For the Nazis, it didn't take much. In fact, ninety minutes, a little politics, a lot of bigotry and a few pointed threats against any dissenters (along the lines of "shut up or you're a Jew lover"), and the Holocaust became reality.

"Conspiracy," HBO's look at the secret meeting where the "final solution" was supposedly hammered out, may be one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen. It's not violent. In fact, there are fifteen main cast members and they spend most of the two hours of this film in one room, talking. Based on the single set of notes from a secret January 1942 meeting held at Wannsee Haus, a picturesque lakeside mansion near Berlin, "Conspiracy" is billed as a look at "how it happened." But really, it's much more and much less.

Imagine a group of men sitting around a table smoking, sipping French wines and calmly discussing how to deal with their Jewish "storage" problem. With a sickening redefinition of words—"evacuate" becomes synonymous with eliminate—this meeting shows how the Nazi brass legitimized the Holocaust among their own people. This is not decision making time—though that's ostensibly why the meeting has been called—because the decision has already been made. Gen. Reinhard Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh, looking very master race-ish with slicked-back blond hair and piercing blue eyes) is the ringleader, and pushes the group toward a desired conclusion, employing softly worded threats and polite cutoffs to encourage agreement. The conversation is stunning, a combination of racism, legalese, practicality and politics, demonstrating that this kind of true evil isn't intelligent or fascinating, but tired and banal.

There's a good twenty minutes spent discussion who, exactly, is a Jew, which gives anyone not up on their details of what Nazi Germany was like a crash course in insanity law. There's Dr. Wilhelm Stukart ("Bridget Jones's Diary heartthrob Colin Firth), author of the country's "purity protection" laws going round with the SS over the fact that they want to "evacuate" anyone who simply looks too Jewish. And though you start out on Stuckart's side, trying to find someone sympathetic in the cast, you quickly come back to the realization that there isn't anyone—it is, after all, a room full of Nazis. That Stuckart may be arguing against mass genocide, but only because it's against the law and logistically messy to try and separate Germans married to Jews, or to try and have laws that are arbitrarily decided by what some SS office thinks someone looks like.

"Conspiracy" fascinates as a chronicle of what might have gone down during these proceedings and portrays its participants not as masterminds, but as petty bigots willing to murder millions for the sake of simple efficiency. At one point there's a telling statement from Heydrich as he tries to convince the very reluctant Reichs Chancellery official, Dr. Wilhelm Kritzinger (David Threlfall), that they have to gas the lot. You've felt some empathy with Krtizinger, who's fighting the inevitable, and who has been told by Adolf Hitler himself that this isn't going to happen. Guess what—he lied. But then Heydrich say something that reminds us none of them is any better than the other: "And what is your philosophy? Hound them, impoverish them, exploit them, imprison them—just do not kill them?"

Featuring the excellent Stanley Tucci (in a creepy turn as Adolph Eichmann).

Also by Elaine Richardson

SWEPT AWAY
Sweeps are the devil. As if every few months a TV exec wakes up and realizes that they can't just promise ratings, they have to deliver and then thinks up every gimmick possible to get Joe Public to flip on their network—and stay there.
(2001-05-03)

PLAY BALL
An intriguing mixture of baseball and celebrity, Billy Crystal's labor of love, HBO's highly enjoyable "61*," offers a compelling look at a story where just about everyone knows the ending.
(2001-04-26)

FRAKENFOOD?
Would you eat genetically manufactured food? You know—where scientists do a little gene fiddling to create corn that produces its own pesticide or a papaya that's resistant to disease? If you had a choice, would you eat such a thing?
(2001-04-19)

HOT AIR
School officials go on about standards and the importance of school reform in setting standards, but if standards mean that kids departing the CPS high school can read at a third-grade level, as opposed to a first-grade level, do we really want to count that as progress?
(2001-04-12)

CASE OF THE X
(2001-04-12)

POOR HOUSE
(2001-04-12)

ON DELIVERY
(2001-04-05)

HOT AIR
(2001-03-29)

THE ART OF WAR
(2001-03-29)

GET IN THE GAME
(2001-03-29)

SUFFERING GRACEFULLY
(2001-03-22)

REEL DEAL
(2001-03-22)