Final Account

In 2008, the late British filmmaker Luke Holland began interviewing the last living generation of Germans to have participated in the Third Reich, everyday citizens who carried out plans made by the architects of mass-scale genocide. More than a decade later Holland completed Final Account, a raw and urgent documentary - featuring in-depth witness statements, previously unseen archival material, and haunting current-day footage - that reflects on how otherwise ordinary people took part in one of the most extraordinary of all human crimes.

‘The film really is an extension of [late filmmaker Luke Holland’s] life. You know, his mother and father left Germany, you know, to escape the Third Reich. He didn’t know that he was Jewish until he was in his teens. And then once he did, I think he was always on a quest to really discover that history and why his family had been through it, what the origins of that were. And, you know, it was no surprise to me in 2008 when he said, I want to go to Germany and interview Nazis. Had it come from anybody else, I would have been surprised but actually not from him.’

Associate producer Sam Pope, from an interview with NPR.