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Imagine what it must be like | 0:00:56 | 0:00:58 | |
to grow up as the child of a mass murderer. | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
To live with such a parent must impose the most terrible of burdens. | 0:01:01 | 0:01:05 | |
My name is Niklas Frank. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
I am born 9th of March, 1939. | 0:01:15 | 0:01:20 | |
This is not special, special is that I'm by chance | 0:01:20 | 0:01:26 | |
the son of Hans Frank. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:29 | |
He was politically responsible for all the ghettos | 0:01:29 | 0:01:35 | |
and for the concentration camps on the soil of Poland. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:41 | |
I was researching a book on the Nuremberg trial | 0:01:44 | 0:01:47 | |
when I met Niklas Frank, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:48 | |
and later he introduced me to Horst von Wachter. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:51 | |
I was born in Vienna on 14th April, 1939. | 0:01:54 | 0:02:01 | |
So I'm still a child of peace. | 0:02:01 | 0:02:04 | |
It was before the war. | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
As gratitude towards the Nazi party, | 0:02:07 | 0:02:11 | |
my mother proposed the name of Horst, | 0:02:11 | 0:02:13 | |
after Horst Wessel who was a prominent figure | 0:02:13 | 0:02:17 | |
from the first years of the Nazi party. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:20 | |
Right from the beginning, my father, he was a complete Nazi. | 0:02:20 | 0:02:26 | |
The material was all the more relevant to me | 0:02:27 | 0:02:29 | |
because of my own family background. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
I'm Jewish and my family was very directly affected | 0:02:31 | 0:02:34 | |
by the actions of these men. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
I'm curious about details and people. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:39 | |
I want to know why things happened, why people act as they do, | 0:02:39 | 0:02:43 | |
how they can engage in mass killing and then spend an evening with their families. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:47 | |
Yet, watching these images felt dirty, | 0:02:47 | 0:02:50 | |
as though I was complicit in a voyeuristic sort of way, | 0:02:50 | 0:02:54 | |
looking on the inside of horror. | 0:02:54 | 0:02:57 | |
Mr President, members of the court, uh, it's an honour... | 0:03:09 | 0:03:13 | |
'My day job is working as an international lawyer | 0:03:13 | 0:03:16 | |
'on cases involving genocide and crimes against humanity, | 0:03:16 | 0:03:20 | |
'but it was while working on my book | 0:03:20 | 0:03:22 | |
'that I was commissioned to write an article about Horst von Wachter.' | 0:03:22 | 0:03:26 | |
I came with a tremendous anxiety | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
because I just didn't know what to expect, | 0:03:37 | 0:03:39 | |
and because of this connection with the past. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
Here was a man who might have met Hitler. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:44 | |
I was meeting someone who was directly connected, | 0:03:44 | 0:03:47 | |
not just with abstract history | 0:03:47 | 0:03:49 | |
but with a deep part of my family's life. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:52 | |
How did you find this house? | 0:03:58 | 0:03:59 | |
Here, there was a colony of artists in the '60s, you know. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:03 | |
-Living in the schloss? -Yeah, yeah. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
It was a secret place, you know, | 0:04:05 | 0:04:07 | |
-where they came and made their festivities. -Yeah. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:11 | |
I love this staircase. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:13 | |
Everything has a meaning, you know. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:15 | |
Positions of the doors for elements, for directions. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:20 | |
This room is devoted to Trismegistus, | 0:04:20 | 0:04:25 | |
who's the god of wisdom, god of numbers. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:30 | |
-22 windows. -No, that... | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
-No, 16 windows. -There are 16, then you have four doors. | 0:04:32 | 0:04:36 | |
-Yeah. -And you have two chimneys, you know. -Yeah. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:39 | |
And 22 is the number of the letters | 0:04:39 | 0:04:45 | |
in the Hebrew alphabet. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:47 | |
This is really very important. | 0:04:47 | 0:04:51 | |
The Hebrew thing keeps coming back. | 0:04:51 | 0:04:53 | |
Yes, it is Hebrew. | 0:04:53 | 0:04:55 | |
Here you see we have two lovers, you know. | 0:04:56 | 0:04:59 | |
Are they the same lovers or are they different lovers? | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
No, they are different. They are very different, you know. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
'I've come to talk with him about | 0:05:05 | 0:05:06 | |
'what his father got up to during the Second World War, | 0:05:06 | 0:05:09 | |
'and he just wanted to talk about stones and rocks and buildings, | 0:05:09 | 0:05:13 | |
'about history going back millennia, not just 70 years.' | 0:05:13 | 0:05:16 | |
You can see here the two putti, they are kissing each other, you know. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:21 | |
You told me that this building was your father's gift to you. | 0:05:21 | 0:05:25 | |
-Oh, yes. -What did you mean by that? | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
When you said that to me, what did you mean by that? | 0:05:27 | 0:05:30 | |
This has to do with my youth | 0:05:30 | 0:05:32 | |
and how I dropped out of normality because of my father. | 0:05:32 | 0:05:37 | |
Because my normality was... | 0:05:38 | 0:05:41 | |
That was normality between... until 1945 | 0:05:41 | 0:05:45 | |
when I was six years, | 0:05:45 | 0:05:48 | |
and that was practically destroyed, you know, | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
by this whole, by the war, more or less, | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
but I see it now like this. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
Because everything was finished, you know, | 0:05:58 | 0:06:00 | |
and I was raised like a... like a young Nazi boy | 0:06:00 | 0:06:04 | |
and that everything was right and things like that, | 0:06:04 | 0:06:07 | |
and from one day to the other everything was gone, you know, | 0:06:07 | 0:06:12 | |
and that was... I was really shocked. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
I mean, I feel it today, | 0:06:14 | 0:06:16 | |
so that's why I'm here, you know, more or less. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:22 | |
MUSIC: Piano Sonata No 8 by Ludwig van Beethoven | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
I do remember moments in summertime on the lake. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:37 | |
I remember my...sixth birthday | 0:06:37 | 0:06:42 | |
which was on 14th of April, 1945. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:47 | |
It's not only that the regime broke down | 0:06:47 | 0:06:50 | |
but everything around us broke down. | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
The normality broke down for us, for me, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
and I was just... I remember when I was sitting on this...veranda | 0:06:57 | 0:07:02 | |
overlooking...the lake, | 0:07:02 | 0:07:04 | |
and we had this small birthday party | 0:07:04 | 0:07:09 | |
and then I was alone and just thought that | 0:07:09 | 0:07:13 | |
I should remember this moment for all my life. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:17 | |
You had this feeling that everything is finished, | 0:07:18 | 0:07:22 | |
there is no future for you | 0:07:22 | 0:07:25 | |
and whatever you do it has no sense, you know. | 0:07:25 | 0:07:28 | |
What I remember now is the... British and American war planes. | 0:07:30 | 0:07:37 | |
You saw these huge masses of planes over you | 0:07:38 | 0:07:42 | |
and sometimes they... Yes, I remember. Yes. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:48 | |
I remember that they dropped... | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
They dropped the bombs in the lake, you know. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:03 | |
When they had too much bombs | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
or they just wanted to get rid of the bombs, | 0:08:06 | 0:08:10 | |
they dropped it into the lake and... | 0:08:10 | 0:08:13 | |
And the whole, uh... The whole house started to shiver, you know. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:19 | |
'Within an hour of sitting in his room, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
'he'd taken out the family albums and we were going through pages | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
'of summer holidays and winter holidays, | 0:08:34 | 0:08:36 | |
'interspersed with pictures of Dachau, | 0:08:36 | 0:08:38 | |
'images of AH, Adolf Hitler, | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
