“Final Account” is a chilling and essential documentary featuring rare testimony from a wide range of elderly Germans and Austrians who witnessed or participated in — both wittingly and unwittingly — the atrocities of the Holocaust. It’s a fascinating look, yet again, at one of history’s most horrendous periods and explores the era’s eternal question: “Were you a perpetrator if you knew, but said or did nothing?”
Writer-director Luke Holland (“Good Morning, Mr. Hitler,” “I Was a Slave Labourer”), who died of cancer last June at age 71, grew up unaware that he was Jewish and that his maternal grandparents were killed in concentration camps. This long-withheld secret and need to explore his family history led him to arduously locate and interview everyday non-Jewish citizens who came of age as the Third Reich came into power — and the insidious, if often accepted, ways in which their lives were affected and shaped.
