![]() When he approaches his pastor, he is advised to be quiet when he tries to get the Catholic bishop to take his information to the Vatican, he is rudely dismissed someone wearing an SS uniform has little credibility. Gerstein is presented as a serious Protestant able to do nothing but cooperate with the program while hoping to slow down the pace of the killing and try to inform the outside world of what is going on. The movies most powerful moment shows the reaction on Gersteins face after he is brought to a concentration camp and looks through a peephole at the Jews being gassed inside. A historical person, Gerstein was recruited by a sinister SS official, the Doctor (Ulrich Mühe) to use his chemical expertise in carrying out the final solution. The central character of ∺men is not Pius XII, who is only a dim background figure in the scenes in which he appears, but Kurt Gerstein (Ulrich Tukur), an expert on the sterilization of water. ![]() What emerges is a film worth seeing, yet with surprisingly little dramatic bite. The American ambassador, for example, is shown as considering any effort to rescue the Jews a distraction from the prosecution of the war. An adaptation of Rolf Hochhuths play, The Deputy, which caused an international uproar when it appeared in 1963, ∺men raises lots of still important questions, but somewhat softens the popes failure by seeing it as part of a wider indifference to the Holocaust by those who knew what was going on. Costa-Gavras, a French filmmaker who made his reputation by infusing political content with high excitement (Z, State of Siege), uses his new movie, Amen, to explore the failure of Pope Pius XII to protest Hitlers extermination of the Jews during World War II.
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