'and all that happened in the first two hours that I met Horst.' | 0:08:40 | 0:08:44 | |
And here we have him on the water, | 0:08:51 | 0:08:53 | |
Austrian rowing champion on the Danube. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:55 | |
Yes. | 0:08:55 | 0:08:58 | |
-Next album. -As the years move on. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:01 | |
'Otto von Wachter played a central role in the murder | 0:09:01 | 0:09:05 | |
'of the Austrian Chancellor by the Nazis in 1934. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:08 | |
'As early as that he was a leading Austrian Nazi.' | 0:09:08 | 0:09:11 | |
And he's gone from being a complete outsider... | 0:09:11 | 0:09:14 | |
-Yeah, into the government. -Into the government. | 0:09:14 | 0:09:16 | |
So he was named SS-Oberfuhrer on Kristallnacht. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:20 | |
Yeah, when this... This was Kristallnacht. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:24 | |
That's Kristallnacht, yeah. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:26 | |
Yeah, I must check it but then when you say it... | 0:09:26 | 0:09:29 | |
A year later he's now been upgraded and he's a Brigadefuhrer... | 0:09:29 | 0:09:33 | |
That's already in Krakow here. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:36 | |
-I recognize that, that's... -Yeah, that's my mother. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:39 | |
That's your mother sitting with Niklas's mother? | 0:09:39 | 0:09:41 | |
-Yeah, Brigitte Frank. -So this must be in the Wawel. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
-Yes. -In the Wawel castle. | 0:09:44 | 0:09:46 | |
And you see, she was quite a good friend to Brigitte Frank. | 0:09:46 | 0:09:51 | |
'I was transported back 70 years to the heart of an appalling regime | 0:09:53 | 0:09:57 | |
'but Horst was looking at these images with a different eye from mine. | 0:09:57 | 0:10:01 | |
'I see a man who has probably been responsible | 0:10:01 | 0:10:04 | |
'for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. | 0:10:04 | 0:10:07 | |
'Horst looks at the same photographs | 0:10:07 | 0:10:09 | |
'and he sees a beloved father playing with the children | 0:10:09 | 0:10:12 | |
'and he's thinking that was family life.' | 0:10:12 | 0:10:15 | |
-More skiing photos. -Yes. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:22 | |
And this... And now we're in Lemberg. | 0:10:22 | 0:10:24 | |
Now we're in Lemberg. | 0:10:24 | 0:10:25 | |
What is he now? | 0:10:25 | 0:10:27 | |
-The Governor of Galicia. -Yes. | 0:10:27 | 0:10:29 | |
So they've just occupied it. Here he is, they've just occupied it, | 0:10:29 | 0:10:33 | |
they are moving east, this is Soviet propaganda, | 0:10:33 | 0:10:36 | |
-and is that your father? -Yes. | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
-There was a little photograph. -Yeah, yeah of the... With the Jews. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:43 | |
Yeah. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:45 | |
-That was a visit to Warsaw. -A visit to Warsaw. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:48 | |
The eye's attention is caught by the little girl | 0:10:48 | 0:10:52 | |
-who is in the middle and... -Wait... | 0:10:52 | 0:10:56 | |
the light is not so good here. | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
-So your father? -Yeah. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:07 | |
-And this is Himmler. -Yeah. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:09 | |
It is in '43, must be. | 0:11:09 | 0:11:13 | |
-His Galician SS Division. -Yeah. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:15 | |
That was his biggest effort there | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
and because it built up this division | 0:11:18 | 0:11:22 | |
with the help of the Ukrainians. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:25 | |
And that's... That's not you? | 0:11:25 | 0:11:28 | |
That is me, yes, that's me. | 0:11:28 | 0:11:30 | |
You went to stay in the Franks' summer house? | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
I must be sitting behind there. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:34 | |
You're sitting there. That's you over there. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
Yeah, it must be. | 0:11:36 | 0:11:37 | |
-I think that's Niklas... -Yes, it could be. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
..in the Schoberhof. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:41 | |
The very first picture I have in mind I was being washed by my nurse. | 0:11:48 | 0:11:53 | |
It was my first memory, it was here in Schoberhof. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:56 | |
Our rooms were on the back side, it's now torn down. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:00 | |
The building, it became more and more a ruin | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
but now it really tore myself apart | 0:12:05 | 0:12:09 | |
when I saw they are rebuilding it in a new way, | 0:12:09 | 0:12:12 | |
that really hurts. | 0:12:12 | 0:12:14 | |
-Because? -Because it's my home. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:17 | |
We always had our holidays here, | 0:12:17 | 0:12:19 | |
we loved the mountains around here, skiing. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:22 | |
# O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum | 0:12:25 | 0:12:29 | |
# Du kannst mir sehr gefallen | 0:12:29 | 0:12:35 | |
# Wie oft hat nicht zur Weihnachtszeit | 0:12:35 | 0:12:40 | |
# Ein Baum von dir mich hoch erfreut! | 0:12:40 | 0:12:46 | |
# O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum | 0:12:46 | 0:12:52 | |
# Du kannst mir sehr gefallen! # | 0:12:52 | 0:12:56 | |
My beloved nurse Hilda, she was always with us. | 0:12:56 | 0:13:01 | |
Everything what is human with me, | 0:13:01 | 0:13:05 | |
came from Hilda, not from my mother. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:09 | |
And when my mother came back for instance and said, | 0:13:09 | 0:13:12 | |
"Oh, Hilda, go away, now I am with my children. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:16 | |
"You have a free day off." | 0:13:16 | 0:13:18 | |
And after 20 minutes she said, "No, no, Hilda, you have to stay. | 0:13:18 | 0:13:22 | |
"I can't do it with the children, I am too nervous. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:25 | |
"Please keep the children with you." | 0:13:25 | 0:13:27 | |
And she was away with her old Mercedes. | 0:13:27 | 0:13:30 | |
Because I have some memories also of Poland | 0:13:31 | 0:13:34 | |
and she filled in what was left. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
For instance, by visiting the Krakow ghetto. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:40 | |
I only had some, few... | 0:13:40 | 0:13:42 | |
And she said where it was, when it was and what happened. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:47 | |
-Did she accompany you? -Yes, she was with me. | 0:13:47 | 0:13:50 | |
I was never alone as a little child in the Krakow ghetto. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
Together with my mother. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:55 | |
What did you... I mean, what did you see in the Krakow ghetto? | 0:13:55 | 0:13:58 | |
The only thing I remember was | 0:14:20 | 0:14:22 | |
that I was standing inside my Mercedes car, on the back side, | 0:14:22 | 0:14:27 | |
and there were a lot of sad people around me outside. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
And there were some young people of my age, | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
children. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:38 | |
And to one of them I took out my tongue, | 0:14:38 | 0:14:42 | |
and he went away very sadly looking, | 0:14:42 | 0:14:46 | |
and so I was the winner and I was laughing aloud. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:51 | |
But Hilda took me back and was silent besides me, | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
showing me that was not correct. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
Your mother accompanied you on that trip? | 0:15:14 | 0:15:17 | |
Yes, but she was outside of the car shopping in the ghetto. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:21 | |
What shopping was there in the ghetto? I mean the imagination... | 0:15:21 | 0:15:24 | |
Furs, furs. She was always looking for furs. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:28 | |
When you say shopping, you meaning shopping or stealing? | 0:15:28 | 0:15:32 | |
She said "surprises," I would say, | 0:15:32 | 0:15:34 | |
and everybody who was selling to her would say, | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
"Oh, that's the wife of the Governor-General. I'm lucky I will survive." | 0:15:37 | 0:15:41 | |
Yeah, and did your father accompany you on those? | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
No, never. | 0:15:44 | 0:15:46 | |
They hated each other. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:48 | |
The marriage was gone and my father wanted a divorce, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:53 | |
my mother fought all the way up to Hitler | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
and Hitler forbade my father the divorce till after the war. | 0:15:56 | 0:16:01 | |
She... She actually contacted Hitler? | 0:16:01 | 0:16:05 | |
