It would be simple to pass judgement on the characters of this documentary as I'm sure that many will, but if we look at these old men and women who were inextricably cast into the nightmare that was wartime Germany and Hitler's Final Solution and see them as normal people it becomes all the more horrifying.
Their obvious struggle to justify the heinous war crimes that were committed by their fear of retribution - being executed for not following orders, fall short even in their own minds of excusing themselves. The nazis never executed any soldiers for refusing to participate. The question of what defines a perpetrator is asked over and over but the answer is not ultimately resolved. This is the unanswered question of all wars. What are we all capable of under the guise of patriotism? Where do we draw the line when military action becomes genocide? And when the truces are called and soldiers retreat over the dead bodies of non-combatants how do they explain to their children why they "had" to do it.
At the end we come to understand that the director lost his grandparents to the concentration camps and that might explain his unrelenting cross examination of his subjects but in a world that really hasn't changed much since 1938 in terms of people's gullibility to personalities of cult, we should perhaps instead view it as a warning of what is still possible rather than an indictment of the German people.
Their obvious struggle to justify the heinous war crimes that were committed by their fear of retribution - being executed for not following orders, fall short even in their own minds of excusing themselves. The nazis never executed any soldiers for refusing to participate. The question of what defines a perpetrator is asked over and over but the answer is not ultimately resolved. This is the unanswered question of all wars. What are we all capable of under the guise of patriotism? Where do we draw the line when military action becomes genocide? And when the truces are called and soldiers retreat over the dead bodies of non-combatants how do they explain to their children why they "had" to do it.
At the end we come to understand that the director lost his grandparents to the concentration camps and that might explain his unrelenting cross examination of his subjects but in a world that really hasn't changed much since 1938 in terms of people's gullibility to personalities of cult, we should perhaps instead view it as a warning of what is still possible rather than an indictment of the German people.