Conspiracy is a 2001 made-for-television drama film that dramatises the 1942 Wannsee Conference. Using the authentic script taken from the only surviving transcript recorded during the meeting, the film delves into the psychology of Nazi officials involved in the " Final Solution of the Jewish question" during World War II. WGA Awards 2002". Writers Guild of America Awards. Archived from the original on 7 March 2016 . Retrieved 24 December 2015. Nicholas Woodeson as SS-Gruppenführer Otto Hofmann: Chief of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office.

Peter Sullivan as SS- Oberführer Dr Karl Eberhard Schöngarth: SD officer assigned to the General Government. Kritzinger, whose department has proceeded on assurances the Jews will be held in "liveable conditions", never lets Eichmann or Heydrich get away with cloaking brutality with ambiguity. On the other hand it's clear that the "liveable conditions" are in reality overcrowded Polish ghettos with a high risk of disease. Heydrich later calls Kritzinger on his hypocrisy for being willing to accept everything short of genocide.Real Time: Like the German original, the events within the conference room strictly follow the minutes of the meeting that took place, which was over in less than 90 minutes. I Don't Pay You to Think: When Heydrich notes that the secretary will be discreet about the proceedings that will discuss mass murder, Eichmann replies that the man in question agrees. Heydrich sarcastically replies "He agrees? Excellent". Tom Hiddleston, in one of his first film roles, briefly appears in the beginning and end as a telephone operator. Heydrich insists on referring to the slaughter of Jews as "evacuation," even long after it's been made clear that they're talking about a massacre. After a while, the conference members all start correcting each other when they use a different term. Some of the Nazi officials are concerned with the plight of German spouses of the German Jews they want to murder when those people's husbands and wives are taken away. Others counter that they feel they're "race traitors" anyway and should be treated as such. SS General Heinrich Müller goes so far as to say that he'd happily throw them all on the same transport if it were up to him.

Heydrich then recalls and concludes the meeting. He also asks for explicit assent and support from each official, one by one. After giving careful instructions on the secrecy of the minutes and notes of the meeting, they adjourn and begin to depart. Since this is about the Wannsee Conference, where the "Operation Reinhard" phase of the Holocaust was authorised, the various German government agencies are noting with coldblooded earnestness why killing the Third Reich's "undesirables" truly is the best means of dealing with them. Only one of the men has any genuine moral problems with the mass murder — the rest are simply quibbling over the minutiae. Think about every bad decision you’ve read in a memorandum. Generally, those memos were the result of people sitting in a room. In that room, probably, were people with less bad ideas who were overpowered by more forceful or charismatic personalities. (President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller is said to embody the latter traits.) In “Conspiracy,” the S.S. general Reinhard Heydrich, played with an icy suavity by Kenneth Branagh, does the overpowering. When he lays out the full extent of his plans, to kill every Jew in Europe, anyone offering anything more than an uneasy look is taken away for a talking-to. In one such aside, Heydrich warns a disgusted Wilhelm Kritzinger, played by David Threlfall, “You would be a hard man to bring down, but not impossible.” (The actual Wannsee minutes don’t note any offense by Kritzinger, though some historians have said that he was more squeamish than he let on.)

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Department of Redundancy Department: Otto Hofmann introduced himself as being from the Race and Settlement Department, then explains that they deal with race and settlement.

Ewan Stewart as Dr Georg Leibbrandt: Head of Political Department, Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. At Least I Admit It: Heydrich's final conversation with Kritzinger reveals that his disdain for the man isn't just because he's opposing him. It's also because he was perfectly fine with the persecution, abuse, impoverishment, enslavement, eventual sterilization and indefinite imprisonment of the Jews, but only now, when outright genocide is on the table, does he suddenly have a moral objection. Even Heydrich is visibly disgusted by this, since he has no issue with admitting what he is, what they're going to do, and why. Utopia Justifies the Means: Heydrich has a personal talk with Major Lange about the duties of soldiering. Heydrich seems to view himself as some sort of impromptu mentor figure to Lange (who was the lowest-ranked man at the meeting, personally selected by Heydrich because of his experience of the mass killings in Latvia), as he tries to convince Lange that all the death they're causing (including annihilating an entire people) is for a "better future". Given Heydrich's sociopathic qualities it's doubtful that he actually believes it himself and was instead just turning up the charm, but Lange takes the message at face value.Industrialized Evil: The planning and practical execution of industrialized evil is the central event of the film. Heydrich openly boasts about how they applied the assembly line concept to a genocide. Wham Line: When Kritzinger indignantly states that the possibility of annihilating all the Jews in Europe has been "personally denied to me by the Führer," Heydrich calmly replies "And it will continue to be." The look on Kritzinger's face shows that this is the point where he has realised, for the first time, that Hitler has lied to him about the genocide, and will go on lying to him, and that it doesn't matter what he does or says: it's going to happen anyway.