“Final Account” (M) *** and a half

THE print of the late director Luke Holland’s documentary hadn’t arrived on time for review last week. I am grateful to Dendy management for knowing my eagerness to see it and arranging a viewing. 

Here’s a summary provided by the distributors: “An urgent portrait of the last living generation of everyday people to participate in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Over a decade in the making, the film raises vital, timely questions about authority, conformity, complicity and perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women ranging from former SS members to civilians in never-before-seen interviews reckon with – in very different ways – their memories, perceptions and personal appraisals of their own roles in the greatest human crimes in history.”

Holland began in 2008 to track down and interrogate the last surviving “witnesses to the crimes of the Third Reich”. He found not just witnesses, but also arguable perpetrators.

When I finally caught up with it, I was pleased to see I wasn’t, as is so often the case, the only viewer in the cinema. It’s now over three-quarters of a century since Hitler put a cowardly end to his own life and, soon after, to the war that he started. I regret that he escaped trial. That would have been an event to watch, as much to see his justification of what he did as to mourn the victims of those Germans who pulled the triggers or started the crematorium furnaces or dug the mass graves to conceal the Holocaust’s sad, innocent, victims.

I believe that it deserves universal watching, as does Claude Lanzmann’s monumental “Shoah”, which remains a nonpareil cinematic text on the Holocaust.

At Dendy