It is a brisk, cloudy winter’s day on 20 January 1942. German politicians and functionaries from the SS and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party enter a mansion on the Wannsee Lake wearing almost identical uniforms. The reason for their meeting is to discuss what the Nazis called “the final solution to the Jewish question”. The aim of these men is to “cleanse” Europe from west to east in order to “free up living space” for Germans. Talk about pure-blooded Germans, dividing their heredity into quarters and even sixteenths, mingles with informal breaks for cigarettes and cakes. These are hours spent on the bureaucracy of destruction that changed the fate of millions of Jews.

80 years after the conference, genocide is still being carried out in different parts of the world – including right here, in our vicinity. This docudrama reconstructs the events at Wannsee and although subtle in its visual restraint, it is all the more chillingly cold and cynical in relaying the dialogues, comments, and discussions of the decision-makers, making death sentences seem as mundane as picking a hair off a Hugo Boss jacket. Although this conference has become rich material for many films, including the German film Hitler’s Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference (1984) and the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox (2020), the acting in this version of what happened is convincing with its cold-bloodedness and the admirable historical detail in portraying “’the banality of evil”, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase.