Remorse above all in a blindfolded court of justice

Rating: 10/10 (17 December 2011)

This film is in many ways a drama that concerns us all because we produced the situation that prevailed after the victory/defeat of 1945.
All Germans are responsible either because they voted for Hitler or because they were not able to unify against Hitler, thus enabling him to seize power with one third of the votes. Then you had the simple workers, employees and farmers who were hanged when trying to be trade-unionists, or deported. Everyone knew what it meant, saw the crimes and smelled the smoke.
Then you had the middle and upper middle class, the university professors and intellectuals, the doctors and surgeons, the lawyers and judges who all decided that justice was the implementation of the law of the moment, hence of Hitler's law, and then in 1945 of the law imposed by the US or the USSR. The father and mother of the main male character are such people.
Then you had those who came of age before the end of the war and got into it, including into the SS, like Günther Grass. They took part in the atrocities, including Auschwitz, which is the case of the main female character. The liaison between the two main characters does not change one iota to that fact.
Justice in that case cannot be only the retribution of a crime. It has to make sure the criminals they convict and sentence are really the authors of the acts that are brought against them. And in that case it is not true and the main male hero who is a law student when the trial takes place does not provide justice with what he knows, and that is a crime too.
Three hundred people were burnt to death in a church whose doors had been locked and were not unlocked under the responsibility of six female SS. The problem for the court is to find out who is the leader of these six SS women. They satisfy themselves with the fact that the main female character acknowledges she wrote the report that was signed by the six women; that the five other women accuse this one to be the author. But they do not check if this woman can write. They assume she can. But she can't. The real leader of the six, the one who wrote the report is one of the five other women who was very lightly sentenced.
But the main male character, and his law professor, does not do what he should have done: tell the court what he knew, that she was illiterate and that the sentence was a miscarriage of justice. Then later he will entertain a relation with her via mail only and cassettes since she could not read or write, without seeing that it was cruel since that amounted to reminding her of what must have been her only happy moment in her life, that three or four month long affair with him. And never, even after her suicide in prison before leaving, will he tell.
That's not justice, that's vengeance and what's more blind or blinded vengeance. Justice was blindfolded on that occasion. The judges should have made sure but they assumed that one of Hitler's achievements, literacy for all, was true, in other words they did not do their job properly.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU