The Making of an SS Killer - The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert - 2
#Alfred_Filbert #Einsatzgruppen #génocide #shoa #Thomas_Harlan #Wundkanal
Following his return from Hungary, Harlan wanted to resume shooting in the Peruvian jungle, though the state of Filbert’s health did not permit this.(21) Instead, shooting took place at Exposure Studios in Charenton outside Paris.(22) The shoot began on 22 August 1983(23) and lasted for eight weeks.(24) According to the French journalist Pierre Joffroy, during his Parisian outings, Filbert carefully avoided certain quarters, where there were surviving witnesses to the Holocaust, and he insisted that the production car that took him from his hotel to the studio and back stick to the same route every day; otherwise, he panicked and was afraid the driver might be attempting to abduct him.(25) The interpreter on set, Ursula Langmann, relates a very different and telling story. She was responsible not only for translating between Filbert and the largely French crew (only Thomas Harlan and Heike Geschonneck spoke German) but also for taking care of Filbert on and off the set, including picking him up from his hotel on the Rue Kepler in the morning, driving him back to the hotel in the evening, eating with him, attending costume fittings, etc.(26) One Saturday, Langmann had to accompany Filbert to a costume fitting at a tailors in the 9th arrondissement in Paris, where the costume designer had ordered a couple of suits for the film shoot. Afterwards, around lunch- time, Filbert was hungry and wanted to eat something. Langmann suggested various restaurants at more conventional tourist locations in Paris in order that they could leave that particular quarter of the city as soon as possible. The reason for her desire to go elsewhere was that at the time around the cabaret music hall Folies Bergère there were predominantly restaurants belonging to Tunisian or Moroccan Jews and Langmann wanted to reach what she termed ‘neutral ground’ with Filbert. As Filbert was a little hard of hearing and therefore spoke very loudly, the thought was anathema to Langmann that Filbert might trumpet some- thing about his past in one of the restaurants. Yet Filbert, ‘stubborn’ as he was, could not be persuaded to eat elsewhere. The two of them ended up in a Jewish couscous restaurant, where the food was admittedly very tasty but where Langmann soon lost her appetite at the site of the large families gathered there on the Sabbath, unaware of who was sitting at the neighbouring table. Eventually, Langmann asked Filbert if he knew where they had ended up: he, of course, knew that the restaurant was run by North African Jews and that he was surrounded first and foremost by Jewish families, eating their lunch. Yet this did not bother Filbert in the slightest: ‘No qualms, not the least sense of guilt . . . In his eyes, it had nothing whatsoever to do with him or his past.(27)
In the film Wundkanal itself, ‘Dr S.’, a war criminal, is kidnapped by a group of four young people, heirs to Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, and imprisoned in a room filled with mirrors and monitors, where he is constantly confronted with his own image. The four voices, belonging to the unseen kidnappers, one of whom speaks English (the American film- maker Robert Kramer) and one of whom is a woman (Heike Geschonneck), interrogate him in a mock trial scenario, force him to pass judgement on himself and attempt to elicit a confession of guilt. Ultimately, whereas the prisoner is released, the film ends with the four kidnappers lying dead on the floor, evidently in reference to the fate of the four RAF members in Stammheim: Baader, Meinhof (or, alternatively, Irmgard Möller, who survived the night of 18 October 1977), Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Rasspe. Harlan dedicated the film to the memory of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli,(28) the Italian publisher and left-wing revolution- ary who had financed his research on Nazi perpetrators and their post-war careers. The release of Dr S. also prefigures Harlan’s advocacy of and admiration for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created by Nelson Mandela and established in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid. Harlan later noted, ‘The truth that must no longer be con- cealed has the greatest power.’ He contemplated what might have hap- pened, had the National Socialists testified before a truth commission: it would have created in German society an awareness of the crimes com- mitted. A truth commission would have contrasted significantly with the criminal courts, before which the perpetrators felt compelled to deny their complicity.(29) Historical scholarship on National Socialist crimes would surely have benefitted immeasurably from a conception of justice that prioritised truth over guilt.
The film Wundkanal mixes fact and fiction to such an extent that it is unclear to the viewer which is which. Filbert is mentioned for the first time during the opening credits, which include the following text (in English):
DR ALFRED SELBERT ALIAS PAULSSEN ALIAS GRODNOW
BORN SEPT. 8, 1906 AT HEIDELBERG (W. GERMANY)
FORMER CHIEF SS INTELLIGENCE DEPT. 6.
NOW IN LA PAZ, BOLIVIA, DIRECTOR SINCE 1971
FEDERAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY B.N.D. (W. GERMANY)
LOCAL REPRESENTATIVE.(30)
Filbert had, of course, lived for the first six years after the war under the name ‘Dr Alfred Selbert’ and this was the man – thus, in effect, himself – whom he was now playing in Wundkanal. He was indeed born on 8 September, though in the year 1905, not 1906. Later in the film, however, Filbert – as Selbert – correctly states that he was born on 8 September 1905. Though his mother had been born in Heidelberg, Filbert himself was born in Darmstadt. Filbert was not the former chief of SS intelligence, department 6, but rather the former deputy chief of Office VI of the RSHA. The Bolivian connection was potentially also not far from the truth, depending on whether one believes Harlan’s afore- mentioned claim that Filbert had worked for the CIA in Bolivia after the war. Without any hard evidence to this effect, however, his assertion must be regarded as tenuous. Although Filbert was still in Berlin’s Tegel Prison in 1971, the holding of a function in the BND either prior to or subse- quent to his imprisonment is not in itself entirely unlikely in light of the high number of former Nazis in the BND(31) and also the close working relationship between the CIA and the BND (including its forerunner, the Gehlen Organisation).(32)
The slight inconsistencies contained in the information given are not accidental, they are not errors. They are, on the contrary, intentional and have the purpose of disorientating the viewer, of persuading the viewer to accept the possibility that everything he/she sees is factual or, conversely, that nothing is factual at all. The very real continuity of Nazi biographies in the Federal Republic of Germany is merged with the possibility of foul play in the Stammheim deaths but also with clearly fictitious elements such as the figure of Colonel Humphrey Ian Donald Calleigh, director of the ‘Office of Peace Planning & Security’ of British Military Intelligence in Hertfordshire, England.(33) This approach allows Harlan to play with the accepted conventions of documentary filmmaking and to straddle the boundary between fact and fiction.
When Filbert is mentioned for a second time during the opening credits, it is his real name that is used:
PAUL WERNER(34) ALFRED FILBERT PAUL WERNER THE AUTHORS OF THE 1939–1945 GENOCIDE NOW STILL ACTIVE & INVOLVED IN THE GERMAN PRISON KILLINGS (1977 . . .)(35)
The 1977 ‘German prison killings’ were, of course, the aforementioned deaths of the RAF leadership in Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison. Just over halfway through the film, Dr S. is instructed to read an abridged but verbatim passage on the liquidation of the Vitebsk ghetto from the actual judgement against Filbert from 1962.(36) The only alteration made to the passage is that the words ‘Dr Filbert’ are replaced with ‘Dr S.’, though Filbert is on the verge of saying ‘Dr Selbert’ (!) and only at the last moment corrects himself. Even Greiffenberger is mentioned by name during the reading of the passage. Confronted with his own image on another monitor, Dr S. concludes the passage by removing his spectacles and saying: ‘Yes, what can I say to that? All sorts of things could be said to that.’(37)