If we have had the opportunity to see something in recent years, it is films, series and documentaries about World War II and the Holocaust. It is likely that this topic will be used until the next similar event in the future, and British documentary filmmaker Luke Holland went to Germany in 2008 to find living witnesses of the 1930s and early 1940s. Unfortunately, Holland passed away very soon after the film was finished and did not experience its premiere, just as certainly the vast majority of people appearing in “Final Account”. And there are inevitable comparisons with probably the most famous documentary about the Holocaust, the monumental “Shoah” by Claude Lanzmann, but still this is a powerful, shocking, but also important documentary.
From 2008 for the next ten years, Hollande interviewed some three hundred witnesses of the time who were young people at the time of the Third Reich. Some of them remember joining the Hitler Youth in the early 1930s, some explain why they joined the infamous SS. The grandmothers describe what their life was like right next to the concentration camps. Interviews alternate with restored footage from that era and photographs, and still living witnesses, respectively people in the 1980s or 1990s, some of whom still do not want to accept what happened. The story is set chronologically, so we start from the early 1930s when Hitler seized power in the second half of the 1930s and the beginning of the persecution of Jews until World War II.
From the stories of people who remember joining various Nazi organizations as children, we understand that this was a system worked out to the smallest detail. How propaganda brainwashed children from an early age, how it is a real cult of uniforms and militarism that it really seems scary, but also warning. We also realize that a good portion of those who witnessed the time knew what was happening, but many admit that they were silent out of fear of death because they were aware of what would happen to them if they bit something. We also have some old SS members who claim that members of their units certainly did not commit crimes in the camps because they were on the front lines, as well as recollections of people who lived near the camps and point out that they still smell of crematoria. Those who are still interested in this topic, with the “Final Account” will certainly not go wrong. Rating 7.5 / 10.
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