The sins of the father

While children are not responsible for the sins of the fathers, there are occasions where the legacy left behind by our forbearers is inescapable. Such is the case in My Nazi Legacy, where international genocide lawyer Philippe Sands explores the burden of history resting on the shoulders of Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter, whose fathers were the Nazi governors of Poland and Galicia respectively, responsible for sending thousands upon thousands to their deaths.

What follows is a deeply personal documentary – Sands grandfather, who grew up in Lviv, Ukraine, was the only family member out of 80 to survive the Holocaust – that shakes up our preconceived black-and-white notions of attitudes to the past. Frank has come to terms with the legacy of his father, and is completely ready to denounce him as an evil man. For von Wächter, however, the fall of Nazi Germany meant he ‘dropped out of normality’, and there is a sense that he has never really returned. He refuses to face up to his father’s undeniable links to the Holocaust, and yet in some ways he cuts the most sympathetic figure of the film; a much less polished speaker than Frank, there is a sense that he is exposing himself completely to the camera. ‘I don’t want to be stuck somewhere full of pain’, he says, and it is difficult for us not to see where he is coming from. As the film progresses, he is brought more and more evidence of his father’s deed, but von Wächter remains an immovable object against the irresistible force of oppressive history Sands brings down.

While Sands adds an Adam Curtis-esque authority to the documentary, his linking together of past and present events is not as seamless – we end the documentary on a mediation on growing Fascist sentiment in the Ukraine that seems to sit oddly with the rest of the film. Nevertheless, _My Nazi Legacy _is a moving, deeply personal portrait of the scars left by the march of history.

Final Verdict: 3.5 Stars