Taking Sides (film)

Taking Sides German title Taking Sides Der Fall Furtwngler is a 2001 GermanFrenchAustrianBritish coproduction directed by Istvn Szab and starring Harvey Keitel and Stellan Skarsgrd. The story is set during the period of denazification investigations conducted in postwar Germany after the Second World War, and it is based on the real interrogations that took place between a U.S. Army investigator and the musical conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler, who had been charged with serving the Nazi regime. It is based on the 1995 play of the same title by Ronald Harwood.

In Berlin at the end of World War II, Wilhelm Furtwngler Stellan Skarsgrd is conducting Beethovens 5th Symphony when yet another Allied bomb raid stops the performance. A minister in Hitlers government comes to Furtwnglers dressing room to advise him that he should go abroad, and escape the war. The film then jumps to some time after the Allied victory, and we see U.S. Army General Wallace R. Lee Ermey task Major Steve Arnold Harvey Keitel with getting Furtwngler at his denazification hearing Find Wilhelm Furtwngler guilty. He represents everything that was rotten in Germany.Arnold gets an office with Lt. David Wills Moritz Bleibtreu, a GermanAmerican Jew, and Emmaline Straube Birgit Minichmayr, daughter of an executed member of the German resistance. Arnold questions several musicians, many of whom know Emmalines father and say that Furtwngler refused to give Hitler the Nazi salute. ........

Source: Wikipedia