Yes, by letter. She didn't come personally to him | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
but she wrote a letter, a letter including a picture of her and the five children. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:15 | |
And the consequence of that was that Hitler did what? | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
-Hitler instructed... -He forbade. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:21 | |
Hitler forbade Frank the divorce till after the war. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:25 | |
And why did your father just not ignore that? | 0:16:25 | 0:16:28 | |
He loved Hitler more than his family. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:32 | |
IN GERMAN: | 0:16:33 | 0:16:37 | |
My father, he wrote a letter and wrote, uh, | 0:16:53 | 0:16:57 | |
"I am seeing mountains of corpses, | 0:16:57 | 0:17:01 | |
"I am going into the dark, please don't accompany me, | 0:17:01 | 0:17:06 | |
"give me the divorce." | 0:17:06 | 0:17:09 | |
He's using the Final Solution to persuade Brigitte | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
to give him a divorce and she says no. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:15 | |
By the way, if she would have said yes, | 0:17:16 | 0:17:20 | |
we would still keep the show of... | 0:17:20 | 0:17:23 | |
Niklas and Horst, two men I've come to know | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
whose fathers were very senior in the Nazi hierarchy. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:54 | |
Hans Frank started as Hitler's personal lawyer | 0:17:54 | 0:17:57 | |
and then rose to be Governor-General of occupied Poland. | 0:17:57 | 0:18:00 | |
Otto von Wachter was only a notch or two down, | 0:18:02 | 0:18:05 | |
he was one of Hans Frank's deputies. | 0:18:05 | 0:18:07 | |
First the Governor of Krakow, then the Governor of District Galicia. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:11 | |
What a beautiful castle, | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
full of criminals at this time. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
Everybody of those servants, of those German staff of the government | 0:19:02 | 0:19:07 | |
who worked also here, they knew exactly | 0:19:07 | 0:19:10 | |
that no day passes by | 0:19:10 | 0:19:14 | |
that we have not committed the most horrible crimes. | 0:19:14 | 0:19:18 | |
My father always wanted to please Hitler | 0:19:26 | 0:19:30 | |
so he gave a shit about... really about the fate of the Jews | 0:19:30 | 0:19:35 | |
or about the fate of the Polish people. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:38 | |
Ah, here it is. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:46 | |
For me, it was the most special room in the whole of the Wawel | 0:19:46 | 0:19:51 | |
because it was a bath I have never seen before or afterwards. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:57 | |
I always, it was one of my dreams to have a bath like this, | 0:19:57 | 0:20:02 | |
going down two steps | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
but this was the only gentle experience I had with my father. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:11 | |
I came in through this door, very small, | 0:20:11 | 0:20:15 | |
and my father was standing here shaving | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
and he saw me | 0:20:18 | 0:20:21 | |
and gave a little bit of his shaving foam onto my nose | 0:20:21 | 0:20:26 | |
and that was the only gentle moment between him and me which I remember. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:33 | |
And you can see that I remember | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
how much I was longing for the love of my father, | 0:20:36 | 0:20:40 | |
otherwise it's quite a normal procedure. | 0:20:40 | 0:20:43 | |
But it burned my soul, it was the only gentle moment. | 0:20:43 | 0:20:47 | |
Wonderful bathroom. | 0:20:48 | 0:20:51 | |
Why do you think your father had so little affection for you? | 0:20:51 | 0:20:56 | |
Because he didn't... didn't think that I am his son | 0:20:56 | 0:21:02 | |
but the son of his best friend Karl Lasch. | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
Who was your mother's lover? | 0:21:05 | 0:21:07 | |
At the time...she could have conceived. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
But later I think he believed my mother that I am his son. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:18 | |
He was five to ten times better educated, for instance, than me. | 0:21:23 | 0:21:29 | |
He knew Goethe's Faust by heart | 0:21:30 | 0:21:33 | |
and also most of the plays of Shakespeare. | 0:21:33 | 0:21:36 | |
As if it was Hans Frank's own procession, huh? | 0:21:41 | 0:21:45 | |
Unbelievable. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:48 | |
I am really happy that this painting has survived | 0:21:48 | 0:21:52 | |
and is back where it belongs to. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
'Leonardo Da Vinci's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani | 0:21:55 | 0:21:58 | |
'was one of the most famous paintings in the world. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:01 | |
'Hans Frank took it from a Polish museum | 0:22:01 | 0:22:03 | |
'created by the Czartoryski family | 0:22:03 | 0:22:05 | |
'and kept it with him throughout the war.' | 0:22:05 | 0:22:07 | |
Do you remember that? | 0:22:07 | 0:22:08 | |
Yes, that I remember because I thought it was a rat. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:11 | |
-Ermine. -Ermine. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:13 | |
It's the Lady with Ermine, | 0:22:13 | 0:22:15 | |
and the painter Leonardo Da Vinci | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
described it as a painting that should instil | 0:22:18 | 0:22:22 | |
in any person who looked at it feelings of love. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:26 | |
Not to my father. | 0:22:27 | 0:22:30 | |
In a stolen castle, in a stolen country, it makes me really angry. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:35 | |
And there's no sense of pride on your part | 0:22:38 | 0:22:43 | |
that in some way... | 0:22:43 | 0:22:45 | |
..it could be said that your father's actions did protect this work? | 0:22:46 | 0:22:52 | |
No, no. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:53 | |
I could not forgive him, he was bought up as a catholic | 0:22:56 | 0:22:59 | |
and he studied law in the Weimar democracy. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:03 | |
So he knew by heart what was right, what was wrong. | 0:23:03 | 0:23:07 | |
And he went on and on till, to the gallows. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
Because I think he was too much of a coward. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
He knew that he's committing crimes... | 0:23:17 | 0:23:21 | |
..and...he never had the bravery to say, | 0:23:22 | 0:23:28 | |
"OK, Mr Hitler, that's it." | 0:23:28 | 0:23:30 | |
As a family of one of the defendants, | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
we have got the chance to visit our father in Nuremberg. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:45 | |
First thing what I saw was Mr Hermann Goering on the opposite side, | 0:23:47 | 0:23:52 | |
so I was sitting, looking at my father behind the window, | 0:23:52 | 0:23:57 | |
"Hi. Nicki, it's a pleasure to see you, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
"soon we will celebrate a really great Christmas together at Schoberhof." | 0:24:00 | 0:24:07 | |
And I was thinking, "Why is he lying? | 0:24:07 | 0:24:12 | |
"Why is he lying? He knows that he will be hanged." | 0:24:12 | 0:24:17 | |
And I was unbelievably disappointed. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
My father, he was staying four years in the mountains, always hidden. | 0:24:29 | 0:24:34 | |
My mother brought him food and equipment for the winter, for the summer and so on. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:39 | |
My mother was of course still a Nazi lady, | 0:24:40 | 0:24:46 | |
so when the American soldiers moved into our house | 0:24:46 | 0:24:50 | |
they asked my mother, "Are you a Nazi?" | 0:24:50 | 0:24:54 | |
And my mother said, "Yes, I am Nazi." | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
And then they said, "Oh, you're the first person we met who said she is a Nazi." | 0:24:58 | 0:25:04 | |
-So... -And she was proud? | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
Yes, of course she was proud. | 0:25:09 | 0:25:11 | |
She was convinced that my father was right and did the right things, | 0:25:12 | 0:25:16 | |
never one word that she spoke bad about him. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:20 | |
Then he came to live with us, I think it was two weeks or so | 0:25:22 | 0:25:27 | |
and she said to us smaller children, | 0:25:27 | 0:25:30 | |
that's an uncle from South America or whatever. | 0:25:30 | 0:25:35 | |
He had a little moustache | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
and...he came up to see us | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
when we were sleeping in our beds, | 0:25:41 | 0:25:45 | |
I remember. | 0:25:45 | 0:25:47 | |
And that is the only contact with my father I can remember. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:51 | |
