Significance of the conversation in the bathroom
When the guy felt sick he started talking about his father and his smoking habits? This seemed misplaced for some reason. Is there any significance to that scene?
shareI thought it was a good scene. In my viewing of it, the scene shows that they are still men, with a conscience, but they overcome by fear of their own demise or death if they opposed the party. The "sickness" was a physical manifestation of fear. I have heard some people argue smoking reduces their stress, I suppose that smoking did not work to calm their unease.
Div
Blasted posting quota.
My interpretation of the scene is different. The guy wasn't sick from the smoking. He was using that as an excuse to cover up his reaction to gassing of the Jews. Remember this was immediately after the Jews go in red, come out pink joke.
sharethats what i thought
as he left after the joke..i thought he couldnt take it.
but there are many different reasons for this being put in.
I think it was to demonstrate the extent to which the participants were not psychopaths -- a la Charles Manson -- but normal people, health maladies and all, who thus cannot escape their guilt by arguing insanity. Look at the setting and the surrounding activity in this movie. The participants show up, eat and drink fine wine and food, enjoy the opulent surroundings, chitchat about some peripheral matters, and very calmly sit around a table and discuss a plan to murder millions of men, women and children. As Heydrich himself says at one point, "let us pretend we are the directors of I.G. Farben, that's how they do it, is it not?" (ignoring the irony that I.G. Farben produced Zyklon B gas). Others have pointed out that the participants could just as easily have been a corporate board of directors discussing how to build more widgets, given the attitude they took towards the subject under discussion.
To say nothing of the fact that Lt. Gen. Hoffman, the one who comes down with the stomach upset, was a member of the SS and thus likely no stranger to atrocities and murder... not sure that would have turned his stomach at this stage.
I thought that was the point also -- he was overcome by the macabre idea of the pink bodies (at least for a moment), and then Major Lange (in the bathroom) suggests that it "must have been the cigar sir." They both know the real reason, Lange has already mentioned that the SS men suffer psychological turmoil from shooting helpless Jewish women and children rounded up for slaughter, but it is part of the Nazi military culture to avoid ANY appearance of "weakness" or empathy towards those to be slaughtered. So Schongarth can't "crack," ever, in other words.
I think the cigar cover story and the mention of the abusive cigar-smoking father when Eichmann "checked" on them (his way of bullying to get the meeting back on track as scheduled) was another way of deflecting attention to the cigar rather than the truth. In another way this comes up again at the end with Eichmann when Muller and Heydrich are sitting by the fire. Eichmann says that he had a "physical symptom" when he once fainted instead of admitting that he was disturbed by the violence he was witnessing (there is a true story that Himmler vomited and became seriously ill when he witnessed a mass shooting that had been organized for him to watch. He was apparently splashed with blood and brain matter from one of the poor victims, and he became very ill in response. This is supposedly when he decided that gas or other less "direct" means would "better" than shootings).
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