My clash with death-camp Hanna
To conceal the same dilemma, at Siemens she apparently volunteered to become an Auschwitz guard. The portrayal of the transition from factory to mass murderer as seamless - Siemens one day, Auschwitz the next - justifies the notion of Schmitz as victim, a convenient fantasy for Germany’s new soothsayers. “What would you have done?” she asks the judge, who is made to look discomfited when posed the test of “moral equivalence”.
All those issues are bogus, raised by some Germans to avoid the fundamental discovery described by the Potsdam history: that in 1945 most Germans felt no guilt but only regret for their personal losses and the country’s humiliating surrender. The Germans’ inability to mourn for the victims of the Nazis reflected their overwhelming self-pity.to suggest that Schmitz, a sadistic thug, would employ an incompetent lawyer and accept long imprisonment to hide the shame of her illiteracy deliberately distorts the murderer’s character. By humanising the murderer’s dilemma - should I admit to illiteracy and escape long punishment? - the film deceives the audience. In reality, after 1945 few Germans talked about the Holocaust or pursued the murderers because of their own guilt. Before and during the war, the allies had in effect side-stepped the Nazis’ atrocities and after the war there were other priorities. The Germans cared even less about their victims, especially the survivors. The film shies away from that uncomfortable truth.
Germany’s reputation was helped when war crimes trials restarted in the late 1950s. Fritz Bauer, a prosecutor based in Frankfurt, rebelled against the country’s institutionalised blind eye to murder. He led the first prosecution of former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt. The realisation that the accused were receiving state pensions for their service in Auschwitz shattered a convenient myth about removing the Nazi stain from German society.
In 1960, Bauer’s genius identified the location in Argentina of Adolf