Kenneth Branagh credited as playing...
Heydrich
- Müller: Perhaps the judge has a special love for them?
- Klopfer: [mutters appreciatively] Yes, yes a special love for them... very good...
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: For whom? For Jews? Wonderful, you don't have my credentials. Forgive me, from your uniform I can infer that you're shallow, ignorant and naive about the Jews. Your line, what the party rants on about is how inferior they are, some-some-some sub-species, and I keep saying how wrong that is! They are sublimely clever. And they are intelligent as well. My indictments to that race are stronger and heavier because they are real, not uneducated ideology. They are arrogant and self-obsessed and calculating and reject the Christ and I will not have them pollute German blood!
- General Reinhard Heydrich: [tries to calm Stuckart down] Please, Doctor...
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: He doesn't understand! And neither do his people. Deal with the reality of the Jew and the world will applaud us. Treat them as imaginary phantoms, evil in human fantasies, and the world would have justified contempt for us! To kill them casually without regard for the law martyrs them, which will be their victory! Sterilization recognizes them as a part of our species but prevents them from being a part of our race. They'll disappear soon enough. And we will have acted in defense of our race and of our species and by the law! This fellow mentioned the law for the protection of German blood, *I wrote that law*! When you have my credentials then we'll talk about who loves the Jews and who hates them. Pigs don't know how to hate. I know, too, that when it comes to the half-mixed, that to kill them abandons that half of their blood which is German.
- Klopfer: I'll remember you.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: You should. I'm very well known.
- Heydrich: [to Lange] Politics is a nasty game. I think soldiering requires the discipline to do the unthinkable and politics requires the skill to get someone else to do the unthinkable for you.
- Lange: I have the real feeling I "evacuated" 30,000 Jews already, by shooting them, at Riga. Is what I did "evacuation"? When they fell, were they "evacuated"? There are another 20,000, at least, waiting for similar "evacuation". - I just think it is helpful to know what words mean... with all respect.
- [Kritzinger bangs the table in applause]
- Adolf Eichmann: If I might, I think it's unnecessary to burden the record...
- Heydrich: Yes! In my personal opinion, they are evacuated.
- Kritzinger: Explain!
- Heydrich: I have just done so.
- Kritzinger: That is not - no, that is contrary to what the Chancellery has been told. I have directly been assured - I have - that - purge the Jews, yes, but to annihilate them - that we have undertaken to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe - that possibility has personally been denied, to me, by the Führer!
- Heydrich: And it will continue to be.
- Müller: [after the meeting, by the fireplace] What was the story you were going to tell me?
- Heydrich: Story?
- Müller: Kritzinger.
- Heydrich: Yes, he told me a story about a man he'd known all his life, a boyhood friend. This man hated his father. Loved his mother fiercely. The mother was devoted to him but the father used to beat him, demeaned him, disinherited him. Anyway, this boy grew to manhood and was still in his thirties when the mother died, this mother who had nurtured and protected him. She died. The man stood as they lowered her casket and tried to cry but no tears came. The man's father lived to a very extended old age, withered away and died when the son was in his fifties, I think, and at the father's funeral, much to his son's surprise, he could not control his tears. He was wailing, sobbing. He was apparently inconsolable. Lost, even. That was the story Krtizinger told me.
- Adolf Eichmann: I don't understand.
- Heydrich: No?
- [Eichmann shakes his head]
- Heydrich: The man had been driven his whole life by hatred of his father. When the mother died, that was a loss, When the father died, the hate had lost his object, then the man's life was empty. Over.
- Adolf Eichmann: Interesting.
- Heydrich: That was Kritzinger's warning.
- Adolf Eichmann: What? That we should not hate the Israelites?
- Heydrich: No, that it should not so fill our lives; that when they are gone we have nothing left to live for. So says the story.
- [Eichmann and Muller make no reply, then Heydrich closes the monologue by unpretentiously saying]
- Heydrich: I will not miss them.
- Heydrich: We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for them to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate the race. That's farcical. Dead men don't hump, dead women don't get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way.
- Adolf Eichmann: Now, last summer Reichsführer Himmler asked me to visit a camp up in Upper Silesia, called Auschwitz, which is very well isolated, and close to significant rail access. And we are turning that camp into a major center, solid structures (and here's where your Jewish labor comes into play, Herr Neumann, the Jews haul the bricks and they build the buildings themselves). And when the structures are complete, we expect to be able to process 2500... an hour. Not a day, an hour.
- Heydrich: And those numbers look a lot better.
- Luther: 2500 an hour?
- Hofmann: 2500?
- Adolf Eichmann: At 24 hours a day, that is 60,000.
