![]() They try to rationalise their behaviour, deny knowledge and justify their accounts of standing by or indirectly aiding the murder of millions. ![]() These former SS officers and camp book-keepers, neighbours and farmers, choose their words so very carefully. It is fascinating to watch the fleeting changes in expression in each interviewee's face as they speak we can see them cautiously gauging the Holland's reaction to their admissions. She smiles to show off her gleaming teeth - one of her job perks was getting them fixed by prisoner-dentists in the camp. She was 14 when she started and looked after them for six years while both parents worked full time in Melk camp. Looking through an old album full of pictures of smiling little girls, Margarete Schwarz ( above) remembers her job as a nanny for an SS family. The interviewees were mostly filmed at home surrounded by photos on the wall of family members, Madonnas and memorabilia. ![]() Holland doesn't dwell on the horrors inside the camps themselves but near the finale we see colour photos of prisoners’ emaciated and frozen corpses on the snowy train tracks, photographed by the Allies toward the end of the war. The staff from nearby camps enriched the local economy with their need for food, lodgings and entertainment. Industries used slave labour prisoners from the camps – mining, chemical works, submarine construction. They knew from the smell of the smoke what was happening to them. One interviewee remembers seeing the disabled being brought to the hospital in buses with painted windows. It touches on the psychiatric hospitals which became killing centres for 100,00 disabled Germans, a precursor to the gas chambers in the camps. Final Account follows a chronological thread, from the Kristallnacht pogrom in ’38 that saw Jewish synagogues, homes and business destroyed. He whittled their number down in the edit suite and those we meet on screen are compelling.There are no expert historians guiding us through, just German and Austrian citizens remembering their heyday. ![]() The director interviewed around 300 people during his long quest to understand what happened. One sings a charming children’s song about sharpening the knife to put in a Jewish belly and recalls how bells rang throughout Germany when Hitler came to power. These are regular people once enchanted by Nazism, now living in comfortable retirement in cosy houses or salubrious nursing homes. Holland, whose maternal grandparents died in the Holocaust, is intent on showing us ordinary folk, functionaries not monsters. ![]()
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