Radmann is determined to bring Schulz to justice, but finds his efforts frustrated because of the many former Nazis who are serving in government and looking out for one another. The weight of this burden for him becomes all too real.In 1958, Johann Radmann is a young and idealistic public prosecutor who takes an interest in the case of Charles Schulz, a former Auschwitz extermination camp commander who is now teaching at a school in Frankfurt am Main. The further Radmann digs, the more he begins to understand that almost everyone is, somehow, culpable. Most of the people Radmann encounters are either naive as to what happened within their country or full of rage at Radmann’s insistence on not letting the past stay buried. Despite this, Labyrinth of Lies is still fascinating when investigating how a post-Nazi Germany so quickly, and efficiently, tried to forget its own past. In fact, Labyrinth of Lies hits every obvious note, from a moment of success after a montage of months of research, to the watering down of the described incidents for easier consumption, to Radmann’s drunk outrage at the information he’s been given, to, even, an “AHA” moment that helps Radmann crack his cases.

His relationship with his girlfriend Marlene (Friederike Becht) goes absolutely nowhere, sufficing only to demonstrate that innocence and true love can still arise so recently after such atrocities. He’s told horrible truths-which are at this point mostly well-known crimes-that come off like repeated, expositional details, and the few elements we get of Radmann’s personal life feel completely irrelevant to the film’s overall story that is being told. Radmann is an amalgam of three historical prosecutors, yet despite that, he’s little more than a bland receptacle for pertinent information. The further Radmann explores the depths of horror that occurred decades before, the more he faces a Germany that will do anything to move beyond its awful past, in the process discovering just how closely the Nazi party touches his own life and those of his loved ones. When journalist Thomas Gnielka (Andre Szymanski) brings to Radmann’s attention a former Nazi teaching at a nearby school, free and unpunished, Radmann takes it upon himself to find justice for those people whose lives this teacher potentially had a hand in destroying. Johann Radmann ( Inglourious Basterds’ Alexander Fehling) is a public prosecutor, bored with the usual traffic cases he’s assigned. Labyrinth of Lies sheds light on this lesser known series of trials, but can’t help but fall into many of the same cliché traps that similar historical fictions often do.

Nearly 20 years after the Nuremberg trials, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963-1965) marked the first time Germans prosecuted fellow Germans for their involvement with the Nazi party during World War II.

Labyrinth of lies movie review