He had good connections to the Vatican. | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
He found refuge in some religious institution there | 0:25:55 | 0:26:00 | |
and...he died very quick there. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
-Oh, my God. -Here she is, | 0:26:10 | 0:26:13 | |
the queen of Poland, my mother. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:16 | |
It was painted in 1935. | 0:26:17 | 0:26:20 | |
-Did they still love each other then? -Yes. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
Or some adultery, but not so heavy ones, lighter. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:29 | |
And when it was over, it was a big glory of the Frank family, | 0:26:29 | 0:26:34 | |
she said, "OK, now it's over. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:37 | |
"Now I have to work my ass off to nourish these children," | 0:26:37 | 0:26:41 | |
and she died at the age of 63, completely worn out. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:46 | |
A very clear picture about the Frank family and what I have done | 0:26:48 | 0:26:54 | |
and what they have connected to when I saw the first pictures, | 0:26:54 | 0:26:58 | |
photographs in the newspapers. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:01 | |
There I saw mountains of corpses | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
and also children of my age then. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
And it was always written, underlined, Poland. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:12 | |
And what happened to me is that, you really get the shock... | 0:27:14 | 0:27:18 | |
..because I always thought Poland is ours. | 0:27:20 | 0:27:23 | |
Of course I felt guilty because of my father somehow. | 0:27:43 | 0:27:47 | |
Of course, because you knew them. | 0:27:47 | 0:27:50 | |
More or less, it started all this horrible things, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:55 | |
came into public what happened, and it was not... | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
After immediately... | 0:27:59 | 0:28:01 | |
Immediately after the war there was... | 0:28:01 | 0:28:04 | |
Nobody talk about this. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:07 | |
Talked and wrote. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:09 | |
The difficulties started later. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:12 | |
My mother wanted me to become a lawyer, of course, | 0:28:13 | 0:28:17 | |
like my father. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
She was very disappointed because when I said, | 0:28:19 | 0:28:22 | |
"No, finished. I don't study any more. I go into the woods. Bye-bye, Mother." | 0:28:22 | 0:28:28 | |
And of course she was very shocked. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
Then she got this professor friend and this friend said to me, | 0:28:31 | 0:28:35 | |
"Oh, Horst, you don't have to do anything, | 0:28:35 | 0:28:38 | |
"you will be professor/doctor. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:39 | |
"You just have to inscribe in Salzburg at the university," | 0:28:39 | 0:28:44 | |
and there you had all these friends of my father's, | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
and, well, of course I refused this thing | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
and I said, "I must find my own way." | 0:28:51 | 0:28:55 | |
I was closing up and I was very insecure. | 0:28:56 | 0:29:00 | |
At this certain moment I said to my friend, | 0:29:00 | 0:29:03 | |
that I want to serve somebody, I want to... Like a servant. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:08 | |
I really, I have to be of any use to somebody. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:14 | |
And then they said, "Oh, I know a crazy painter, he needs somebody." | 0:29:14 | 0:29:19 | |
When I saw Hundertwasser the first time, | 0:29:23 | 0:29:26 | |
I knew that he would need me | 0:29:26 | 0:29:28 | |
and I would go along with him quite well | 0:29:28 | 0:29:31 | |
because he was also a shy person like me, | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
and somehow that he was Jewish, | 0:29:34 | 0:29:36 | |
that was of course very good for my feelings too. | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
Then I went sailing the boat to New Zealand, that was his new paradise. | 0:29:41 | 0:29:47 | |
Perhaps, also with you because you were Jewish. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:57 | |
Somehow this being Jewish is something very attractive for me. | 0:29:57 | 0:30:03 | |
And in the beginning when I met Hundertwasser... | 0:30:03 | 0:30:07 | |
..his mother was afraid of me of course, | 0:30:08 | 0:30:11 | |
because she knew who my father was. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:16 | |
And she was, uh... | 0:30:16 | 0:30:20 | |
..with all her experiences in the war, | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
when she had to run around at the start of it. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:28 | |
The question of the historical responsibility of my father | 0:30:30 | 0:30:35 | |
is a very complex one, | 0:30:35 | 0:30:36 | |
but the racial theory of Germans being superman | 0:30:36 | 0:30:42 | |
and the others being untermenschen, | 0:30:42 | 0:30:44 | |
my father was against this right from the beginning. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:48 | |
He was absolutely somebody | 0:30:49 | 0:30:52 | |
who wanted to do something good, | 0:30:52 | 0:30:54 | |
and he wanted to get something moving | 0:30:54 | 0:30:58 | |
and find some solution about all these problems. | 0:30:58 | 0:31:01 | |
Who arose after the first war and tried... | 0:31:01 | 0:31:06 | |
He was a complete optimist. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:09 | |
My father really had deserved to die at the gallows | 0:31:10 | 0:31:16 | |
for what he has done, he deserved it. | 0:31:16 | 0:31:19 | |
Besides photos of my beloved family... | 0:31:21 | 0:31:25 | |
..I always wear with me | 0:31:26 | 0:31:30 | |
the last picture of my father when he was... After he was hanged. | 0:31:30 | 0:31:34 | |
He has a swollen eye so maybe he crashed against the trap door. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:41 | |
On the one hand... | 0:31:44 | 0:31:45 | |
..yeah, to be sure that he's really dead, | 0:31:47 | 0:31:52 | |
but on the other hand, and this is what haunts me all my life, | 0:31:52 | 0:31:57 | |
the Germans know exactly what can happen | 0:31:57 | 0:32:03 | |
if you are losing civil courage, | 0:32:03 | 0:32:07 | |
if you are losing democracy, | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
it leads to... | 0:32:09 | 0:32:11 | |
Can lead to extermination camps. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:17 | |
So we know this by heart because we have done it, the Germans. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:23 | |
And people of his merciless... | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
..kind of living and killing are still alive in Germany. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:34 | |
The article I had written for the Financial Times | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
attracted a lot of interest. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:41 | |
The newspaper offered to stage a public event | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
at which Horst and Niklas could present their views side by side | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
and I was surprised when they both agreed. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
THEY SPEAK IN GERMAN | 0:32:50 | 0:32:51 | |
The two men had much in common with similar backgrounds, | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
yet seeing each on his own, I had become acutely aware | 0:32:59 | 0:33:02 | |
that they had very different attitudes to their fathers. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:04 | |
Niklas is a more polished and prepared individual. | 0:33:10 | 0:33:13 | |
Horst has just opened himself up, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:15 | |
he's never been through anything like this. | 0:33:15 | 0:33:18 | |
He's never had this kind of scrutiny. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:20 | |
Horst, let's... Let's turn to you. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:23 | |
May I first introduce, hmm, have some words? | 0:33:23 | 0:33:26 | |
Absolutely. Please do. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:28 | |
Yes, I am very grateful that I can be here. | 0:33:28 | 0:33:31 | |
That kind of listening and hearing would be impossible in Austria, | 0:33:31 | 0:33:37 | |
there would be... Well, we don't know anything about Nazis | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
and we don't want to know anything and so... | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
I'd come to learn that Niklas didn't like to miss any opportunity | 0:33:44 | 0:33:48 | |
to attack his father and to do so publicly. | 0:33:48 | 0:33:51 | |
But Horst on the other hand, it was less clear to me | 0:33:51 | 0:33:53 | |
why he would want to expose himself publicly. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
Both of our fathers were heavily involved, heavily. | 0:33:58 | 0:34:04 | |
