B+Directed by David Evans Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Some of the most important, and underseen, photos in American history are the shots of lynchings. Smiling white men and women and sometimes their children pose next to the burnt and dismembered corpses of black men. In addition to the gore and snuffed-out life present in these pictures, they are most horrific from the fact that the dead men or women in the picture could be swapped out with some giant county fair pumpkin or a winning Little League team, and the smiles would be the same. There’s civic pride on those faces, prompting the viewer to wonder what the conversation was like on the trip back home. Did attendees gather at the soda fountain after and reminisce the next day? The banality of these pictures is a reminder that evil doesn’t have a tail and cloven hooves, but a family and an occupation and a house with framed pictures. The documentary A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did is about the now-elderly children in those frames reckoning, or not, with a different set of crimes committed by their parents, men who orchestrated monstrosities and then came home to their families. The existence of atrocity next to domesticity continues to hold great interest for this viewer, a universal human dichotomy that remains fascinating and chilling across all timelines and continents.
The histories of the three principals of David Evans’ film intersect in a Ukrainian city amidst the terror of the Eastern Front and the Nazi occupation. The fathers of Niklas Frank and Horst van Wachter were two high-ranking officials in the Third Reich, while Phillippe Sands’ grandfather was one of the tiny minority of Jews to escape the place with their lives. Niklas and Horst differ significantly in how they view their fathers. Like much of Germany, the former has come to terms with what his father did, and condemns him as the genocidal war criminal he was. Like much of Eastern Europe, the latter is willing to throw the various functionaries under the umbrella of being trapped in a system, preferring to think about the small victory of keeping his family safe while condemning so many others. Phillippe, a human rights attorney, wants to understand how these men feel about their heritages, but as the descendant of survivors, he also wants to drag an admission out of Horst that his father was not only the cheerful man who played with his young children, but also the bureaucrat who knowingly organized the trains that took thousands to their deaths.
Horst is shown to be a tremendously difficult person despite a pleasant demeanor. He’s completely immune to any evidence that Phillippe presents him. He inanely compliments the sturdy architecture of a bombed-out synagogue that’s been preserved as a monument to the dead, or the still beauty of a field that was turned into a mass grave within his lifetime. He is mentally incapable of countenancing a different picture of his father than the one that’s been preserved in amber from his early years. Horst is partly able to do so because his father, aided by the Catholic church (an organization with its own massive blind spots), escaped Nuremberg and died without a moral accounting or judgment in a monastery. Niklas doesn’t have that luxury, and would likely reject it if he had it. He doesn’t have Horst’s rosy memories of childhood, remembering only a harsh and cold man who was executed as an unrepentant lickspittle of Hitler. A man with a far bigger moral imagination than Horst, Niklas can even spare some empathy for his hated patriarch, looking at his baby pictures and wondering how an undifferentiated infant could grow up to be such a monster.
Evans has the cinematic good fortune to capture a serendipitous moment that perfectly crystallizes the power of his film. On their trip to Ukraine, Horst is waylaid by descendants and veterans of the division that his father founded, and is hailed as the son of a hero, thus validating everything he thought about his father’s record. This group was established not only to perpetuate a genocide, but also to resist the Red Army, a highly relevant mission in 2015. Openly wearing swastikas on their uniforms, the commemorators view their comrades as liberators and defenders of the homeland from a vicious opposing force. Who cares that some Jews got put on trains when the division fought bravely against Communist tyrants who also had plenty of blood on their hands? This revisionist view is chilling especially when Stalin’s image is also on the upswing in Russia. A Nazi Legacy captures the wide breadth of history and how fungible even the most obvious examples of evil are for individuals and societies. Anything can be hand-waved away with the most minimal of excuses. B+
Horst is shown to be a tremendously difficult person despite a pleasant demeanor. He’s completely immune to any evidence that Phillippe presents him. He inanely compliments the sturdy architecture of a bombed-out synagogue that’s been preserved as a monument to the dead, or the still beauty of a field that was turned into a mass grave within his lifetime. He is mentally incapable of countenancing a different picture of his father than the one that’s been preserved in amber from his early years. Horst is partly able to do so because his father, aided by the Catholic church (an organization with its own massive blind spots), escaped Nuremberg and died without a moral accounting or judgment in a monastery. Niklas doesn’t have that luxury, and would likely reject it if he had it. He doesn’t have Horst’s rosy memories of childhood, remembering only a harsh and cold man who was executed as an unrepentant lickspittle of Hitler. A man with a far bigger moral imagination than Horst, Niklas can even spare some empathy for his hated patriarch, looking at his baby pictures and wondering how an undifferentiated infant could grow up to be such a monster.
Evans has the cinematic good fortune to capture a serendipitous moment that perfectly crystallizes the power of his film. On their trip to Ukraine, Horst is waylaid by descendants and veterans of the division that his father founded, and is hailed as the son of a hero, thus validating everything he thought about his father’s record. This group was established not only to perpetuate a genocide, but also to resist the Red Army, a highly relevant mission in 2015. Openly wearing swastikas on their uniforms, the commemorators view their comrades as liberators and defenders of the homeland from a vicious opposing force. Who cares that some Jews got put on trains when the division fought bravely against Communist tyrants who also had plenty of blood on their hands? This revisionist view is chilling especially when Stalin’s image is also on the upswing in Russia. A Nazi Legacy captures the wide breadth of history and how fungible even the most obvious examples of evil are for individuals and societies. Anything can be hand-waved away with the most minimal of excuses. B+
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