One of the most controversial films to be shown at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, The Himmler Project presents a minimalist restaging of the infamous three-and-a-half-hour speech Heinrich Himmler delivered to ninety-two SS generals in the Golden Hall of Posen Castle in October 1943. Although it has been described as "one of the most terrible examples of the German language," the speech, by the same token, is a crucial document of Third Reich ideology. Karmakar’s staging of the speech, using a lone actor with deadpan delivery and neither costume nor set, provides a unique opportunity to closely examine the text and to begin to recover the past in the absence of Nazi regalia. For the film’s director, this analytic approach provides the framework through which to reveal the inherent patterns of behavior of Nazi ideologues, their internal logic, and their structures of legitimization.