You told me once I should make peace with my father. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
I have peace with my father because I acknowledged his crimes | 0:34:09 | 0:34:14 | |
and so I could lead a really good life. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:18 | |
And you, you're struggling for what? | 0:34:18 | 0:34:21 | |
To fight also against your father. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:24 | |
Sorry, dear friend. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:26 | |
Well, I think I see it different. | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
I see the structure of the whole annihilation of Jews | 0:34:31 | 0:34:34 | |
and what happens, they are quite different. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:38 | |
And I didn't look for peace, | 0:34:38 | 0:34:41 | |
it's just I felt it's my duty as a son | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
to put things straight with my father | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
and I see who was really responsible. | 0:34:47 | 0:34:50 | |
But it doesn't make your father innocent | 0:34:50 | 0:34:52 | |
if he's not quite responsible. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:54 | |
They worked together, | 0:34:54 | 0:34:56 | |
all those parts of the German people were working together | 0:34:56 | 0:35:00 | |
in the annihilation of the Jews, for instance. | 0:35:00 | 0:35:03 | |
Well, I think, I don't... I don't agree with you | 0:35:05 | 0:35:09 | |
because I have to swear they protested and my father protested | 0:35:09 | 0:35:14 | |
even to Hitler that is impossible, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:17 | |
how to treat the people there and how to and he... | 0:35:17 | 0:35:22 | |
His fault was that he believed that Hitler would change his politics. | 0:35:22 | 0:35:27 | |
In our conversations we've touched on | 0:35:28 | 0:35:31 | |
what you've uncovered about your father, | 0:35:31 | 0:35:33 | |
he ran, for example, the transportation system | 0:35:33 | 0:35:36 | |
that shifted people to concentration camps and to their death. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
And yet you've resisted in our conversations | 0:35:41 | 0:35:45 | |
ever acknowledging that he himself is somehow guilty for what happened. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:51 | |
Because it's his character. | 0:35:51 | 0:35:55 | |
I mean, I don't know about transportation | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
but when the Jewish ghetto in Lemberg was established | 0:35:59 | 0:36:05 | |
it's written down below his name, General-Governor Wachter, | 0:36:05 | 0:36:11 | |
but it's only signed by SS fuehrer... | 0:36:11 | 0:36:15 | |
So my father refused to sign this. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:18 | |
That's ridiculous, Horst. | 0:36:18 | 0:36:21 | |
If he has not signed some document | 0:36:21 | 0:36:23 | |
but it happened, it happened. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:26 | |
Do you remember, I showed you a letter that was sent | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
by Heinrich Himmler, and in the letter, | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
Himmler writes that he asked your father | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
whether your father would like to return to Vienna. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:38 | |
They weren't sure whether your father was fully committed | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
to what was about to happen, | 0:36:41 | 0:36:43 | |
and Himmler wrote, "Victor does not wish to return to Vienna." | 0:36:43 | 0:36:48 | |
In other words, he would stay and see through | 0:36:48 | 0:36:52 | |
what he knew was being done. Can you explain what...? | 0:36:52 | 0:36:56 | |
Yes, he had no choice. | 0:36:56 | 0:36:58 | |
He couldn't react like he himself felt | 0:36:58 | 0:37:02 | |
and he was just... | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
making... | 0:37:05 | 0:37:07 | |
He was just employee of his father, you see, but... | 0:37:07 | 0:37:11 | |
But he chose to stay, he could have gone. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:13 | |
Yes, but he felt responsible for the people. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
Well, for some of the people. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
Yes, for some... For some he could do. | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
From the first moment he was very close with the Ukrainians, | 0:37:21 | 0:37:25 | |
with the Galician division | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
and he actually tried to | 0:37:28 | 0:37:33 | |
do something positive. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:35 | |
Why, Niklas, did you introduce me to Horst? | 0:37:35 | 0:37:38 | |
-It was a trick. -No, when we had our first conversation, | 0:37:43 | 0:37:47 | |
in this beautiful hotel, | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
as a lawyer, for sure, he was always in the best hotel available. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
AUDIENCE LAUGHING | 0:37:53 | 0:37:55 | |
And I told him we came across Otto Wachter, | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
and I told him I am a friend of Horst Wachter, | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
his son is a very nice person. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:04 | |
And you said, "What? | 0:38:04 | 0:38:06 | |
"You are a friend of this family and of Horst Wachter?" | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
I think you will like him, you will like him. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:13 | |
I had nothing to hide | 0:38:13 | 0:38:15 | |
or I did nothing that you shouldn't know about my father. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:20 | |
And my, yeah, family was very angry. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
-And still angry. -And still angry, OK. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:28 | |
Do you regret that we're sitting here | 0:38:28 | 0:38:30 | |
-in an audience today? -Yes, of course. | 0:38:30 | 0:38:32 | |
What do you want this audience to take away from this conversation? | 0:38:34 | 0:38:38 | |
What's the message that you want to leave them? | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
Well, I think there are many victims of the Holocaust in sitting here | 0:38:42 | 0:38:48 | |
and I want them to have a more concern, | 0:38:48 | 0:38:55 | |
more survey about how things were and they were, | 0:38:55 | 0:39:01 | |
that there were many different... | 0:39:01 | 0:39:06 | |
sides about the whole thing | 0:39:06 | 0:39:07 | |
and it was not just like a block like he wants it to be. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:12 | |
There had been many people who were against this, | 0:39:12 | 0:39:18 | |
but that's what I want you to acknowledge | 0:39:18 | 0:39:22 | |
and that's why I'm thankful I can say this | 0:39:22 | 0:39:25 | |
and I think it's not... It's my duty but it's also my right | 0:39:25 | 0:39:30 | |
and it should be said, I mean, and then that I'm very happy. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:34 | |
Lady over there. | 0:39:36 | 0:39:38 | |
I love my father and I honour my father | 0:39:38 | 0:39:41 | |
but as far as I'm aware my father has done nothing to be ashamed of, | 0:39:41 | 0:39:45 | |
and I don't know what it must be like | 0:39:45 | 0:39:47 | |
growing up with a heritage like both of you have. | 0:39:47 | 0:39:50 | |
I must however say, Horst, | 0:39:50 | 0:39:52 | |
that I think a lot of your arguments are so extraneous | 0:39:52 | 0:39:56 | |
to the main facts of the issue | 0:39:56 | 0:39:58 | |
to be actually so self-deceiving, I find it rather frightening. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:03 | |
All this rubbish about Ukrainians, that's extraneous to the issue. | 0:40:03 | 0:40:07 | |
OK, so... | 0:40:07 | 0:40:09 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:40:09 | 0:40:10 | |
So that's a clear view that's been put. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:13 | |
Yes, I accept. I accept the view and I think I can understand it. | 0:40:13 | 0:40:18 | |
The only thing which I... | 0:40:18 | 0:40:20 | |
It's only related between the relations between me and my father | 0:40:20 | 0:40:25 | |
and what I turned out to be with my father and that's what I say. | 0:40:25 | 0:40:30 | |
Nik's father sounds to me like the most horrible father | 0:40:30 | 0:40:35 | |
and you don't come from a happily married family or anything like that. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:39 | |
You had a happier childhood, is that not, is it too simple? | 0:40:39 | 0:40:45 | |
Yes, it must have been something very important | 0:40:45 | 0:40:48 | |
because... I was very embedded in the family | 0:40:48 | 0:40:55 | |
and I'm very proud that I had this childhood. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
Niklas? | 0:40:58 | 0:41:00 | |
I won't say that I had an unhappy childhood. As a Prince of Poland, | 0:41:00 | 0:41:05 | |
I was really very well off, the best toys you can imagine. | 0:41:05 | 0:41:10 | |
Hi, I've got a question for Horst. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:13 | |
