Labyrinth of lies - the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963

Went to see the German film, Labyrinth of lies last night, and despite what various critics said I found it a very powerful and thought provoking film. Critics who expected this to be a deep film about Auschwitz, or a courtroom drama, Le Carre thriller or action movie, profound exploration of characters to engage with are bound to be disappointed. This is about facing the past. A young prosecutor, Johann Radman (Alexander Fehling) is appointed by the Chief prosecutor, Fritz Bauer,  to the job to bring those who committed atrocities in Auschwitz to justice because he was young enough, born in 1930, not to have been compromised. It is Fritz Bauer, only a minor character in the story, but in real life the instigator of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, who is the key to what the film is about. The fictitious young investigator puts his efforts into capturing Mengele and bringing him to trial, because he thinks that Mengele encapsulates the horrors of Auschwitz, but Bauer instructs him to forget about Mengele, Mengele was known to live in Argentina, and to visit his family in Germany regularly, but has powerful friends to protect him. Instead the prosecutor should go after the 8000 other Nazis involved in running the camp and committing atrocities. The point Bauer argued, and kept stressing for all his professional lives, was that the atrocities were not committed by monsters, but by ordinary unremarkable people, teachers, bakers, foresters, civil servants, and all who supported the regime and condoned its actions were guilty. Radmann, the young prosecutor and the other characters in the film are fictitou, except for Fritz Bauer, who was himself incarcerated in a concentration camp, escaped to Denmark then to Sweden. After the war he returned to what was by then the Federal Republic of Germany, and entered the justice system, becoming District Attorney in Essen, based in Frankfurt, and there, controversially, he initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. There were many who believed that it was best to let bygones be bygones, let sleeping dogs lie, but Bauer, a friend of Willi Brandt, considered it important to face the past, no matter how dark, and was greatly disappointed that the way the Frankfurt trials were presented, those found guilty were depicted as monsters, out of the ordinary, not typical average German citizens.