Writer and director Luke Holland, who sadly passed away a year ago, was a great friend of the Library. He was a regular visitor at the Library and our events and always advocated our work. I was fortunate enough to meet Luke in 2018 when he came to our Russell Square building to continue our discussion about Final Account, the project which would be his last. Luke’s documentary project resulted in the collection of rare testimonies taken from elderly Germans who either participated or witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust. He wanted to bring the Library on board to act as a repository so these voices would be preserved for future generations.
Luke had not known that his Viennese maternal grandparents were Jewish and had been murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. The need to explore his family history and the urge to better understand what had happened to his own family, took him on a journey to interview everyday German and Austrian citizens who had been members of the SS, Wehrmacht soldiers, concentration camp guards, and other witnesses. People opened up to Luke’s camera; more than 250 men and women.
Professor Mary Fulbrook, University College London, commented that the documentary:
“Would leave viewers with no doubt that, even in the early moments when prejudice was expressed via those little microaggressions in everyday life, Nazis knew what they were doing.”
This collection of testimonies is as difficult to listen to as the reports the Library collected immediately after Kristallnacht in November 1938, or during our 1950s project to collect eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution.
We often think of perpetrators as those who directly commit violence, those who murder innocent people. However, with only his camera in hand, Luke wanted his audiences to understand the role of passive bystanders – those who justified to him their decisions to turn a blind eye.
Using testimonies from the Final Account collection, Compromised Identities explores this very question. The online exhibition at University College London investigates discrepancies between individual motives and behaviours and how the postwar political circumstances reframed the perpetrators’ own past. The exhibition points out that: “with a recent rise in racist and antisemitic acts, continued instances of collective violence, and renewed calls for reckoning with violent pasts, these reflections remain all too relevant today.”
The collection of interviews will be available at two places in the UK: at The Wiener Holocaust Library and University College London. Both institutions will provide free onsite access to all the video testimonies through a brand new online platform built by the French Institut National de l’audiovisuel.
Access to the Final Account collection at the Library
Access to the Resource is provided exclusively via a dedicated computer available in the Reading Room. The computer must be reserved in advance to avoid disappointment – please email us at [email protected] and we will try to accommodate your request. However, please note that this may not always be possible; hence, we will give you alternative dates.
Headphones will be provided, however feel free to bring your own if you prefer.
Please note that access to the collection is controlled, conditional on the signature of a User Declaration, and restricted. Terms and Conditions for Access and Use apply. Select interviews remain closed until further notice.
In addition, copy, photographs, audio or video record, download, edit, share, upload or otherwise distribute the video recordings, are NOT permitted at any time. Researchers will only be allowed to take notes.
Lastly, a hard-copy Finding Aid will be available to researchers.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact the Collections Team at [email protected]
The Wiener Holocaust Library Subject Guides: War Crime Trials
The Library’s holdings on war crime trials largely pertain to those crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. We do hold a small but growing section on war crime trials relating to other genocides.
Suggested further readings
- Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice by Mary Fulbrook
- A small town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust by Mary Fulbrook
- Reverberations of Nazi violence in Germany and Beyond: Disturbing Pasts by Stephanie Bird
- Ordinary Men: Resever Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning
- Ordinary Organizations: Why normal men carried out the Holocaust by Stefan Kühl
- Forced Confrontation: the politics of dead bodies in Germany at the end of World War II by Christopher E. Mauriello
For more related sources, try a search for any of the following keywords in our Collections Catalogue: Postwar; Racial persecution; Third Reich (1933-1945); War crime trials; Memory.
One comment so far
Why isn’t this film widely known? It is the ultimate work of a humanitarian/historian who asks us to think about how little passive acts lead to an acceptance of evil that is rearing its ugly head in the US now.
Read “The Kindly Ones” and “Every Man Dies Alone.”