You say that your father didn't sign the paper and that's why you won't condemn him, | 0:41:13 | 0:41:18 | |
if his signature was on it, would you condemn him? | 0:41:18 | 0:41:21 | |
What would it take? What proof would it take for you to condemn your dad? | 0:41:21 | 0:41:25 | |
Yes, I would have condemned him, of course. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:29 | |
Yeah, but if he had signed? | 0:41:29 | 0:41:31 | |
I think the question is going you're taking refuge in the fact | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
that there are not in existence pieces of paper which say, | 0:41:34 | 0:41:39 | |
"And today I will kill 15,000 Jews"? | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
If you were presented with such a piece of paper, | 0:41:42 | 0:41:44 | |
would your position be any different in terms of saying | 0:41:44 | 0:41:48 | |
as a son you have a duty to defend your father? | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
Of course it would be different but it... It would be different | 0:41:51 | 0:41:56 | |
but I cannot imagine that one paper exists. | 0:41:56 | 0:42:00 | |
My father did everything what he could do to save the population | 0:42:00 | 0:42:04 | |
and my father is now... In these days, | 0:42:04 | 0:42:07 | |
the difficulties between Ukrainians is really venerated there. | 0:42:07 | 0:42:12 | |
As we met in the Purcell Room, | 0:42:21 | 0:42:23 | |
Ukraine was engaged in its own struggle | 0:42:23 | 0:42:25 | |
as to whether it would look east towards Russia | 0:42:25 | 0:42:27 | |
or west towards the European Union. | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
Some of the protesters voiced an age old hatred of Russia | 0:42:30 | 0:42:33 | |
and for that, they and the group as a whole, | 0:42:33 | 0:42:35 | |
which included writers, students and human-rights activists, | 0:42:35 | 0:42:39 | |
were accused of being fascists and neo-Nazis. | 0:42:39 | 0:42:41 | |
It was as if the past had returned to haunt the present | 0:42:41 | 0:42:45 | |
because there is a link between contemporary events in the Ukraine | 0:42:45 | 0:42:48 | |
and the period when Horst's father was in charge of District Galicia. | 0:42:48 | 0:42:53 | |
IN GERMAN | 0:42:55 | 0:42:57 | |
This is where Horst's father was based, in what's now called Lviv, | 0:43:25 | 0:43:29 | |
the Germans call it Lemberg, the Poles know it as Lwow. | 0:43:29 | 0:43:32 | |
The city's name reflects the changes in the region and the tensions. | 0:43:32 | 0:43:36 | |
The city is at the heart of this story | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
because the killings that link the three of us, me, Niklas and Horst, | 0:43:39 | 0:43:43 | |
are the events of August 1942 - the Grossaktion, as it's called - | 0:43:43 | 0:43:48 | |
when the Jewish population was almost entirely exterminated. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:51 | |
Before 1942, this city was an important centre of Jewish life, | 0:43:55 | 0:43:59 | |
a life that's now totally vanished. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
This was my grandfather's hometown. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:04 | |
What I hadn't appreciated was how large a family my grandfather had left behind. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:10 | |
In fact, there was a vast family, | 0:44:10 | 0:44:13 | |
more than 80 individuals, and I didn't know that of those 80 | 0:44:13 | 0:44:17 | |
who were alive in 1939, he was the only one still alive in 1945. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:23 | |
The building that we're in was the Parliament of Galicia, | 0:44:41 | 0:44:45 | |
in the Austro-Hungarian empire, | 0:44:45 | 0:44:48 | |
and then in 1919 when the Poles took over, | 0:44:48 | 0:44:51 | |
it then became the Jan Kazimierz University, | 0:44:51 | 0:44:55 | |
until September '39, then the Soviets came. | 0:44:55 | 0:44:58 | |
Then on July 1941, | 0:44:58 | 0:45:03 | |
the Germans came, and in to this room came | 0:45:03 | 0:45:09 | |
your father, Nik, as Governor-General, | 0:45:09 | 0:45:12 | |
and your father as Governor of Galicia, | 0:45:12 | 0:45:15 | |
and they stood on the platform, | 0:45:15 | 0:45:18 | |
they stood on the stage and your father made a speech | 0:45:18 | 0:45:23 | |
in which he announced, essentially, | 0:45:23 | 0:45:25 | |
the implementation of the Final Solution in Galicia, | 0:45:25 | 0:45:29 | |
and within a month, 75,000 people at least had died. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:33 | |
I would like to have this place which my father had had | 0:45:33 | 0:45:38 | |
and now, Horst, you have to hear what he was saying. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:43 | |
And he addressed your father | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
at first saying, | 0:45:52 | 0:45:55 | |
"Party comrade Wachter, I have to say, you did well. | 0:45:55 | 0:46:01 | |
"Lemberg is once again a true and proud German city. | 0:46:01 | 0:46:06 | |
"I do not speak about the Jews that we still have here." | 0:46:06 | 0:46:10 | |
And then hear at this. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
"We will deal with them of course. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:17 | |
"By the way..." | 0:46:17 | 0:46:19 | |
Now it's my well-educated funny father, | 0:46:19 | 0:46:23 | |
and he's doing a joke. | 0:46:23 | 0:46:25 | |
"By the way, I hardly saw any of them today. | 0:46:26 | 0:46:31 | |
"What has happened? | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
"I was told that this city used to swarm with | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
"thousands and thousands of these flat-footed Indians | 0:46:37 | 0:46:41 | |
"but I could see none. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:43 | |
"You have not done anything nasty to them, have you?" | 0:46:43 | 0:46:48 | |
And the protocol wrote "great hilarity." | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
And you are still pretending you didn't find anything | 0:46:53 | 0:46:57 | |
which would accuse your father of being involved in this. | 0:46:57 | 0:47:02 | |
This I won't understand. As you know, I like you personally, | 0:47:02 | 0:47:06 | |
but I don't like your brains and your thoughts you have in your brain. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:11 | |
Horst, what would you need to see | 0:47:11 | 0:47:13 | |
to come to a different perspective of your father? | 0:47:13 | 0:47:16 | |
I don't think... I think all the guilty ones have been judged. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:21 | |
And I know that his father was some... Some... | 0:47:21 | 0:47:25 | |
He was a theatre man. He liked to make himself, hmm... | 0:47:25 | 0:47:30 | |
All these remarks he made and my father did never | 0:47:33 | 0:47:36 | |
avoided the personal contact with his father. | 0:47:36 | 0:47:40 | |
That was the reason before and I don't know of any anti-Semitic... | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
Anti-Semitic speech my father did, I don't know about. | 0:47:44 | 0:47:48 | |
Maybe he was just more careful? | 0:47:48 | 0:47:51 | |
Well, he was, he... He would... That was not his style. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:55 | |
He was a completely other style of man, like his father. | 0:47:55 | 0:47:59 | |
The result was the same. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:02 | |
He sat... He sat there in this room. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
Yes, I'm very sorry about this, but, hmm... | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
Why? Why, if nothing... If he didn't do anything, why are you sorry about it? | 0:48:07 | 0:48:10 | |
He... | 0:48:10 | 0:48:12 | |
I mean, what should he have done? | 0:48:13 | 0:48:15 | |
He should have jumped up, as you said and said, "No. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:19 | |
"I'm against it and..." | 0:48:19 | 0:48:21 | |
Horst. | 0:48:21 | 0:48:23 | |
-No-one was responsible for what happened. -Yes. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:26 | |
You have all the names of who are responsible. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:28 | |
You have all the names, all the details, they are all documented. | 0:48:28 | 0:48:32 | |
But the lists include your father. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:34 | |
No, they don't include my father. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:37 | |
They don't include my father. | 0:48:38 | 0:48:39 | |
You cannot say this, that's all imagination for me. | 0:48:41 | 0:48:45 | |
Do you... Do you want me to show you a document | 0:48:45 | 0:48:47 | |
-that lists your father? -Yes. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:49 | |
-OK, stay there. -OK. | 0:48:49 | 0:48:51 | |
If you... If you show it to me, but not speeches. | 0:48:51 | 0:48:55 | |
No, document. | 0:48:55 | 0:48:57 | |
I found it last week. | 0:48:57 | 0:48:59 | |
OK. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
This is a Polish document. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
I just found it on Friday. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:08 | |
-46. -"28th of September, 1946." | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
-Uh-huh. -"To the military governor, | 0:49:11 | 0:49:13 | |
"United States zone," OK? | 0:49:13 | 0:49:16 | |
