Steve Bannon is talking about Birkenau. Auschwitz, you see, was a bit jury-rigged but, ah, Birkenau. Real pros did that one. “Oh my God, it’s precision engineering to the nth degree,” he says, “by Mercedes and Krupp and Hugo Boss. It is an institutionalized industrial compound for mass murder.” It’s the look in his eye that’s striking as he says these words. He doesn’t look sorrowful. There’s a glint of wonder there. He talks about all the boring bureaucracy, all the meetings and coffee cups, all the otherwise rational people involved in building Satan’s playground, how they all distanced themselves from “the moral horror of it.”
I don’t know in what context Bannon started musing along these lines, and I’m not sure I want to know. His Holocaust remarks come at the outset of The Brink, director Alison Klayman’s cinema-vérité look at Bannon’s rough ride since he was first ousted from President Trump’s White House and then separated from the Breitbart site and his major financial backers, the Mercer family. Later in the movie Bannon is inviting reporters over to his townhouse to watch what he calls a “propaganda” movie about Trumpism, and he lightheartedly asks, “What would Leni Riefenstahl do?”
