When Former Nazis Tell the Story of the Holocaust

The filmmaker Luke Holland, who died a few months ago, was bound to the Holocaust through his maternal grandparents, who perished in a concentration camp. Beginning in 2008, he set out to interview ordinary people who had lived and worked under the Nazi regime. His accumulated footage became his final project: Final Account.
The people we see on screen appear as pleasant elderly folk. They were not party functionaries or people of power, but cogs in a machine that, through everyone's participation, produced one of history's greatest tragedies. It takes courage to publicly confront such a dark past; yet each person remembers and interprets it differently. It is striking to watch how each one subjectively reworks their own experience and their nation's history. There are almost no convenient "I don't remember" moments. Instead, each person tries to explain with clarity and lucidity why they embraced Nazism, what they believed, what actions they took, and whether they feel any remorse. None admits that exterminating millions of Jews, Roma, and disabled people was right. Yet some claim expulsion from the country would have been justified, or deny the death toll was so high. Some witnessed the disappearance or death of people they knew. At the time, not one of them questioned Hitler's ideas. They followed them faithfully until they could not, until it was too late.
There are many words—direct questions and rarely evasive answers—but the delicate subject demands we attend equally, if not more, to what goes unsaid: the eyes, the lines around the mouth, the hesitations, the tone of voice. These give weight to each account, each piece of the puzzle of Nazi genocide. The director does not place us viewers in a position of superiority from which to understand, or even judge, the behavior of others. The true aim is to hold up a mirror. Those elderly people are not only the past; they are also a potential future. They represent what we might have become under their same historical and social conditions, and what we could still become if those conditions returned. Watched carefully, this is a film about all of us—about possible versions of ourselves—meant to make us think about what we might become and help us never repeat the mistakes of the past.