L ifestyle /C ulture
‘Final Account’ Visits an Uncomfortable Place
FI L M
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
“FINAL ACCOUNT,” a new
documentary from recently
deceased English director Luke
Holland, is as straightforward
in its presentation as it is compli-
cated in its subject matter. For
90 minutes, elderly Germans
look into Holland’s camera
and describe their former lives
as Nazis.

The interviews, which
began in 2008, proceed
more or less chronologically,
beginning with the interview
subjects’ time in Hitler Youth
and Jungvolk and continuing
along a path that audiences
are familiar with: the prewar
mania of nationalistic fervor
and Hitler-worship, the
escalating oppression of Jews,
Communists, the disabled and
other minorities, the vener-
ation of violence and racial
purity, the march to war, the
initial victories, the open secret
of the concentration camps,
and then, finally, the slow-mo-
tion defeat of the Nazis.

The story of Allied victory
over fascism doesn’t have that
same neat structure when the
story is being told by Germans
with varying degrees of
attachment to the defeated
political regime.

Most of them express some
sort of regret for having been
in the Wehrmacht, the Waffen
SS or other armed bodies of the
Third Reich. But not all do, and
even among those that do feel
that what happened in Nazi
Germany was unequivocally
wrong, there is a strong feeling
that they had no choice but do
what they did.

From bookkeeper
to concentration camp guard, the
impression one gets from the
collected testimony is that there
wasn’t a single genuine Nazi in
all of Germany. If they weren’t
too young to speak up, they say,
then they didn’t have the power
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Archival footage in “Final Account,” by director Luke Holland
to resist the social current, or
didn’t have the inner courage
to accept death as a conse-
quence for disobeying orders
(whether that calculation was
borne out in reality is unclear.)
On the less repentant end
of spectrum, among those
who have dispensed with the
self-preservation of a filter
in their old age, the inter-
view subjects caress their old
medals from a special box in
the closet, or wax poetic on
the irreplicable camaraderie of
their units.

In perhaps the most
harrowing interview in “Final
Account,” one man comes
clean: The project may have
failed, he says, and it may have
gone awry in some places,
but the animating goals were
noble. “The ideas were correct,”
the man says, his neck flapping
a bit above a tightly-knotted tie
and a banana-colored sweater
vest. This humanitarian is
willing to say that the Jewish
population of Germany should
have simply been compelled to
leave, rather than killed.

Holland’s hand is light,
sometimes frustratingly
so. There’s no voiceover, no
narration, almost nothing to
let viewers know the salient
fact that Holland learned
later in life that his mother
was a Jewish refugee from
Vienna and that his maternal
grandparents died in a concen-
tration camp. He intersperses
the interviews with archival
footage of German life during
the Nazi era, along with some
information here and there to
give context to the next round
of questions or the subject
matter being discussed.

Aside from a pivotal scene
toward the end, the movie
consists primarily of uninter-
rupted testimony. Holland
does push at times, and as
the movie reaches its galling
final interview, the questions
get more pointed, and he
presses on despite the apparent
hostility and discomfort, one
mark of a good interviewer (or
interrogator). But from beginning to
end, Holland operates with
JEWISH EXPONENT
Courtesy of Focus Features
no part in? Why does Werk fear
the contemporary reignition
of the impulses that brought
about Nazism, the student
presses on, when he should be
afraid that he’ll be killed by an
Albanian migrant on the train?
“You should be afraid of
that, but not of your own kind,”
the student says.

Werk tries to remain calm,
to maintain the distance from
his own actions that he did
during his interviews with
Holland. But the student has
disturbed him.

It’s one thing to put some
distance between yourself and
your actions in an interview,
a sealed space where you can
imagine that the only receptor
for your signal is your inter-
locutor and an audience you’ll
never meet. But what happens
when a whole generation
distances themselves from
their actions in that way? What
dark signal does that send to
the generations that follow?
The answer comes in the form
of the student who castigates
Werk for his lack of pride.

The whole scene lasts about
seven minutes and is incredibly
uncomfortable to watch. It’s also
the centerpiece of the movie.

In “Final Account,” Holland
lifts up some deeply-wedged
stones to take a look at some
loathsome creepy-crawlies. But
Holland doesn’t expose that
wriggling evil in a righteous
mission to stamp it out, nor
does he aim to give his audience
a cheap gross-out (“Look how
disgusting this is!”).

Instead, he puts the creepy-
crawlies under a microscope
to show us something. Those
markings, that antennae, those
pincers: You don’t necessarily
have to go around flipping
rocks to find them. Check your
backyard. The film begins showing at
the Ritz Five on May 21. l
tremendous restraint toward
those whose early lives were
dedicated to eradicating that
impulse. Most of the time, this
restraint seems humane, the
solemn mission of a dedicated
historian, one who just wants
to get the information out
there. Other times, I wonder
if Holland was simply stunned
into silence by what he heard. I
certainly was.

There is one scene where
Holland announces his inten-
tions in a more obvious way,
and the movie is better off
for it.

Hans Werk, a Waffen SS
veteran from Berlin, addresses
German students at the villa
where the Final Solution was
devised. He describes the
shame that he feels about his
past with “the murderous
organization,” but he’s soon
embroiled in a shouting match
with one student who accuses
Werk of offloading his own
shame at being German onto
younger people. Why should
he feel any shame, the student jbernstein@jewishexponent.com;
asks, about something he took 215-832-0740
MAY 20, 2021
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