documents and mobilized 359 witnesses from 19 countries to testify, including 211 holocaust survivors.
This is a nation's judgment of its own past.
This lawsuit is an important turning point in German history.
The two-month trial was attended by more than 20,000 people, including many primary and secondary school students. This trial has educated an entire generation.
In 2017, the archives of the trial were inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Some netizens commented: Until a few years ago, Germany was still sending former Nazis to court, all of which stemmed from the Frankfurt trial. It is said that Germans are the most reflective people, but the conscience of the nation does not grow naturally, it requires the courage to discover the truth.
In people's minds, Germans are good at reflection, especially the repentance of the crimes of World War II, and this courage to face up to mistakes has been admired by the whole world...
But admitting one's mistakes is like uncovering a scar that has long since healed, it is a very painful process that requires great courage...
At the beginning of the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany, Germany remained silent about the crimes of the Nazis.
The situation was that almost everyone within the system of government had been a Nazi.
Many people take it for granted that the mistake was Made by Hitler alone, that everyone was merely obeying orders, not committing crimes, and that we could even be said to be victims.
Hitler is dead, the war is over, and this matter should be turned over.
Moreover, post-war Germany urgently needs development, people need to return to normal life, need confidence and strength, need to fight chicken blood...
At this time, it is inappropriate to talk about repentance and self-punishment.
As there is a line in the movie: The country needs frosting, so she doesn't care about the truth.
As a result, the whole country, from top to bottom, consciously or unconsciously covered up this period of history. No one has openly discussed, let alone sought justice for the victims.
The Jews who were once imprisoned at Auschwitz, what they experienced, young people do not know ...
There is a detail in the film where John asks a survivor: Do you remember the names of the victims?
The other party said: Hundreds of thousands of dead, there is a killing factory, where do I remember?
John asked, "What day was your wife and son killed?"
The other side said: There is no calendar in the concentration camp. Do you think the concentration camp is a riverside resort? You're so clueless...
After only 20 years, because of silence and oblivion, people's definition of "common sense" has been completely different...
Most of the Nazis, on the other hand, lived the life of an ordinary person after the war.
War criminals who fled to other countries can return to Germany to visit their relatives with great swagger, and the judicial organs know their whereabouts very well, but tacitly shut up...
John's investigation went badly and no one could understand why he did it...
Some people say that he is a hero and a showman, and some people say that he is trying to subvert the country...
Someone stopped him: it would be unprecedented for a country to prosecute his sons and daughters for their actions in the war, and it would be a slap in the face. Do you want all your sons to question their fathers about what he did in the war?
And John, too, is getting lost in this long investigation...
He found many Nazi soldiers, not inherently bad.
For example, there was a Nazi soldier who later became a baker.
John secretly visits him and finds him friendly and smiling.
He would give a lollipop to a passing child, distribute the freshly baked bread to passers-by, and invite him to taste it.
Such a man, you can hardly believe, he once beat the Jews to faint and poked each other in the eye ...
Thousands of such people.
They became dentists, lumberjacks, teachers, car repairmen...
There are 8,000 Nazi archives stationed at Auschwitz alone. This means that the largest trial in West German history will have 8,000 suspects.
John also discovers that his girlfriend's father, a Nazi, his most respected father, is also a Nazi...
It seems that everyone around them has been inextricably linked to the crimes of that year....
He was in great pain, and he felt guilty to all Germans, including himself.
But on the other hand, he is very contradictory.
Is it meaningful to take out the people who have already lived a normal life one by one, and even if they are punished, the victims will not be resurrected.
John said: "I always want to fight for justice, but I don't know what justice is now. If it was me who became a Nazi, I don't know what to do.
Until one day, he finally arrived at Auschwitz, the scene of the death of more than a million people.
He was told that the trial was not for punishment, but for the sake of this history to be known, for their stories not to be forgotten.
He finally understood that the stories of the victims were the most important:
Someone lost an eye in a concentration camp simply because the soldiers were not looked directly at the roll call.
Some people were pressed under the water and drowned, some people were beaten to death, some people were forced to spend the night in the ice and snow, frozen to death...
A mother flees with her child in her arms and is shot dead by both...
A 5-year-old boy had just arrived at the concentration camp and jumped out of a truck with an apple in his hand.
The Nazis walked up to him, grabbed him by the foot, and threw his head against the barracks wall... Then calmly picked up the apple and ate it...
A pair of twin girls, taken away by doctor-like men, were taken for human experiments.
The "doctor" injected them with various viruses, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria...
Without anesthesia, they were dissected, organs were taken from their bodies, holes were drilled in their heads, and they were sewn back to back...
The father of the twins, who escaped death, lived in self-blame all his life: Why didn't I protect them? Why are they dead and I'm still alive?
These scalp-tingling, heart-wrenching stories are the daily routines of Auschwitz...
At the Frankfurt Trials, the stories of 211 survivors were told and heard...
It evoked sympathy for the victims of Nazism among the younger generation in Germany, and since then, Germany has embarked on a collective reflection on World War II from top to bottom. And what happened to the Jews during World War II began to attract the world's attention...
It is hard to imagine that without this trial, this history would have passed over time, and the parties would have died one by one and been buried forever...
The director said: The greatest significance of the Frankfurt Trial is not a revenge reckoning, but to awaken a German society intoxicated by the prosperity of the post-war period.
Only by making this history public can this people full of lies get out of the labyrinth of silence.
And this movie tells us that all this did not happen naturally, but because a group of people with conscience and bottom lines are working hard to let the truth come to light.
A netizen said it well: Compared with the atrocities that have really occurred in history, the forgetting of history by future generations is even more frightening. We must be clear about the fact that our historical memory is never innate, and that our understanding of history is a process of continuous enrichment.
This process is not easy, it will puncture the illusion of beauty, take off the mask of hypocrisy, face the most despicable and dark side of human nature, it will make a country lose face... But only by correcting the mistakes of history can we have a bright future.
And the country that has the courage to experience all this can be regarded as truly powerful.
Backstage reply Silent Maze
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