This outstanding documentary about history and guilt from author and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands concerns the two elderly sons of prominent officials in Nazi Germany. It entirely upends what I confess were my own preconceptions about what such a film would be: that is, a placid, consensual study, ruefully brooding on the sins of the fathers. This is far more challenging – and more disturbing.
Sands interviews Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter, the sons of Hans Frank and Otto Wächter, respectively (among their other grim distinctions) the Nazi governor of occupied Poland and Nazi governor of Galicia in Ukraine. It becomes disturbingly clear that although Frank Jr has come to terms with what his father did, Wächter Jr is still in denial – wriggling, squirming, trying to claim that his father was not personally guilty. Increasingly angry, Sands confronts him with documentary proof that Otto Wächter had substantial administrative responsibility for the slaughter of Ukrainian Jews, including Sands’s own family.
These are live issues: then as now, there are quasi-fascist strands of opinion in Ukraine that side with Nazi Germany for facing up to Russia. The film visits a creepy Nazi-nostalgist convocation of uniformed paramilitaries there, who hail Horst von Wächter as the son of a hero. Wächter is clearly pretty pleased. It is a chilling demonstration of how the poison of the past can live in the bloodstream of the present.
