Thread your way through the drunks, beggars and political protesters on the southern edge of central Budapest and you find a fortress-like building huddled down a crumbling back street. This is Hungary’s shiny new Holocaust memorial museum, wrapped around a synagogue and guarded by airport-style security gates, presumably against neo-Nazi attack. Old habits die hard in this corner of Europe.

Inside is a moving audiovisual record of the obscene, grotesque, industrialised genocide inflicted on Hungary’s Jewish and Gypsy populations by Nazi Germany in the latter stages of the Second World War. So systematic was the so-called Final Solution by this point that one in ten victims of the entire Holocaust, and one in three of those sent to Auschwitz, was forcibly deported from Hungary.

The man responsible for their fate was the oddly nondescript SS Transport Administrator, Otto Adolf Eichmann. This high-ranking Nazi escaped justice when the war ended and fled to Argentina, where he lived incognito until 1960. Finally snared in an undercover ambush by Mossad agents, he was smuggled to Jerusalem, publicly tried for genocide and hanged in 1962. He never accepted guilt for his crimes.

Half an hour from the Holocaust museum, in a rural studio complex north of Budapest, history is repeating itself. The German star Thomas Kretschmann is playing Eichmann with an understated glint of icy arrogance.

Opposite him, the American actor Troy Garity is bullish and broody as Avner Less, the Israeli captain in charge of interrogating the notorious Nazi. Both are cloistered inside a minutely detailed sound-stage re-creation of a prison cell in early 1960s Jerusalem.

To portray Eichmann in shabby middle age, Kretschmann’s head has been partly shaved and his face given a grey, wrinkled sheen. “I normally look more pretty than this,” he assures me, snapping out of pscyho-Nazi mode to shake hands. “Thank God I am not one of these Method actors who has to carry their character around all day.”

Titled simply Eichmann, the film taking shape here is a British-led production directed by Robert Young and written by Snoo Wilson.

The decision to shoot in Budapest was partly financial, but also dramatically logical. Eichmann was stationed in Hungary when the Nazis occupied it in 1944, and it was here that he tested his mass deportation methods to extremes, sending 437,000 Jews and Gypsies to almost certain death during one feverish ten-week period. Given the widespread Nazi collaboration among Hungarians, the film-makers are treading carefully around local sensibilities.

“We’ve sought expert help locally, and we’ve been to the synagogue,” says the film’s young British producer, Karl Richards. “It’s an interesting question because for Hungary itself these were very dark days. The same with the Germans, because we have a lot of Germans on the crew. Look at films like Downfall — that represented a man out of control, whereas this is a film about a guy who didn’t feel any guilt whatsoever.

I think it’s going go be a lot harder for German and East European audiences to take.”

A gentleman director of the old school, Young is the only member of the film’s mostly youthful crew who actually lived through the Nazi era. He was born in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and says that researching Eichmann triggered some unsettling memories.

“Can you imagine what it was like looking at all those photographs and reading all these accounts?” Young asks. “As a child I remember some of these things and the effect it had on me has been everlasting. Every so often we need to remind ourselves.”

Just how much of Eichmann’s monstrous evil can be depicted on screen is a moot point. Between scenes, Kretschmann and Garity are handed the latest pink pages of script revisions containing graphic discussion about the murder of a baby. “Too much, too much!” they both protest. “Talk to the director,” Wilson says, throwing up his hands. “No, talk to the writer,” counters Young, shuffling away. Kretschmann deposits his pages directly into a nearby bin. “I’ll just file this here for safekeeping,” he grins.The changes are dropped.

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