Directed by Luke Holland
Rated PG-13
In theaters May 21

by Alex Rudolph. Staff Writer

The only comforting thing about Final Account, Luke Holland's new documentary about the last living German generation to have participated in the Holocaust, is knowing it started production in 2008, and that when an elderly person says he continues to honor Hitler, he's probably dead. If you do a little reading about the film, though, you'll find that Holland, an incisive director and photographer whose work focused on fascism and evil on a personal level, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015 and that he himself passed away last year. In some things, there is no relief.

Even without knowing its first interviews were conducted 13 years ago, Final Account feels like a massive work. Holland reportedly spoke with over 250 Nazis and people who would like you to think they weren't Nazis. He returns to the dozen or so represented in this film as time passes, discussing the war and what it was like to be a young person in Germany in the 30s before pushing further and confronting his subjects about their culpability in everything. I've watched documentaries and I've been to museums, which means I've heard from survivors, but I'm always left wanting to hear from a few perpetrators. Shoah, the ür-Holocaust documentary, is probably the only other time I've spent listening to post-Nuremberg Nazis grapple with what they've done. As a Jew, I've always wanted to get a more complete sense of where it all came from, how it was rationalized, if it ever fully went away for these people, etc. Holland provides those answers expertly. He isn't setting you up to sympathize with anybody, but these people think they're inherently sympathetic, and Holland grabs onto that and uses their self-images to interrogate everything they offer.

You could (and maybe should) make a film like Final Account about any tragedy with living war criminals. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence were the most acclaimed documentaries of the 2010s, so it's not as if people are avoiding the topic. What makes the Holocaust such a uniquely strong candidate for this approach, though, is how universally black-and-white the slaughter is considered. In Oppenheimer's series, the killers had ultimately won their fight, and whatever outsiders in the films' audiences think, the people behind the genocide are allowed to feel good about themselves because they're the ones who get to write their country's history books.

Unless America gets uncharacteristically self-reflective in the next decade and stops rehabilitating George W. Bush's image, we'll never get a film like this about the people who backed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thirty years from now, they'll still live in a world that largely supported their crimes. And 15 years after that, the lobbyists and politicians and TV hosts who denied climate change will report from Arizona about how they only knew it was real when they were forced to move out of California. They just backed the side they thought was right at the time. Somebody's going to make a documentary about everything that's happening in Gaza right now and they're going to interview Israelis who are publically allowed to feel justified in their actions because so many other world powers kept lending their support.

But the Holocaust is the rare mass murder everybody (save neo-Nazis and edgelords) can condemn. It's shocking, then, to watch Holland talk with people who admit to at one point thinking you could find a Jew by their smell. These are subjects who grew up learning to read with a "Jew-themed alphabet book," where every letter was assigned a negative Jewish attribute like "greasy." One interviewee, the son of a butcher, talks about how the Jewish man his father sold animal skins to suddenly disappeared and that was that. Another, a little older, remembers Kristallnacht, when his village's firefighters gathered around a burning synagogue, not to stop the destruction but to make sure it didn't spread to any of the neighboring, Aryan houses.

But we know about that. I know Jews were murdered. The important thing, and the reason Final Account is a crucial document, is the way Holland pushes further. He asks that interviewee about the flaming synagogue. "Was it a crime?" he prods. And the man can't give a straight answer, ultimately saying that "from a legal perspective, it is the destruction of property." Watching the movie, your stomach twists every ten minutes or so. Somebody will say she was too young to understand that concentration camps were bad, and Holland will push them, say "14 is too young?" and the person will say "Well, we didn't go outside of our village."

That's the first kind of person in Final Account–the rationalizer, who has spent every day since the 40s diminishing their agency in a years-long massacre. It's horrifying to watch bodies dragged through the streets, they'll offer, and then back up and note "As an accountant, I had nothing to do with it" (actual line). I had initially wished the interviews were longer, that Holland had pushed harder, but as the movie continued, the director's long game became more clear. He's easier on his subjects earlier on, ingratiating himself to them. The requests for clarification come later, when there's a relationship and he can talk to these people on a deeper level. There's a turning point, in which a man discusses escaped death camp prisoners hiding on his farm, where you realize why Holland had to film this for over a decade. The man walks Holland through his farm, pointing to where the Jews had been sleeping before being discovered and taken away to be killed. The director politely points out the passive voice, asking "How did the police find out?" And the man stumbles and says "Well, we found them and we called the police. At least that's how I remember." You don't film something like this in a year. You return again and again and build trust, to the point that you can ease a person into admitting they were responsible for at least two deaths in a slaughter they had just been shaking their heads at.

I don't know whether that type of person is worse than the second. A few people pine for the days of the Third Reich. A woman laughs and talks about hiding her camp guard husband for nine months so he wouldn't be taken to jail after the war ended. A man gets glassy-eyed praising the camaraderie he felt in the SS, when "you could count on a man 100%." Part of the master race grift is the idea that once you're in, you're better than everybody else, and a former soldier here is still bragging about how "not anybody could join." "I would dirty myself," he insists, if he was to say the SS was a criminal organization. "Nuremberg decided [Nazis were evil], not the Germans."

The one time you feel for anybody, you're watching an old ex-Nazi speaking to a room of far-right youth, their faces all blurred out, in the building where the Final Solution was planned out. The older man says he's ashamed of his crimes. "I lost my honor. It's a scar on this whole country. I belonged to a murder organization. What else was it?" He's crying. And a student, anonymous, reprimands him for "being sad about being German." The kid is angry. "You can't be ashamed of standing up for the fatherland or you're saying everybody who says they're proud to be German belongs in jail." The man considers his life a failure, the boy pushes back and the man knows there's nothing he can do to stop the incoming wave of young fascists. They'll always be there.

It feels bizarre to say, but there's a relief in the building's setting. You're watching Nazis, new and old, argue, but you're in a large room. Final Account is a claustrophobic movie, one in which you're often locked facing a Nazi for long periods of time. I grew to feel oddly uncomfortable with my screener's watermark because it meant I was looking at my name impressed on people who would have been happy to kill me. Holland, who dedicated the film to his grandparents, victims of the Holocaust, knew exactly what he was doing. You don't want to engage with the people he's forcing you to engage with. Every instinct tells you to avoid fascist scum. Final Account says it's time to figure out what those beliefs and actions do to your soul. It's now or never. They're dying. I wish Holland hadn't also died, primarily because he's a human being but also because I can't believe a person spent the years 2008-2020 making something this intense. I wish I had been able to see another Luke Holland film, and I wish he had been granted a long break after making a piece of art this painful.