Das Zeugenhaus (2014)

In the autumn of 1945, the Americans set up a guest house in a confiscated villa in Nuremberg. Former Nazi officials are accommodated there alongside concentration-camp survivors and anti-fascists. They are all waiting to give evidence or be questioned at the International Military Tribunal as part of the Nuremberg Trials, which will continue for months. For this reason, Countess Belavar, who is from Hungary, is brought to the Americans’ headquarters. Fleeing communist persecutors who are only too eager to wipe out all aristocrats, she has no idea what they want from her. At first, she continues to fear for her life, but then learns that she is to act as hostess at the witness house, ensuring a pleasant atmosphere for its guests, who include perpetrators, victims, and people who went along with the Nazi regime. However, the Countess is required to report on the events and conversations in the house. She refuses, because her upbringing forbids it. The Countess performs her new role very professionally and quickly notices the tensions among the guests. They include Elise Krollmann, the actual owner of the house, and her teenage son Werner; Major General Erwin Lahousen of the German Wehrmacht; Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official Reich photographer and friend, and his daughter Henriette, the wife of Baldur von Schirach, one of the trial’s principal defendants. Heinrich Hoffmann considers himself a member of the prosecution team, since he is supposed to examine photographs that may be used in the trial. During his stay, he also develops a small black market in the house. Other residents include Gisela Limberger, an arrogant and cynical woman from Austria who was Hermann Göring’s private secretary; Mr. Gärtner, whom everyone takes to be a former concentration-camp commandant; and Heinrich Ross, who keeps insisting that he does not know what he is doing there—that he has been mistaken for his SS brother, Wilhelm Ross. He is horrified and fears for his life. The Nazi-loyal Hoffmann and Limberger, meanwhile, suspect Gärtner of trying to buy his freedom by giving evidence against other Nazi criminals, and everyone shuns him. Rudolf Diels and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier arrive at the witness house as its last guests. She is supposedly there to help with translation at the trial. Both seem to be keeping a particular secret. Rudolf Diels is housed alone in a room, without contact with the other residents. He tells the Countess that he was an accomplice in the July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler. It later emerges that he was the founder of the Gestapo. When word gets around the house that he is also a guest, resentment arises, since Hoffmann considers him a traitor. Only Gisela Limberger hopes to find an ally in him, and she smuggles a letter out of the house for him. As a result, Diels is soon able to leave the witness house; as a practiced intriguer and turncoat, he has managed to win over the US military as well. While all the guests at the witness house wait to find out whether and when they will finally be called to testify at the Nuremberg Trial, Major General Erwin Lahousen regularly attends the proceedings. He is visibly suffering from the past and what he experienced. Nightmares lead him to try to end his life, but he fails. When the guests learn that he has given a detailed account at the trial of Hitler’s crimes, making clear that the Wehrmacht committed serious war crimes and that the army’s leadership knew all about them, tensions in the house erupt for the first time. Matters worsen when Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier finally testifies at the trial. She was imprisoned at Auschwitz concentration camp and describes the atrocities she personally witnessed there. When she returns to her quarters, Hoffmann refuses to believe her. He remains convinced that “his” Hitler was, deep down, a good man. But Gärtner, who has until then been so quiet and shunned by everyone, manages to make him understand that Hoffmann knew perfectly well that concentration camps existed and had even taken photographs there: Gärtner himself saw him as a prisoner at Mauthausen concentration camp. Gärtner is still traumatized by what he experienced and ashamed to have survived when so many others died. Hoffmann’s image of his “Führer” continues to crumble, and he tries to hang himself, but his attempt fails because of his large build. Heinrich Ross manages to convince the court of his innocence. Just before he is allowed to leave the witness house and go home, overjoyed, Heinrich Hoffmann tells him that he has identified him unmistakably as Wilhelm Ross from a photograph. Knowing this, he lets him go. After 218 days of hearings, the Nuremberg Trial comes to an end. The major war criminals are convicted. Henriette von Schirach’s husband is sentenced to 20 years in prison. Her father, however, is handed over to the Bavarian criminal police for his months-long black-market dealings.