PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A documentary called Final Account, featuring conversations with elderly Nazis from the Third Reich, hits theaters on Friday. It's more than a movie, but an historical archive.
Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation, said that before filmmaker Luke Holland passed away, they connected in 2008 when he first decided he wanted to interview former Nazis of the Third Reich.
"Although he thought he might make a film, the first thing was to see what interviews he would collect and who he would find," said Smith.
"He just kept going and going and going and going, and now there's over 300 interviews."
Associate Producer Sam Pope pointed to one of those interviews that happened while passing through a village near the Bergen-Belson Concentration Camp. They came across an elderly man who had lived there his entire life.
"He describes, whilst taking Luke on a tour of the old family farm, how they would find Jewish escapees who had hidden on the family property and then once finding them, reporting them to the concentration camp guard and then escorting them back," said Pope.
Smith says Holland was motivated by his unanswered questions.
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"Why did this happen? How did this happen? Who committed this crime?" Smith said. He described the archive of stories from this perspective as astonishing.
"As an oral historian of the Holocaust period, I'd never seen anything like it."
He added that looking at the Nazi side of the story with empathy doesn't make their atrocities acceptable.
"There was no sense in the documentary, and I will extend that to the content that I've seen in the archive, of remorse towards the victims at all."