What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy

David Evans's disturbing documentary opens with a harsh sentence: “Imagine what it must be like to grow up as the child of a mass murderer.” What Our Fathers Did details the family legacies carried by Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter, whose fathers were high-ranking Nazi officials, and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands, whose family members perished in the Holocaust. The film brings the three men together as they try to come to terms with the Nazi war crimes, both on a historic scale and in relation to their personal histories. Frank is direct in acknowledging his father's actions and affirms the appropriateness of the Nuremberg Trial death sentence that ended the latter's life. Von Wächter, on the other hand, has not fully accepted the sins of his father, defending him as a lower-level cog in the Nazi machinery and insisting that he was forced to carry out his duties. “I have so many documents from people who knew him personally who said he was a decent character,” von Wächter insists. A visit by the men to a seemingly tranquil field that holds the mass grave of Nazi victims turns into a sequence of uncommon poignancy, offering a stunning revelation. An exceptional documentary about the long and painful shadow of the Nazi atrocities, this is highly recommended. Editor's Choice. [Note: this is also available with public performance rights for $350 from Bullfrog Films, www.bullfrogfilms.com.] (P. Hall)