- Kritzinger: 60,000 each day...
- Adolf Eichmann: That's 21,900,000 Jews a year, if ever there were that many.
- Heydrich: And we are also constructing the means of disposal, which will obviously depend upon the process of combustion.
- Adolf Eichmann: Yes, it'll be industrial in nature: large commercial gas-fed ovens, no residue to speak of.
- Müller: 60,000 Jews every day go up in smoke.
- Heydrich: We can achieve that. Imagine.
- Heydrich: Emigration. The policy that will take the place of emigration, and we have collected enough practical experience to do it well, is evacuation.
- Hofmann: Which differs from emigration in what way? Evacuation to where?
- Heydrich: Let us postpone that question for a while.
- Klopfer: To hell, one hopes.
- Lange: Many already have.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Do they even have a hell?
- Heydrich: They do now. We provide it.
- Heydrich: [the meeting is near a close, and Heydrich is listening to everyone's decision] Do we have any disputes left to face here either with my authority or with that we have agreed? General?
- Müller: Let us astonish Charles Darwin.
- Klopfer: [raises glass] I second the motion. It is our most important war.
- Heydrich: Sir?
- Kritzinger: We are discussing the inevitable and bringing it about in the most practical way under one command. I have no dispute with that, I understand the realities. And indeed, count on my support.
- Hofmann: With the understanding that consideration will be given to my proposal, yes. Proceed.
- Dr. Georg Leibbrandt: I defer to the SS.
- Dr. Alfred Meyer: If you are to do it, then force-feed it. Speed it along. Our situation, such as in Warsaw, is difficult, edging towards disastrous. Thank you.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: ...Oh, yes. What can I say? My enthusiasm is boundless.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Obviously.
- Heydrich: Sorry?
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I trust my enthusiasm is clear, is apparent. Yes!
- Heydrich: Neumann?
- Erich Neumann: I would like to know that adequate labor will still be available...
- Heydrich: On a case-by-case basis. Major Lange?
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I'm sorry, why can't you shoot them?
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: Didn't you just hear him? It is the worst thing for our soldiers to be doing. They are women, they are children. And soldiers have a sense of honor, sir.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: There's plenty of honor in following orders.
- Lange: Sir, would you care to join my group?
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: Enthusiastically!
- Heydrich: No.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I will.
- Heydrich: No, you will not. 11 million, even half that number, executed in small batches, would be asinine to undertake for the reasons Dr. Meyer mentioned. Inefficient use of time, manpower, bullets. No. As Major Lange will learn, gas if much more efficient, and less public.
- Undersecretary Martin Luther: I think I heard some of what I wrote in what you said.
- General Reinhard Heydrich: I think not.
- Heydrich: If there are indeed 'decent Jews' then before they are decent, and indeed after, they are Jews. No, first-degree exempted will be sterilized. No matter children, and eventually no more mixed blood, once and for all. It is important to know what words mean, but it is important to remember that a thousand years from now, no matter who holds the power, history will be written in those words.
- Lange: [as Heydrich continues to get a final word from everyone around the table] Yes.
- Dr. Joseph Bühler: I would like to urge that speed that Dr. Meyer asked of you. The Poles are not as disciplined a population as we Germans. And I will report our will of the group to the Governor General.
- Heydrich: He will understand that I'm relieving him of a burden. Colonel?
- SS.Col. Eberhard 'Karl' Schöngarth: I thoroughly approve and I'm anxious to start. I look forward to working with your office, and yours, Colonel.
- Dr. Roland Freisler: The sooner, the better.
- Heydrich: Nietzsche advises the secret to enjoying life is to live dangerously.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: He enjoyed it so much he went mad.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: I find the plan unworkable. I find the plan personally insulting. I have given years to codifying the laws regarding interracial marriage. Now I'm presented with this clumsy, forgive me, unworkable structure. My work, these laws, any legal code worthy of the name, restricts the enforcers of law as well as its subjects. There are some things you cannot do.
- Heydrich: As you see it.
- Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart: What I see is all I have to contribute here.
- Kritzinger: No, that is not, that is contrary to what the Chancellory has been told! I have been told, I have... Purge the Jews, yes. But,to annihilate them... That we have undertaken to systematically annihilate all the Jews of Europe? No, that possibility has personally been denied, to me, by the Führer!
- Heydrich: And it will continue to be.
- Kritzinger: Yes, I understand. Yes. He will continue to deny it.
- Heydrich: My apologies. Do you accept my apologies?
- Kritzinger: Of course.
- [opening the conference]
- Heydrich: So to begin. We have a storage problem in Germany, with these Jews.