We all know that knee-jerk racism and willful ignorance are the handmaidens of evil: Without these all-too-common traits, heinous acts are difficult to perpetrate on a large scale. Documentary make…
” is the first product of an ambitious undertaking to interview the now elderly helpers and handmaidens whose tacit acceptance of the Nazi regime enabled the Final Solution. The film is a distillation of roughly 300 interviews with men and women, some of whom were literally cogs in the machine, like the governess of a Nazi family, while others, such as SS men, were directly involved.
That’s not a problem. We need these kinds of documentaries as well, and Holland’s approach, in general, is good.
So how do we judge those who participated in the Hitler Youth? Hans Werk, once in the Waffen-SS, was eight years old when the Nuremberg laws were introduced, and recalls that his teacher influenced his thinking more than his parents; he expresses more regret than most, yet how should we parse such excuses? To Holland’s credit, he guides the viewer to ask those questions themselves, by using interviews coupled with images both historic and contemporary, but given the documentary’s basic...
Although cries of ignorance have long been rejected, there are those in the documentary who hide behind that canard, treating their moment before the camera as a way of discharging themselves of any culpability.
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