"I, being the authorised representative | 0:49:16 | 0:49:19 | |
"of the Government of Poland, request on behalf of my government | 0:49:19 | 0:49:24 | |
"that Wachter be delivered to Poland for trial | 0:49:24 | 0:49:28 | |
"for the here and after described offences. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
"One, subject is responsible for mass murder, | 0:49:31 | 0:49:35 | |
"shooting and executions, | 0:49:35 | 0:49:37 | |
"under his command as Governor of District Galicia, | 0:49:37 | 0:49:40 | |
"more than 100,000 Polish citizens lost their lives." | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
-Now... -Yes. Of course. | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
That is made in September '46, I didn't know about this. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:57 | |
But still these are very general... | 0:49:59 | 0:50:02 | |
supposition of being mass murders... | 0:50:02 | 0:50:06 | |
under his command as Governor. Under his command... | 0:50:06 | 0:50:10 | |
That's... That's all generalisations for me. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
Horst, like my father, he was a representative of Hitler | 0:50:14 | 0:50:19 | |
and as a Governor-General, so he was politically speaking, | 0:50:19 | 0:50:24 | |
responsible for every dead Jew or every Polish. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:30 | |
It's the same with you, with your father. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
He was a Governor of Galicia and therefore he was | 0:50:33 | 0:50:37 | |
politically responsible for all the mass murders. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:42 | |
That mass murders were geheime Reichssache. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
They were special things and he had no influence. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:48 | |
I saw... I see this is Soviet. This is a Soviet... | 0:50:48 | 0:50:52 | |
It's Polish and American. | 0:50:52 | 0:50:54 | |
Yes, but the... | 0:50:54 | 0:50:56 | |
That was... Poland was under Soviet rule at that time already. | 0:50:56 | 0:51:01 | |
It's a request to the Americans to assist, and the Americans assisted. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:04 | |
The Americans were not friendly with the Soviets. | 0:51:04 | 0:51:06 | |
Don't hide into the little corners. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
-No, but this is a general... -I'm asking you... | 0:51:08 | 0:51:10 | |
Horst, we'll come back to this. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:12 | |
I'm asking you what is really motivating you? | 0:51:12 | 0:51:15 | |
Why are you resisting with every fibre in your body, | 0:51:15 | 0:51:19 | |
the terrible evidence with which you are confronted? | 0:51:19 | 0:51:21 | |
Because I have so many documents from people who knew him personally | 0:51:23 | 0:51:29 | |
and who said he was a decent... He had a decent character. | 0:51:29 | 0:51:33 | |
And he tried everything that he could do to prevent the things that would happen. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:39 | |
I want to know what really was going on... | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
What was really going on was that your father was sitting there | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
in front of his father. His father was announcing that 100,000 Jews | 0:51:46 | 0:51:51 | |
are going to be murdered and your father sat there, | 0:51:51 | 0:51:54 | |
no expression on his face. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:56 | |
Clapping in this room, going off and doing his work. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:02 | |
That's what your father did, that's what he did. | 0:52:02 | 0:52:05 | |
Yes. I presume he did like that. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:08 | |
So that is terrible evidence. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
But this is a speech. This is a rhetorical speech. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:14 | |
A highly rhetorical speech. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
Hmm, and this was a political session here from somebody... | 0:52:16 | 0:52:21 | |
Horst, what happened two weeks later? | 0:52:21 | 0:52:24 | |
On the 17th of August? | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
You've shown... You've shown me the letter your father wrote to your mother. | 0:52:27 | 0:52:32 | |
"I'm coming back to Lemberg. The Grossaktion is beginning." | 0:52:32 | 0:52:37 | |
He knew all about it, and it happened. | 0:52:37 | 0:52:40 | |
75,000 people were killed, so that's a father to love? | 0:52:41 | 0:52:46 | |
That's a man one can love? An honourable man? A decent man? | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
I'm going back to help kill 75,000 people, | 0:52:51 | 0:52:55 | |
that's an honourable thing to do? | 0:52:55 | 0:52:57 | |
Of course it's not an honourable thing. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
But it was... The system was something | 0:53:02 | 0:53:07 | |
for us today which you can't imagine. | 0:53:07 | 0:53:11 | |
Hmm... | 0:53:11 | 0:53:12 | |
The deaths were so near to everybody that it was nothing to... | 0:53:13 | 0:53:19 | |
Life of man was just nothing. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:21 | |
Horst fills me with despair. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
I cannot accept that approach. | 0:53:30 | 0:53:33 | |
It's not just the lawyer in me | 0:53:35 | 0:53:37 | |
concerned with how one treats evidence, | 0:53:37 | 0:53:41 | |
it's much more personal than that. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:43 | |
When I hear him speak of his father's good character and actions, | 0:53:43 | 0:53:46 | |
I hear him to be justifying the killing of my grandfather's entire family. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:50 | |
This is where my grandfather's family came from | 0:54:02 | 0:54:06 | |
and this is where most of that family perished. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:09 | |
Do you ask yourself why we came here together? | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
Hmm... No, I had no problems to understand. | 0:54:47 | 0:54:52 | |
We...commemorate what happened and... | 0:54:52 | 0:54:58 | |
..we confronted what happened | 0:55:01 | 0:55:05 | |
and we feel sad and ashamed, maybe. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:11 | |
And we ask ourselves questions. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:14 | |
How it could be... | 0:55:14 | 0:55:17 | |
that such things happened in the past and continue to happen today? | 0:55:17 | 0:55:19 | |
It's the point, because they continue everywhere... | 0:55:19 | 0:55:24 | |
..and we have no means to stop them, | 0:55:25 | 0:55:29 | |
we have to accept them. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
Well, that's where you and I disagree, | 0:55:33 | 0:55:35 | |
that's where you and I disagree. I think... | 0:55:35 | 0:55:37 | |
There are things that can be done to stop things from happening | 0:55:41 | 0:55:44 | |
and it's about in part individual responsibility. | 0:55:44 | 0:55:46 | |
It's where you and I... You and I disagree. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:48 | |
We have this small... We are small... | 0:55:48 | 0:55:53 | |
just like points in the whole history. | 0:55:53 | 0:55:56 | |
It's like the soldiers who fought here, they can't stand up and say, | 0:55:56 | 0:56:00 | |
"Oh, I don't want to fight." | 0:56:00 | 0:56:02 | |
They... They would be executed immediately. | 0:56:04 | 0:56:07 | |
So there's no option but to kill and carry on killing? | 0:56:07 | 0:56:10 | |
There are options... I mean, there's other ways | 0:56:13 | 0:56:16 | |
which are in your power to do something. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
But this was inevitable. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:21 | |
-Your father had no option. -For him, he had no option | 0:56:21 | 0:56:25 | |
to change this thing. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
And because it was inevitable he had no responsibility? | 0:56:27 | 0:56:29 | |
Well, that's a difficult question, about responsibility. | 0:56:32 | 0:56:37 | |
Well, I don't think that he... He ordered to burn down this room. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:46 | |
I mean this, I refuse to say that he gave orders to burn down here. | 0:56:46 | 0:56:51 | |
I don't see my father in here, I mean... | 0:56:55 | 0:56:58 | |
I can't see walking, my father here, around here with his uniform, | 0:57:02 | 0:57:06 | |
and saying, "Oh, well, well done" and things like that. | 0:57:06 | 0:57:10 | |
I can't see him like this. | 0:57:10 | 0:57:12 | |
It's done. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:15 | |
But you... | 0:57:18 | 0:57:20 | |
I mean, in this room you have to have ideas, | 0:57:21 | 0:57:25 | |
great ideas, I'm not pessimistic, and you have to see... | 0:57:25 | 0:57:30 | |
..what was really going on building this up and... | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
..because for me this is built for eternity, you can see the enormous walls there. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:43 | |
The columns, the thickness, and for me, | 0:57:43 | 0:57:46 | |
