Critic Reviews

In the end, the power of Final Account resides in the way it shows how human nature reacts to lies, propaganda and state-sanctioned atrocity. Some people, looking for an excuse to do evil, will jump right in. A very tiny faction will risk all to fight against them.

This is a vital companion piece to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and it ends with a chilling coda.

The spirit of Claude Lanzmann, whose monumental Shoah remains a nonpareil cinematic text on the Holocaust, lingers over and around Final Account, a film assembled by Luke Holland around interviews he conducted beginning in 2008.

The Holocaust is one of the most exhaustively documented events in history, yet it can seemingly never be documented enough. This is not only due to the relentless persistence of antisemites and fascist sympathizers in trying to sow doubt as to its veracity, but because many more seemingly benign parties have managed to distance themselves from fascism’s warning to the West, and the world.

Explicitly, his film shows how a hundred shades of grey combine to make a darkness. Implicitly, it warns that it could well happen again.

There are no heroes in Final Account, no one to empathize with. What makes it uniquely worth watching is its cast of octogenarians and nonagenarians who were eyewitnesses and in some cases active participants in the horrors of the concentration camps.

An oral history of a once-broken, brainwashed nation, Final Account is the end result of Holland’s efforts to collect testimonies on the unthinkable before those who were there are gone.

The "important" label can weigh heavily on a documentary, but the description applies to "Final Account," director Luke Holland's decade-long odyssey to capture and preserve the memories of Germans who lived through the Holocaust, acknowledging their complicity to varying degrees. While much has been done to chronicle survivors' stories, this sobering companion belongs on the shelf alongside them.

Final Account is about today as much as yesterday, and that makes it perhaps the most urgent World War II documentary of them all.

Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.