Review: Final Account Is a Stark and Revealing Portrait of Holocaust Complicity

Luke Holland’s documentary is a gift of memory to future generations.

Final Account
Photo: Focus Features

Luke Holland’s stark and revealing Final Account is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil. A filmmaker who discovered late in life that not only was he Jewish, but that his maternal grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps, Holland set out in 2008 to record the wartime memories of hundreds of Germans who took part in the genocide. Not interested in the planners or higher-ups, Holland talked to the men and women who ensured that the death trains ran on time.

What Holland shows in Final Account is chilling, but not because these individuals, now senior citizens, all spout Nazi dogma. Except for a very few—like the former Waffen-SS soldier who announces “I have no regrets” with a stubbornly sickening pride—most of the interviewees treat Hitlerian ideology as some oddity from the past. Holland structures the film to follow the stages of his subjects’ lives in the Nazi world, from their childhood in Nazi youth groups up through their experiences as soldiers, concentration camp workers, or bystanders.

Holland begins Final Account by intercutting his interviews with color footage of giddy children at play and studying anti-Semitic books. While it can be squirm-inducing to watch ex-Nazis wax rhapsodically about the fun times they had at eugenics-indoctrination classes, it’s also clear that many believe they were at first just going along with it as a way of getting out of the house. In scenes like this, Final Account is particularly effective at showing how the all-encompassing nature of Nazism in 1930s Germany created a propaganda-covered pipeline that funneled these children from fun outings right into the killing machine.

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The degree to which the film’s subjects acknowledge their part in the deaths of millions is dispiritingly negligible. Most engage in dissembling, in lies, and in microscopic parsing of responsibility as they display photos of themselves in uniform and chatter about their youth as though discussing a sock hop. A woman who clerked at a slave labor camp says because her job was bookkeeping, she had “nothing to do with it.” One of the few interviewees to express any thoughtfulness breaks down responses to questions about the Holocaust into three categories: “I didn’t know,” “I didn’t take part,” and “If I had known, I’d have acted differently.” The people Holland speaks to follow that evasive formula almost to a tee. One of the more common, and clearly repressed-guilt-signaling, refrains heard throughout the film is some variation on, “If I had said or done anything, I would have been killed.”

The idea that the Holocaust was mostly undertaken not by fanatics but everyday people who were just following orders is far from new. But it’s a lesson that seems necessary to repeat. When Hannah Arendt explored the “banality of evil” in 1963’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was criticized for supposedly downplaying the monstrosity perpetrated by the Nazi bureaucrats she was discussing. In the 1990s, books like Ordinary Men and Hitler’s Willing Executioners—the intellectual forebears of Holland’s documentary—encountered significant backlash in Germany for castigating supposedly powerless people for their culpability in an atrocity.

A hint of the response Final Account could face from some quarters is presaged in a section where a man is speaking remorsefully to German teenagers about his part in the Holocaust. After saying that he’s scared about Nazis coming to his house to seek revenge, one of the teenagers scoffs, telling the man in a revealing non sequitur that what he “should” worry about isn’t Nazis, but getting knifed by “an Albanian” on the train.

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Near the end of Final Account, one of Holland’s interviewees opens his cherished box of wartime memorabilia. Death’s head patches, flags, and medals are soon laid out for inspection, an unmistakable pride in his nostalgia-fogged eyes. In this moment, it’s easy to imagine how many Germans today must dread finding such a trove in their mother’s or father’s things and having to wonder whether they thought any of it had been wrong.

Score: 
 Director: Luke Holland  Distributor: Focus Features  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2020  Buy: Video

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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