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Former Nazis give their ‘Final Account’ in new documentary AN INTERVIEW SUBJECT FROM “FINAL ACCOUNT”
BY ANDREW LAPIN
(COURTESY OF FOCUS FEATURES
(JTA) – There is a remarkable scene toward the end of the new documentary “Final Account,” a collection of eyewitness testimonies of the Nazi regime from elderly Germans and Austrians who remember it (and, to various degrees, were part of it).
In the sequence, a former Waffen-SS officer sits down with a group of students in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee – the site of the infamous Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials met in 1942 to map out the parameters of the Final Solution. The officer, Hans Werk, speaks of the tremendous shame he feels for himself and his country to have orchestrated the genocide of six million Jews.
When Werk is challenged by a young German nationalist – an anonymous right-winger obsessed with “protecting the Fatherland” and sick of hearing about “shame” from his elders – the former Nazi fires back, recounting Jewish friends and neighbors of his who had assumed they were also part of the Fatherland, until they were marched off to the camps. The true Nazi ideology was not patriotism, he says, but hate.
“Do not let yourselves be blinded!” he shouts.
The film itself has the same aim in mind. “Final Account” is the result of more than a decade of interviews conducted by British documentarian Luke Holland, who discovered his Jewish heritage as a teenager upon learning that his mother’s family had been murdered in the Holocaust. (Holland died last year shortly after completing the film.)
“Final Account” is made up almost entirely of contemporary interviews with former Nazis. Naturally, there are many fewer eyewitnesses left alive today than there were four decades ago, when the French-Jewish filmmaker Claude Lanzmann interviewed scores for his landmark 10-hour documentary “Shoah.” Lanzmann could talk to high-ranking SS officers. By contrast, Holland’s interview subjects were largely children or teenagers at the time.
Many of the anecdotes in Holland’s film revolve around the subjects joining the Hitler Youth as kids or watching their parents support the Nazi Party. A few worked at the camps, or the train stations that led prisoners to them, but their own accounts seem to conveniently distance themselves from the actual murders. Some continue to deny the genocide ever took place. These occasional denialists feel more like sideshows to the film’s main goal – and they might be committing a crime on camera, since both Germany and Austria have outlawed the practice of Holocaust denial.
By and large, most of the interviews in “Final Account” focus on the language of culpability: when (or if) one’s presence within an evil regime constitutes being a perpetrator of its aims.
“We didn’t support the party, but we liked the uniform,” one subject says, conjuring the comic images of exuberant Nazi children in “Jojo Rabbit.”
Others remember the odd yet mundane details that allowed them to build an everyday life around the atrocities taking place in their name.
Holland occasionally prods his subjects from offscreen to acknowledge their participation in crimes against humanity, much as Joshua Oppenheimer did to architects of the Indonesian genocide in “The Act of Killing.” Together, Holland, Oppenheimer and Lanzmann form an unsettling lineage of Jewish filmmakers who have felt compelled to confront genocide participants face to face on film.
“Final Account” doesn’t have quite the same revelatory feel as its predecessors in this genre – the film rarely breaks through the surfaces of its subjects’ accounts to dig at whatever their emotional truth might be. Maybe there isn’t any: One of the overarching messages is that populations can follow hateful ideologies blindly if they feel acceptable enough to the masses.
But there are moments that wrestle with deeper questions. The Wannsee scene, in which one generation of German seems incapable of passing on his personal and historical shame to the next, invokes not only the past but also the future of Holocaust memory. Their conversation is in anticipation of a world in which we have no more “final accounts.” When that does happen, and there are no more eyewitnesses left, how are we to continue the lessons of “Never Again”?
It’s a question that has haunted the last century of Jewish life – and, by necessity, must also haunt the next.
THE LEDGER SCOREBOARD
Sylvan Adams gets rolling for bike race in Tel Aviv
BY HOWARD BLAS
JNS) While Israelis were rushing for shelter in mid-May as thousands of rockets were raining down on them from Hamas in Gaza, Canadian-Israeli businessman and philanthropist Sylvan Adams was in Paris at a press conference featuring international biking-race organizers. He was helping promote and unveil plans to bring elite male and female riders to Tel Aviv at the end of the year for a new indoor cycling competition showcasing the world’s top track cyclists.
The Sylvan Adams Velodrome in Tel Aviv will serve as host to the final round of the inaugural UCI Track Champions League on Dec. 11. The other events will take place at velodromes in Spain, France, Lithuania and England between Nov. 6 and Dec. 4.
Adams, who made aliyah five years ago from Montreal, has been at the forefront of presenting Israel in a positive light in front of international audiences. In addition to bringing the UCI event to the Sylvan Adams National Velodrome, which will also host the 2022 UCI Junior Track Cycling World Championships, he has brought the prestigious Giro d’Italia bike race to Israel in 2018 and is also co-owner of the Israel Start-Up Nation cycling team. He brought soccer superstar Lionel Messi, and the national teams of Argentina and Uruguay, to Israel in November 2019, in addition to legendary singer Madonna to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2019.
Details of the innovative new bike-racing series were announced via a live digital event streamed from Saint-Quentin-enYvelines near Paris and Bath in the United Kingdom. Discussing the details of the upcoming competition were president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) – cycling’s world governing body – David Lappartient; Eurosport & Discovery Global Sports Rights & Sports Marketing Solutions president Andrew Georgiou; and François Ribeiro, the head of Eurosport Events. They were joined by ambassadors and track-cycling legends Kristina Vogel and Sir Chris Hoy MBE, plus key figures including businessman and, of course, Adams.
Adams praised his cycling colleagues from England, noting that “we are taking a page from Britain to become a preeminent cycling country.” He says he is hoping to use the indoor velodrome event “to offer an opportunity to bridge from the road-cycling experience.”
The 62-year-old billionaire then turned his attention to Israel, saying: “I am glad the Grand Finale will be in Tel Aviv; it is a very rich opportunity. I think of Israelis as winners. We win with anything we put our minds to.”
The elite competition will feature many of the world’s highest-profile riders. The event is designed to build the global profile of track cycling beyond the four-year Olympic cycle.
The 36 male and 36 female riders vying for victory in the League’s Sprint and Endurance categories will be motivated by prizes totaling more than €500,000 (nearly $615,000).
“We are taking a page from Britain to become a preeminent cycling country.”
Lappartient reports that “the launch of the UCI Track Champions League marks an important milestone in the history of track cycling–one of cycling’s historic disciplines and one that has been part of the Olympic Games since the first modern Games in 1896. I am very much looking forward to seeing this inaugural edition of the UCI Track Champions League take place in these iconic venues revealed today and to seeing the first four men’s and women’s winners of the 2021 UCI Track Champions League, celebrated in December in Israel.”
Adams notes that “our velodrome – the first such facility in the Middle East – is just over a year old, and we already have developed some real track talents, both men and women, who will get the opportunity to race against the world’s best on their home track.
“In a way, this will be our comingout party to the rest of the track-cycling world, which will get to see our world-class facility, as the event is going to be beamed into living-room TVs around the globe by Eurosport. …Looking forward to welcoming everyone to the great, exciting city of Tel Aviv.”
SYLVAN ADAMS
(COURTESY: ADAMS)
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