After the Truth (original title Nichts als die Wahrheit) is as close as it gets to playing Devil’s advocate without having the defendant literally be Satan. Then again, Josef Mengele was worse than the Devil himself, because the Devil’s not real.
The main character is not the only one playing this dangerous game. Right or wrong, agree or disagree, the filmmakers had to defend their protagonist’s choices, and make the audience feel like we might hypothetically do likewise given the same circumstances.
This is a situation where you need to enclose the viewers within a grey area. You hope we won’t say, ‘yes, I would do the same thing,’ but at the same time you don’t want us going, ‘no, I would never do that’ either. The answer you’re looking to elicit is, ‘I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were in that guy’s position’ — or, better yet, ‘thank God I’m not in that dude’s shoes!’
On top of that, you can’t sustain a two-hour film wherein Mengele (Götz George) plays a prominent role without making his character somewhat accessible.
If portrayed as a monster, what does that say of his defense lawyer, Peter Rohm (Kai Wiesinger), who also happens to be the hero — and that he’s a flawed hero won’t get you too far in this context; this isn’t Primal Fear, where the depths of Ed Norton’s iniquity were every bit as shocking to Richard Gere as to the audience.
Now, you don’t have to — nay, you can’t make Mengele the least bit likeable; there’s no possible sympathy for this Devil (which doesn’t stop the movie from trying, for instance revealing that he has bone cancer). That, however, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make him intriguing. I’m reminded of Dorian Gray’s response to Lord Henry regarding the “poisonous book” Dorian borrowed from the latter: “I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”
This Mengele is an openly unrepentant, self-deluded, narcissistic sociopath who resurfaces after decades in hiding not to be proven innocent but to be proven right (contrast Judgment at Nuremberg’s Ernst Janning who, being a fictional, lower-level Nazi, came with much less baggage than a Mengele, thus opening the door for an understated, ambiguous, let’s-give-him-the-benefit-of-the-doubt Burt Lancaster performance. Incidentally, Stanley Kramer’s epic also benefitted from the wise decision of being told from Spencer Tracy’s impartial perspective).
The only possible way that we could get behind Peter representing him is if the job were forced upon him — and he makes the obvious yet valid point: technically speaking, everybody has a right to counsel, and if Peter didn’t take Mengele’s case, someone else would (and, by the same token, the movie would be about that someone else).
Alas, Peter’s reason to represent Mengele is selfish and hypocritical. He has spent years researching for a book on Mengele, and Mengele has promised him the lowdown straight from the horse’s mouth. One the one hand, Peter claims to be after the truth; on the other, his strategy in court consists mostly of twisting the facts plus a lot of two-wrongs-make-a-right rhetoric.
There are two roads that the filmmakers could have taken. The first would be to have Mengele reappear, be apprehended, tried, and imprisoned without the courtroom drama bullshit. Then introduce Peter as an author/journalist/investigator whom for whatever reason is the only one Mengele will confide in. Keep in mind that, as a means of gaining insight into the mind of a notorious murderer, this approach often yields unsatisfactory results (moreover, as far as we can see Mengele never really fulfills his end of the agreement).
The more advisable way to go would have been to turn Peter into a Faustian figure; an Amoral Attorney who will eventually see the light. Writers Johannes W. Betz, Hellmut Fulss, and Christopher Riley and director Roland Suso Richter certainly got the first part right.
Peter ultimately backpedals, but he when he does, he’s not so much having an epiphany as he’s opportunistically jumping ship. It’s only until his closing statement that Peter figures out that Mengele is guilty and calls for a lifetime sentence.
This comes after Peter has, until almost the very end, defended Mengele to the best (or should that be ‘worst’?) of his abilities — arguing that Mengele sending inmates to the Auschwitz gas chambers was a form of euthanasia, and deflecting responsibility for the barbaric “experiments” Mengele performed on twins (at his lowest, Peter implies that a testifying Holocaust survivor and his bother should be grateful that Mengele only “crippled” them) —, as well as after the prosecutor has already asked for a lifetime sentence (unlike Peter, the prosecutor rightly points out that Mengele would still be getting off easy). Too little, too late.
Rather than admitting the error of his ways, Peter appears to be hedging his bets. And yet, this character, both a horrible lawyer and a terrible human being, this spineless bastard who doesn’t even have the courage of his lack of convictions, is last shown walking away with is head held up high, as if at any point whatsoever he had done the right thing.
All things considered, After the Truth is a thought(less) experiment. Neither do we learn anything new about Mengele (George, not old enough for the role, wears his conspicuous makeup like a literal mask that’s also a figurative one, since the fictional Mengele remains the unaccountable icon of evil that his real-life counterpart has always been), nor does the protagonist learn anything about himself.
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