Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah remains the touchtone among Holocaust documentaries, but this film by the late Luke Holland is a notable addendum to it—a distillation of some five hundred hours of interviews Holland conducted with now-elderly Germans who aided and abetted the horror in small but significant ways, often as lower-level members of the military or camp guards, or as civilians who simply chose to overlook what they knew, or at least suspected, was happening.
Fluently edited by Stefan Ronowicz from footage shot over the course of a decade, it avoids a visually stagnant feel by reason of both the varying locales (the sitting-rooms of subjects, the nursing homes in which they reside, and sometimes walks outside), and the interpolation of archival footage. A connective strand is provided by present-day exteriors of camps that various interviewees discuss, accompanied by captions indicating the numbers of those who were interned and perished in them, and by the mournful strains of a score composed by Dirac Sea and Jóhann Jóhannsson.
The main theme running through most of the recollections is that an initial inclination toward denial or excusatory evasion gradually transforms into a resigned, quietly grudging admission of moral complicity, even if interviewees are finally unable to articulate an explicit apology. A common explanation is youth: we were only children; our parents, older siblings, and teachers supported the Nazi party (usually because of economic distress) and influenced us; we simply enjoyed the camaraderie the Hitler youth programs provided for boys and girls, and the sense of national pride and leadership they instilled as one moved up the ladder in them.
As they recall growing older and the Nazi regime becoming more entrenched, their excuses veer more to fear. What could we do? If we had tried to object, we would have been put in the camps ourselves or executed. Soldiers often emphasize that they were front-line fighters, not perpetrators in genocide. Yet even as the protestations accumulate, gnawing doubts begin to emerge and the rationalizations weaken.
And there are exceptions to the general rule. One interviewee is adamant in refusing to admit any regret for his service in the Wappen SS, proudly fingering his medals; he rejects any criticism of Hitler, while another sees himself as a perpetrator, going so far as to try to persuade a group of right-wing, anti-immigrant youngsters from being seduced by neo-Nazi ideology—without much success.
Final Account is a fascinating window into the mindset of ordinary people who in some measure enabled the Nazi regime, and a salutary warning to be watchful about how such things could happen again, especially in view of the current socio-political climate not only in Germany but throughout the world. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P.