The earnest post-Holocaust drama "Labyrinth of Lies" can be viewed as a sequel of sorts to "Judgment at Nuremberg," the much-decorated 1961 Stanley Kramer film about the Nuremberg trials of the 1940s, in which top-ranking Nazis were tried for crimes against humanity. The trials are still imprinted in many people’s minds as the ultimate moment of reckoning, after which a horrific chapter of history was more or less closed and the world moved on. Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that.

"Labyrinth of Lies," which opens in 1958, resurrects a later chapter in the aftermath of the Holocaust that has largely faded from view, at least for many Americans: the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, in which 22 former mid- and lower-level functionaries at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were tried for murder.

The trials ended a period of relative calm during the reconstruction of a divided Germany, when the prevailing attitude toward the Nazi past was a state of willful amnesia. Ordinary Germans who had joined the Nazi Party and committed atrocities returned to civilian life. A statute of limitations prevented prosecutions for war crimes, excepting murder.

The directorial feature debut of Giulio Ricciarelli, "Labyrinth of Lies" has the dogged tone of an honorable, well-made television movie from the late 1950s or early ’60s. Its most admirable trait is a refusal to sensationalize its subject. There are no flashbacks to grisly acts of torture and killing, no scenes of skeletal inmates huddled behind barbed wire.

Once the trials begin in 1963, witnesses are shown testifying, but their verbal accounts of what they endured are excerpted and made into a montage, their words are camouflaged by Niki Reiser and Sebastian Pille’s soundtrack, which, although mournful, is never mawkish. There are no emotional meltdowns, no grandiose speeches.

"LABYRINTH OF LIES" Rated R Opens today at Kahala 8

The central character, Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling), a fictitious composite of three lawyers, is an idealistic new employee in the public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, frustrated by his banal work in a traffic court. Through Thomas Gnielka (Andre Szymanski), a journalistic acquaintance, he learns of Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), an Auschwitz survivor who has accidentally crossed paths with one of his wartime persecutors, now a schoolteacher. Radmann has never heard of Auschwitz, which the screenplay (by Ricciarelli and Elisabeth Bartel) pointedly reminds us, was not in Germany but in Poland.

When he sets out to prosecute the teacher, Radmann faces stern resistance. Voicing his frustration that thousands of former Nazis went unpunished and simply returned to ordinary life after the war, he encounters stony-faced indifference and hostility, although the only outright threat is a rock imprinted with a swastika thrown through a window.

Studying the voluminous files stored at the U.S. Army Document Center, Radmann finds his worst fears substantiated. He is encouraged in his investigations by Fritz Bauer, a real-life prosecutor wonderfully played by the late Gert Voss, who died in 2014 and to whom the film is dedicated. Bauer wears an expression of wide-eyed, infinitely sad knowledge of evil.

As Radmann pursues his research, evidence of what might be called a national conspiracy of silence accumulates. There comes a point when he is sidetracked by his obsession with capturing the notorious Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, and bringing him to justice.

"Labyrinth of Lies" shoehorns in a love story between Radmann and Marlene (Friederike Becht), a gifted young dressmaker. This is freighted with symbolism; Marlene’s business flourishes when the wives of former Nazis become her principal clientele.

But "Labyrinth of Lies" doesn’t belabor such moral subtleties or try to make a grand statement about good Germans versus bad. It is content to be a chilly, disquieting study of a society in a state of denial until the truth is bared.

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