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Rating: 1958, we are talking about post-war, in Germany. Everything is fine, and we are a great nation, "the most beautiful country to live in" as the children sing in schools. Thanks to the Adenauer government, everything is forgotten, and the Nazis are reintegrated into their positions as public officials. The public prefers not to remember, and the new generations are chosen not to know.
What is said to have happened in the extermination camps is just a fabrication by those who won the war, and that's normal.
In this scenario, a young lawyer working at the Frankfurt prosecutor's office encounters a journalist trying to expose former Nazis who are quietly holding jobs, even teaching in schools (!)
This will start the young prosecutor's commitment, who little by little will discover that beneath the thin carpet lowered by political leaders and public opinion lies a monster of cyclopean and terrifying proportions, absolutely unimaginable. He will have to fight with colleagues, superiors, the entire political organization, and the machinery that had decided to silence everything.
With the help of a few (the chief prosecutor foremost), he will uncover and listen to the few Auschwitz survivors, and after repeated chases of the phantasmagorical and sadly famous Josef Mengele and exhausting searches in the SS archives guarded by the American army stationed in Germany, he will gradually manage to unveil the evidence, obtain testimonies, collect names and dates, and discover that the justice deemed accomplished with the 150 defendants of Nuremberg is actually just a grain of sand compared to even the 8,000 soldiers and officers who over the years served in the Auschwitz camp and who saw, knew, and were complicit or guilty of tens of thousands of deaths. He will have to unwillingly accept that Nazism indiscriminately engulfed everyone, from the father he venerates as a hero of Justice, to the friend in whom he places blind trust, to the father of the girl he loves.
In the end, the awareness destroys him, but despite everything and everyone, he will succeed in instituting the trial that will condemn 22 criminals guilty of not simply "following orders" but of having deliberately and knowingly killed civilian prisoners. This will lead Germany to accept its history and to forever bear the weight of its choices.
The film, in my opinion, is very well structured, you feel the atmosphere, you relive the mood of the people and the immovable will of the politics to bury the very recent past of the country. The story is inspired by real events; the chief prosecutor is real, the journalist is real, while the protagonist is actually a “collage” of three young lawyers who worked on establishing the trial that truly led Germany to "discover" the incredibly silenced Holocaust and to accept its historical weight. There are no tear-jerking scenes or any easy presentation of raw images, but just the attempt, which I consider very successful, to explain the strong political will of the time to bury and the difficult battle to ensure the truth was finally made aware by an entire nation.
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