Anyone who believes that such towering and exhaustive documentaries as Marcel Ophuls' 260-minute expose on the myths surrounding the French Resistance movement The Sorrow and the Pity (1970) or Claude Lanzmann's powerful 503-minute interrogation/interview session on the intimate details of the Nazi death camps Shoah (1985) represent the last word on the Holocaust should think again. Beginning Friday, Landmark Theatres in San Francisco and Berkeley will offer a more compact version of the Holocaust crimes (92 minutes) in an equally unsettling account. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy has British filmmaker David Evans bringing three men together for a focused conversation on the most diabolically shameful chapter in modern European history, a chapter literally written in the blood of slaughtered Jews.
Now in their 70s, Horst von Wachter and Niklas Frank have starkly contrasting views of what their Nazi dads did at the behest of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler to kill innocent men, women, and children from many classes and orientations. Clearly uncomfortable for the bulk of the film, von Wachter desperately looks for mitigating circumstances, evidence to let his beloved papa off the hook for one of humankind's greatest recorded crimes. "He was absolutely somebody who wanted to do something good," he says. "His fault was that he believed Hitler would change his politics."
Niklas Frank is incredulous about the views of his childhood friend. "My father loved Hitler more than his family. My father really deserved to die at the gallows." Frank's condemnation of his parents is absolute, beginning with his memories of a mother who used to "shop" in the Krakow [Poland] Jewish ghetto, where she knew she could get rock-bottom prices for furs from Jewish merchants terrified of winding up in the clutches of her death-camp commandant husband, the notorious Hans Frank.
What Our Fathers Did carries an especially emotional punch resulting from the odd journey taken by, and the unusually close bond forming between Frank, von Wachter and the film's on-screen host and interrogator, Philippe Sands. Sands, whose relatives died in places visited by the trio, keeps pushing his "guests" to react to the sins of their fathers, which Frank does gladly, but which von Wachter resists, finding reasons to protect the memory of his dad. Even the evidence that their fathers were punished by the victorious Allied forces carries different weight with each surviving son. Niklas Frank pulls out a wallet photo of his freshly executed father: Hans Frank was hanged in 1946 after a trial at Nuremberg for his complicity in the slaughter of three million Polish Jews.
For Horst von Wachter, whose father Otto was the Nazi governor of Galicia (the present-day Ukraine city of Lviv), the death of his dad, who died while under the protection of the Pope in 1949, is a hard pill to swallow. He resists the facts to the bitter end, when, in a truly odd moment, he meets a survivor of the era who thinks Otto was a fine fellow.
Niklas Frank has been on the record about his Nazi dad for quite a spell. Frank's German fans have known him for the past quarter-century for his best-selling account The Father: A Settling of Accounts. Horst von Wachter carries very different tokens of the times: formal photographs of Otto with Nazi henchman Heinrich Himmler, and a truly special keepsake, a photo simply signed "A.H." for Adolph Hitler.
For Philippe Sands, the experience standing between these two men with their powerfully different grasp of history was more than a little unsettling. "I was transported back 70 years to the heart of an appalling regime, but Horst was looking at these images with a different eye from mine. I see a man who's probably been responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Horst looks at the same photographs and sees a beloved father playing with the children, and he�s thinking that was family life."
Documentaries are often judged by the structure the filmmaker establishes throughout to create his or her version of the film's truth. In Shoah, creator Claude Lanzmann eschewed archival footage of the gas chambers or of piles of rotting corpses. Evans' What Our Fathers Did mixes present-tense interviews with Frank and Wachter with some dramatic film of Hitler and of the ruins of an important synagogue, attended by Sands' own family. The ruins are intact on the outside and burned out inside.
The filmmakers don't let the delusional Horst off the hook: his dad Otto created the Lviv Jewish ghetto, and supervised the trains that carried Jews to the death camps. The final nail in Otto's moral coffin: he refused Himmler's offer of a transfer back to Vienna. Instead Otto von Wachter was the "good Nazi" who stayed with his ship to the end, before fleeing to hide under the Vatican's protection after the war. In a startling scene, the trio drops by the public hall in Lviv where Frank's dad announced the beginning of Hitler's Final Solution, conspicuously crediting Wachter's dad for the underlying policy. A month later, about 75,000 Jews had been murdered in the area.
Some viewers may wish that this film spent some time telling how these sons of Nazi criminals lived their everyday lives before confronting their "killing fields" legacy. While Horst sticks stubbornly to his denial of Otto's foul deeds, at film's end an elderly Ukrainian nationalist wearing a swastika informs Horst of how proud he is of his unit's dark history. Finally Horst has his moment. History can play nasty tricks on the unwary.