The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
~Edmund Burke
FINAL ACCOUNT is an urgent portrait of the last living generation of everyday people to participate in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Over a decade in the making, the film raises vital, timely questions about authority, conformity, complicity and perpetration, national identity, and responsibility, as men and women ranging from former SS members to civilians in never-before-seen interviews reckon with – in very different ways – their memories, perceptions and personal appraisals of their own roles in the greatest human crimes in history.
In 2008, Film Director and Producer Luke Holland started interviewing ordinary German citizens, then quite elderly, who had been children during the Third Reich. I suspect that this documentary, in Holland’s own way, may have been a tribute to his own grandparents who were murdered as were millions of others during this time frame in history.
We saw the movie in the AMC theatre in Franklin last weekend and found it historically accurate, thoughtful, insightful, and an intimate, if somewhat painful glimpse inside the human psyche. It didn’t have an over-abundance of the intensely dark and gruesome graphics that usually accompany the crimes against humanity that took place at that point in history. But the memories, perceptions, and stories of the interviewees, as well as their interactions with one another were quite revealing.
My interest in the documentary lies in the human element. The question in my mind has always been this: how did the German people, the common, everyday folks who lived in villages and worked in communities and raised families and paid taxes allow such atrocities to take place under their noses, in their country, by their leaders? And, of course, there are no simplistic answers to that question.
What was evident in the film was that in 2008, some 70 years after the fact, these people were still dealing with those types of questions for themselves.
As we are now facing the rise of fascism in this country, bits and pieces of the threads of cultural history expressed in the scenes of the documentary felt eerily familiar to me, which I certainly did not anticipate. It left me with the impression that whether we like it or not, each individual, each family, each church, each community, all of us without exception, will likely be cast into a role that we will have to play in the days ahead if the head-long plunge of our own cultural and national history into fascism is not arrested and averted.
The great question before each of us seems to be this: Will we shape that role or will that role shape us?
If you can, see the movie. Think about the implications of it. Glean something useful from the life experience of others.
And pray for God’s mercy.