It is cold in the Gallus house on this October day. And it should get even colder. “We’ll see each other again in a good four hours, if you like,” says director Rolf Peter (“RP”) Kahl, and then his film “The Investigation” actually runs for four hours in the original version, with a break. The film takes place where the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which determines the plot, actually took place. “Oh, we’re sitting on the wrong side,” says a visitor when she realizes that she is sitting where the defendants once sat, to the right of the stage, in front of the large glass front. The jury sat on the stage, a microphone stood in the middle of the aisle, the public prosecutor sat on the left, and the press in the gallery.
This is how Gerhard Wiese previously described it in an interview with Kahl. The now 96-year-old former public prosecutor Wiese was one of three prosecutors in the trial. At that time he was a young man, unencumbered, who had only been deployed as an anti-aircraft assistant during the war, and today he is a contemporary witness who reports on his experiences in universities and schools.
At the beginning of the trial, the defendants were 21 SS men and a so-called prisoner functionary. During the trial, 360 witnesses testified, 211 of whom were Auschwitz survivors. Some reported their experiences in the extermination camp for the first time in their lives.
The film that will be shown on this day in the House of the Trial is based on the play by Peter Weiss, which premiered shortly after the end of the trial in several theaters in East and West Germany – and the film is (almost) completely true to the text is played back. The witness statements are summarized in it.
Denial in the dock
At the time, the proceedings were officially called “Criminal case against Robert Mulka and others, case number 4 Ks 2/63”. Mulka, that was the camp commandant’s former adjutant. And to this day, you can still see how upset Wiese was at the cold arrogance with which Mulka denied having noticed anything in the camp. You can also hear over and over again from numerous other defendants in the film: “I don’t remember,” “I didn’t know anything about that,” “Other people were responsible for that,” “Once I was forced to do it,” “It was my duty.” Only in one of the defendants can you still notice the joy with which he fulfilled this duty; in all the others you can feel it despite the eternal denial.
“The actor who played the prosecutor told me during filming that he would sometimes have liked to get up to grab and shake the defendants,” reports director Kahl. The shivering audience in the Gallus House must have felt the same way. Getting up and shaking the defendants would be something.
But the question of how the educational value of the process can be transferred to today also awaits an answer. Because anti-Semitism still exists everywhere, and the author Weiss’ thesis that Auschwitz was first about exploiting people in a capitalist sense is rightly contradicted by an insert at the end. The first question to the director from the thin audience at the end of the film refers to exactly this.
How devils become of people
At the beginning, Kahl expressly encouraged people to leave the film if the demands of listening and watching became too great; The division into eleven chapters (“cantos”) makes it easy to return to the action at any time. But not everyone wants to return to Haus Gallus that day. For some it will have been too much overall, for others too cold, in every respect: “The incompetent / the slow in spirit / the mild / the disturbed and impractical / the mourning and the / who felt sorry for themselves / were trampled,” says one witness.
Because the system made devils out of people in Auschwitz, it is clear that there was at least a way out for the accused, for example to serve at the front. Prosecutor Joachim Kügler, a colleague of Wiese, reported Mulka for insults because he had described him as a “member of a uniformed murder squad”. But that’s how it was, and that’s why the quote can also be found in the film. “The film shows us that democracy, freedom, humanism and compassion are not something that comes to people on their own,” says Kahl.
And this is also true: “Whoever forgets the past will experience it again,” is what one of the witnesses, an Auschwitz survivor, told Hessischer Rundfunk during the ongoing trial. As if by chance, it was the visitors who ended up staying on the “right” side of Haus Gallus until the end.
