Das radikal Böse (2013)

“The Radical Evil” opens with a quotation from Primo Levi: “There are monsters, but they are too few to be truly dangerous. The dangerous ones are ordinary people.” In a collage of interviews with scholars, reenacted scenes from the perpetrators’ everyday lives, present-day footage of the locations, and historical images accompanied by voice-overs of quotations from letters, diaries, and court records, the film explores why so many “ordinary young men” in German Einsatzgruppen became perpetrators. As Christopher Browning did in *Ordinary Men*, Ruzowitzky focuses on the perpetrators of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who shot at least 38,000 Jewish men, women, and children in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1943 as part of Operation Barbarossa. He also intersperses quotations from other perpetrators among the voice-over quotations without identifying them. Overall, about a third—that is, two of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust—were killed in this way. Extras were cast as the perpetrators. The film does not reenact the killings themselves and uses original photographs and film footage only “sparingly”—“trusting in the old film principle that something is always most powerful when it takes shape in the viewer’s mind.” However, Ruzowitzky shows the documents in which the mass murder was recorded bureaucratically and meticulously, and has some of the witnesses who are still alive recount the events. Any perpetrators who might still be alive were not interviewed; in Ruzowitzky’s view, they would not speak as openly about events so long ago as they did in the transcripts or in their letters and diaries at the time. He did not interview survivors either, since there are virtually none, as hardly anyone escaped the Einsatzgruppen. “The Radical Evil” is analyzed by six scholars and other experts, including Benjamin Ferencz, born in 1920, who was the prosecutor at the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947; historian Christopher Browning; Catholic priest Patrick Desbois; psychiatrist Robert Lifton; and military psychologist Dave Grossman. Several psychological experiments, including the Milgram experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, and Asch’s conformity experiment, were reenacted for the film, and interviews were conducted with the researchers. Social-psychological tests document peer pressure, hierarchical order, and psychological distancing through the dehumanization of the victims as mechanisms that promote violence, which the Nazi regime exploited on the basis of its extermination propaganda against Jews. Heinrich Himmler’s notorious Posen speech on the “extermination of the Jewish people” is also quoted in voice-over. The murders became routine, rewarded with recognition.