As the mealy-mouthed disclaimer goes: this film review is not for all tastes. Herewith the real words will be said without tiptoeing around the subject like the bullshit you read in almost all of today’s publications.

Three years ago an awe-inspiring film made for TV and still played occasionally on HBO came and went with no fanfare and little or no discussion or critique. This is because it’s about the most forbidden of subjects: “The Final Solution”: the extermination of Jews in World War Two. The setting is 1942 in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin in a magnificent mansion which still stands today (it’s in the tour book, by gosh!). Here a clandestine meeting took place between 15 of Adolf Hitler’s top bananas – from Germany and each and every department head of surrounding occupied lands which was a tremendous hunk of real estate. Things were going badly in Russia, and America had just entered the war, so desperate measures were called for.

I use the term “forbidden subject” here not in the usual way. Certainly there’s not a week or month that passes that we don’t receive a new documentary or bio-pic about the Holocaust. But the viewpoint is always seamless (“… the horror …”). Nuances are not allowed to breathe: to try to get inside the Nazi psyche and what primordial instinct made them so passionately anti-Semitic. Any such examination is like trying to walk on eggshells. One wrong word placement is enough to send your name to eternal infamy – and no one will ever buy your products again!

The easy answer to “Why?” is that these Nazi chaps were “madmen” and inherently evil – which is probably true. But Conspiracy – itself a remake of a German language film of 1984 entitled The Wannsee Conference - goes much deeper by attempting to show what made them so “mad.” The movie has absolutely no action – so I guess we have to call it a “film.” (Run for your lives, American Pie fans.) All we see from start to finish is 15 bigwigs sitting around a long table debating methodology for mass death with great aplomb. A wink-wink, nudge-nudge joke is even heard from time to time. Though high ranking civilians are in attendance, this is a bad ass SS-generated ho-down organized to the finest detail by the young, soft-spoken lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, played with chilling understatement by Stanley Tucci.

But the real peacock of this monster bash is General Reinhardt Heydrich, aka the Butcher of Prague, played by the finest actor in the “English” language, Kenneth Branagh – with his very own blonde hair and blue eyes. And wait’ll you get a load of this character! Of the 15 sitting around the table who count are these two and two others: Stuckart (Colin Firth) of the Interior Ministry who actually wrote the Nuremburg laws of 1935 (get that great German pronunciation down: “Schtookart”). Then down table a ways is Herr Von Doctor Kritzinger, Director of the Chancellery. Shall we say the Fuhrer’s highest ranking bureaucrat? So you might say it’s a WW-SS tag-team match between the two bad nazi’s and the two good Nazis – if I might dare to use this oxymoron.

Before his ass hits the chair, the Butcher of Prague cuts right to the chase: “We have a storage problem in Germany with these Jews. A Jew-free society and a Jew-free economy have been eliminated from national life. But now the Jew must be physically eradicated. First a vigorous policy of immigration from our living space was tried – but who would take them? Every boarder charged outrageously per head – INCLUDING AMERICA.”

Kritzinger, down table, immediately calls for a “clarification” and is cut dead by the bright and breezy Mr. Personality, Heydrich. What he’ll be made to understand before this meeting is over is that THIS MEETING IS NOT HAPPENING … that despite his closeness to “Mein Fuhrer,” he is out of the loop … and that this secret is so big that Hitler must claim no knowledge of the Final Solution. More expressive than the dictionary definition, Conspiracy is dirty work done in Nixonian style – like the Watergate break-in – using the extreme lower case example of this type of protocol. Supreme watchdog of law, Stuckart is likewise muzzled, even though he and Kritzinger are the only ones aware of the bureaucratic train wreck to follow such a scheme. Building on the rassling match imagery used above, this match is fixed. But with due respect for the decent and brilliant Stuckart, General Heydrich suffers him one final supplication (paraphrased): “It’s not that I’m against a Jew-free world, but I know that the Jew is not a sub-species goblin, but that they are sublimely clever, even intelligent as well as arrogant, self-obsessed and calculating. And finally (yes), they reject the Christ. Deal with this reality of the Jew and the world will applaud us.” Thus Schpock Herr von Stuckart.

But now to business.

First question: who’s a Jew? (see Howard Stern’s popular game show, or Mel Brooks’ 600 dollars-a-pop Broadway show, The Producers). Mixed-blood marriages? Half-Jews? Second degree Jews … genetic Jews …?

Next, the options: sterilization. We can call it medical re-socialization. Why not, they’ve already had their cocks clipped. Shooting? Nah, it uses up too many bullets.

Next; word meaning: “elimination, evacuation, etc. etc.”

Then there’s “death.” Heydrich: “Dead men don’t hump. Dead women don’t get pregnant” (what a kidder).

But now it’s get-serious time. Herr von Eichmann will read us the plan – “The Final Solution” – and your humble reviewer wonders how many of us know the particulars? Truckloads of Jews crowded into large commercial gas-fed ovens – made to look like commercial showers; and afterwards, no residue or clean-up to speak of. These are the new improved facilities – in the test market for more years than anyone at the table could imagine. Speed is of the essence (the “assembly line method,” taught to us by the clever Americans). 2,500 dead Jews in an hour – which is 60,000 a day – which is 21 million a year. Bingo! But does this include the five million Russian Jews soon to be subdued? Answer: the Russian doesn’t care who’s in charge as long as he has a bottle of vodka to suck and some manner of domestic animal to fuck.

General Heydrich’s last words on the subject is that any bureaucrat with his nose in a rule book and his hand on his cock will slow down the whole process – as he picks up a choice piece of vinyl, Shubert’s Quintet in C Major. “The adagio section will tear your heart out,” he opines as these strains play over the last scene and the Wannsee 15 each go their own way to a proverbial fate worse than death.

As for Herr von Eichmann, who would die 30 years later in the glass booth in Israel, says he: “I could never understand the passion for Schubert and his sentimental Viennese shit.”