“We didn’t support the party. But we liked the uniform. We went along with it because we enjoyed it,” remembers one pensioner.
Another recalls: “When you’re 10, 12 years old, what do you want? You want to be in a group. You want to get out of the house.” These superficially innocuous memories are the testimony of the last generation of Nazis in a searing new documentary, Final Account.
It opens with a quote from Primo Levi: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
What follows is by turns shocking and quietly unsettling, as it demonstrates the truth of Levi’s words. Men and women in their final years look back and consider their complicity in unimaginable crimes.
The film is the work of director Luke Holland. He learned as a teenager his mother was a Jewish refugee from Austria whose family died in the Holocaust. Holland began the film in 2008 and continued work on it until his death last year.
Producer Sam Pope recalled: “He’d often say he didn’t expect the film would provide answers, he only hoped it would prompt people to ask better questions. The interest was in perpetrators, ordinary people who were following orders.”
Some acknowledge their guilt. One veteran says: “We are all complicit. Nobody walked away.” Others are entirely unrepentant. An Austrian former SS soldier remembers Kristallnacht: “I didn’t really care that the synagogue burned down. I wasn’t sorry about it. I didn’t feel any pity for the Jews.”
In one chilling moment an elderly man returns to a stables where as a youngster he had found escaped concentration camp prisoners hiding. Gradually, it emerges he put in the call that led to their recapture. Asked about their fate, he simply says: “Nobody knows that.”
The response from Holocaust survivors to the film has been positive. “At one screening this woman said, ‘Thank you so much. I can’t believe I can see them,’” Pope recalls.
“Survivors question their memories. Often times it can be difficult to think, ‘Did this really happen?’ I hope confirming that reality goes some way to reinforcing that experience.”
“It’s a film about memory,” explains producer Riete Oord. “A lot of the people Luke interviewed when they joined the SS as kids, their memories are quite clear of the uniforms and participating in sports. And then as they get older, there’s a lot more fudging going on, especially when he asks, ‘Are you a perpetrator?’ Then it becomes a lot more slippery.”
The film is the legacy of executive Diane Weyermann, who died last month aged 66 having been a driving force in its making.
Final Account is showing Thursday 11 November at the Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley, London in the UK Jewish Film Festival and goes on general release on 3 December.
