On Saturday evening we settled down to watch a German film titled "Labyrinth of Lies". The film is a period piece, taking place in Germany fifteen years after the Second World War. When the vanquished Germany of fascist Nazi aspirations was licking its wounds and carrying on with life. It was reaching toward normalcy, not quite spurning the recent past, but tucking it away in some obscure place in peoples' apprehensions, generally disinterested in disinterring any aspect of what had just recently passed.

And most particularly the Holocaust. It was not just denial, but indifference. Germany felt it had suffered and suffered enough, that any recollection of what they had no wish to recall, and felt they knew nothing of was unwelcome. Most Germans claimed never to have heard the placename Auschwitz much less be aware of what it signified as the most hideously-linked place in Poland where Germany felt it safe from public censure to get on with its plan to obliterate the presence of Jews throughout occupied Europe through a plan of physical erasure by any means proving successful.

The Final Solution employed many means of extinguishing the lives of Jews, young and old, but it discovered the most efficient in a combination of suffocating gas chambers and vast crematoria whose chimneys lofted to the heavens belched the minuscule blackened remains of millions of innocent children, women and men, infants and elderly alike. In the minds of most Germans it never happened. In the minds of German officials it was best to behave as though it never happened. No reckoning required, no inner search for the rationale that held the liberation of the world would be accomplished by obliterating the presence of an ethno-cultural-religious group whose members had been recognized as achieving great forward strides in advancing civilization, in artistic and scientific breakthroughs enriching humanity.

Had they been a group whose presence on Earth added nothing of significance to the greater good, their anguish and destruction would still have cried to the heavens for moral retribution.

The year 1958 saw a newly introduced staff member to the German federal court prosecution team, a young man whose idealism was groomed by his memory of a father who instructed his son to "always do the right thing". The father had never returned from the war front, and fifteen years on was presumed dead, but his memory remained precious and large in his son's mind, as someone who rejected the Third Reich, inspiring the son to take on a campaign to restore honour and dignity to a Germany he loved, and throughout the course of his passionate adventure in discovering the horrors of the Holocaust, discovering that no one was interested, everything chose to deny, and his course of action was doomed to fail because of governmental obstructionism.

His commitment to cleansing Germany of its immense moral blot against humanity spurred him to see justice done impartially in the recognition of the great crime committed against Europe's Jewish community. First-hand narrative accounts of the suffering and horrors witnessed by survivors left him shaken and appalled. The grief expressed by survivors burrowed deep into his own soul. Discovering that his venerated father was in fact a member of the Nazi Party, the chief prosecutor attempted to assuage his junior member's despair by assuring him that membership had been universal within the legal community. Just as the knowledge of the vicious oppression of the Jews was common knowledge among average Germans who claimed to have known nothing of what had occurred.

His commitment and determination against all odds, however, and the support he was given by his superior, the federal prosecutor general, who just happened to be a Jew who had been a wartime slave worker in Auschwich, saw Johann Radmaan, the young prosecutor, eventually prevail. His desperate search to apprehend the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele, came to naught, but he had the satisfaction of seeing the Mossad capture Adolf Eichmann, and was outraged when Germany had no interest in requesting his extradition from Israel, to face public trial and the consequences due him.

His efforts did result in the arrest and prosecution and trial of relatively routine, minor members of the Nazi military, complicit in the extermination of their helpless Jewish victims.