'It became crystal clear they were lying': the man who made Germans admit complicity in Holocaust
‘It became crystal clear they were lying’: the man who made Germans admit complicity in the Holocaust
Dorian Lynskey
Thu 2 Dec 2021 11.00 EST
With Final Account, the late director Luke Holland set out to obtain testimonies from those who participated in the Nazi atrocities – before their voices were lost. The result is a powerful mix of shame, denial and ghastly pride
One day in 2018, the prolific documentary producer John Battsek received a call from Diane Weyermann of Participant Media, asking him if he would travel to the East Sussex village of Ditchling to meet a 69-year-old director named Luke Holland. Weyermann said that Holland had spent several years interviewing hundreds of Germans who were in some way complicit in the Holocaust, from those whose homes neighboured the concentration camps to former members of the Waffen SS. The responses he captured ran the gamut from shame to denial to a ghastly kind of pride. Now he wanted to introduce these testimonies to a mainstream audience, and he needed help.
“Luke wasn’t consciously making a film,” Battsek says. “He was amassing an archive that he hoped would have a role to play for generations to come. We had to turn it into something that has a beginning, a middle and an end.” As soon as he saw Holland’s footage, he knew it was important: “It presented an audience with a new way into this.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/dec/02/it-became-crystal-clear-they-were-lying-the-man-who-made-germans-admit-complicity-in-the-holocaust
(With little light shined on the persistent issues of antisemitism we see today, the case for the documentarian such as this is even more prescient than ever.)
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Or maybe George Patton or Werner von Braun, Nazi's by incidental convenience.
Meaning, we should have fought our Soviet allies rather than the Nazis.