this idea is much stronger than destroyed surfaces. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:50 | |
300 years filled | 0:57:50 | 0:57:53 | |
with people and singing and prayer and life | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
and colour and hair and jewellery. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:58 | |
-Yes, that is my... -And it's all gone. | 0:57:58 | 0:58:00 | |
-It all went in a single day. -No, it's not gone. | 0:58:00 | 0:58:02 | |
It's still there. | 0:58:02 | 0:58:04 | |
It isn't gone because that is my main interest, | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
why I agreed to come here, to go back to 300 years ago, | 0:58:08 | 0:58:13 | |
not be stuck in what happened 70 years ago. | 0:58:13 | 0:58:18 | |
It'll never be... It'll never be filled again, this place. | 0:58:18 | 0:58:21 | |
You don't know. | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
Maybe it will. I'm not so pessimistic than you. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:27 | |
This will be filled up. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:35 | |
I can tell you because it's so great.. | 0:58:35 | 0:58:38 | |
..that this period will be gone and there will be a new period coming up | 0:58:39 | 0:58:44 | |
which can... | 0:58:44 | 0:58:47 | |
Can see it again, now it's... | 0:58:52 | 0:58:54 | |
..only a few people who can see this. | 0:58:55 | 0:58:59 | |
But I think... I can see it. | 0:58:59 | 0:59:01 | |
See, I don't want to get stuck somewhere. | 0:59:02 | 0:59:05 | |
Full of shame and full of... | 0:59:08 | 0:59:10 | |
Full of... | 0:59:13 | 0:59:14 | |
I'm proud to be here. | 0:59:21 | 0:59:24 | |
I always imagine when was the last Shabbat celebration before they all | 0:59:31 | 0:59:37 | |
were killed. | 0:59:37 | 0:59:39 | |
What if they talked to each other? | 0:59:39 | 0:59:42 | |
"How can we hide? How can we go into the woods?" | 0:59:42 | 0:59:45 | |
or "Do we have any relatives who can hide us somewhere in the countryside?" | 0:59:45 | 0:59:50 | |
All this kind of stuff, always running through my brain, | 0:59:50 | 0:59:55 | |
the only thing. | 0:59:55 | 0:59:56 | |
And this makes me furious and I will never forgive this. | 0:59:56 | 1:00:01 | |
So it was the synagogue of my family. | 1:00:03 | 1:00:05 | |
-Yeah? -Yeah. | 1:00:05 | 1:00:07 | |
-This was... -Here your family was? | 1:00:07 | 1:00:08 | |
Yeah. | 1:00:08 | 1:00:09 | |
-You didn't know that? -No. | 1:00:11 | 1:00:14 | |
You always ask me what about my feeling, no. | 1:00:14 | 1:00:17 | |
What's your feeling standing here in this synagogue where your family used to be? | 1:00:17 | 1:00:24 | |
It's a very heavy feeling. | 1:00:24 | 1:00:26 | |
-It's a very, very heavy feeling. -What means heavy? | 1:00:26 | 1:00:30 | |
It means that my imagination | 1:00:30 | 1:00:32 | |
is running very strongly. | 1:00:32 | 1:00:35 | |
I imagine the moment in July, 1941, | 1:00:35 | 1:00:39 | |
that the Germans came into the town, | 1:00:39 | 1:00:42 | |
and like you, I imagine the fear, | 1:00:42 | 1:00:46 | |
the mayhem and the certainty that they knew what was coming | 1:00:46 | 1:00:49 | |
because they had contacts with Vienna | 1:00:49 | 1:00:51 | |
and with Germany and they knew what was on its way, | 1:00:51 | 1:00:54 | |
and so for me it boils down to a number of individuals that I never met. | 1:00:54 | 1:00:57 | |
I don't even have photographs of these people. | 1:00:57 | 1:01:00 | |
Nothing, nothing remains, nothing, | 1:01:00 | 1:01:02 | |
but this would have been the place... | 1:01:02 | 1:01:04 | |
Where have they been the last time you have heard about this, | 1:01:04 | 1:01:08 | |
about those family? When... | 1:01:08 | 1:01:12 | |
My grandfather never talked to me about it. | 1:01:12 | 1:01:14 | |
-He refused to talk to me about it. -You also didn't dare to ask. | 1:01:14 | 1:01:16 | |
I didn't dare to ask. | 1:01:16 | 1:01:18 | |
So, and when they perished, | 1:01:18 | 1:01:21 | |
they were still living around here using this synagogue. | 1:01:21 | 1:01:24 | |
Yes, well, the synagogue was burnt down in July '41. | 1:01:24 | 1:01:28 | |
The ghetto was created in the autumn | 1:01:28 | 1:01:34 | |
and they lived in the ghetto in '42 | 1:01:34 | 1:01:39 | |
and they were then rounded up, | 1:01:39 | 1:01:42 | |
taken to a wood, where there were sand pits | 1:01:42 | 1:01:46 | |
that were used to repair the road from Zolkiew to Lemberg | 1:01:46 | 1:01:50 | |
and they put a plank at the end of the sand pit | 1:01:50 | 1:01:54 | |
and each of the 3,500 walked along the plank, | 1:01:54 | 1:02:00 | |
they were shot and they fell in. | 1:02:00 | 1:02:04 | |
But the story doesn't end there. | 1:02:04 | 1:02:06 | |
That's a kilometre from where we are standing now, they're still there. | 1:02:06 | 1:02:09 | |
Nothing's changed. | 1:02:09 | 1:02:11 | |
All the bodies are in the spot that we are going to right now. | 1:02:11 | 1:02:16 | |
This our fathers did. | 1:02:50 | 1:02:53 | |
So everyone remains here. | 1:03:31 | 1:03:34 | |
Nothing has been moved. | 1:03:34 | 1:03:36 | |
-Horst, you've seen the date over here? -Yeah. | 1:03:41 | 1:03:43 | |
25th of March, 1943. | 1:03:43 | 1:03:46 | |
So I'm afraid there is no escaping | 1:03:47 | 1:03:50 | |
that this action took place on the territory | 1:03:50 | 1:03:54 | |
and with the support of your father. | 1:03:54 | 1:03:56 | |
And it contains 3,500 people. | 1:03:59 | 1:04:03 | |
Including my family. | 1:04:04 | 1:04:06 | |
CAMERA CLICKS | 1:04:12 | 1:04:14 | |
Horst, please accept it. | 1:04:23 | 1:04:27 | |
Recognise it. | 1:04:28 | 1:04:30 | |
It's also the responsibility of my father in first, | 1:04:30 | 1:04:35 | |
but your father was as well involved in this horrible crime. | 1:04:35 | 1:04:41 | |
Here in this place. | 1:04:41 | 1:04:43 | |
Please. | 1:04:49 | 1:04:50 | |
He was involved in the system, I know, this is why we're here. | 1:04:50 | 1:04:56 | |
The system was very, very obstructive. | 1:04:56 | 1:04:59 | |
-This is... -I never... | 1:04:59 | 1:05:00 | |
..the place of a mass killing our fathers have been responsible for. | 1:05:00 | 1:05:05 | |
I want to have the exact date and who were, was responsible, | 1:05:18 | 1:05:22 | |
who was present here and the name | 1:05:22 | 1:05:25 | |
of the police officers and I will. | 1:05:25 | 1:05:30 | |
Why you always want to flee? | 1:05:30 | 1:05:32 | |
I do not flee. | 1:05:32 | 1:05:34 | |
I want to see the... | 1:05:34 | 1:05:36 | |
the reality. | 1:05:36 | 1:05:38 | |
And we are standing in the midst of a death, | 1:05:40 | 1:05:43 | |
that is all deaths around us. | 1:05:43 | 1:05:46 | |
There must be tens of thousands of Austrians lying around here. | 1:05:46 | 1:05:50 | |
But, Horst, we're not talking... | 1:05:50 | 1:05:52 | |
We're talking about these 3,500 people. | 1:05:52 | 1:05:55 | |
We're talking about these... | 1:05:55 | 1:05:56 | |
I see all of them around here, it's not only those. | 1:05:56 | 1:06:00 | |
Well, I'm talking about these. | 1:06:00 | 1:06:02 | |
I'm asking you to focus on these people | 1:06:02 | 1:06:04 | |
who on the 25th of March, 1943, | 1:06:04 | 1:06:07 | |
walked from the place where we have just been to this place, | 1:06:07 | 1:06:12 | |
with the support of the auxiliary police under your father's authority. | 1:06:12 | 1:06:18 | |
They were made to walk to the end of the plank, | 1:06:18 | 1:06:20 | |
each person got a single bullet to the head | 1:06:20 | 1:06:22 | |
and they are in there now. | 1:06:22 | 1:06:24 | |
There's simply no escaping | 1:06:24 | 1:06:27 | |
the issue of responsibility. | 1:06:27 | 1:06:29 | |
Not your responsibility, never your responsibility. | 1:06:29 | 1:06:32 | |
The responsibility of Otto von Wachter. | 1:06:32 | 1:06:34 | |
There is no escaping, you simply cannot run away from it. | 1:06:34 | 1:06:38 | |
You are confronted here with the reality. | 1:06:38 | 1:06:41 | |
And then I want the exact following of the orders | 1:06:41 | 1:06:46 | |
from the smallest soldier up to the civil government. | 1:06:46 | 1:06:51 | |
Do you know who paid the salary of the auxiliary police? | 1:06:52 | 1:06:56 | |
Your father. | 1:07:00 | 1:07:01 | |
That was paid by your father. | 1:07:03 | 1:07:05 | |
He signed off on it, that's called command responsibility. | 1:07:05 | 1:07:08 | |
Doesn't matter who did the individual act of killing, | 1:07:11 | 1:07:13 | |
doesn't matter who put the individual bullet in, doesn't matter. | 1:07:13 | 1:07:16 | |
Well, it matters for me. | 1:07:16 | 1:07:18 | |
Yeah, but as a matter of moral responsibility and as a matter of legal responsibility | 1:07:21 | 1:07:25 | |
it's totally irrelevant. Totally irrelevant. | 1:07:25 | 1:07:28 | |
He signed off on everything. | 1:07:28 | 1:07:30 | |
Well, he wouldn't have signed much coming here. | 1:07:34 | 1:07:38 | |
These people, I don't think. | 1:07:39 | 1:07:43 | |
I see this as a battlefield, you see, | 1:08:03 | 1:08:06 | |
because at the beginning of the first war in 1914, | 1:08:06 | 1:08:10 | |
there were these big battles and the soil was full of blood. | 1:08:10 | 1:08:16 | |
There have been so many killings going on. | 1:08:24 | 1:08:28 | |
The annual commemoration of Otto von Wachter's Waffen SS Galicia division, | 1:09:14 | 1:09:19 | |
created by him in 1943, | 1:09:19 | 1:09:21 | |
includes a ceremony to rebury newly discovered remains | 1:09:21 | 1:09:25 | |
of German and Ukrainian soldiers who fell in the fields near this chapel. | 1:09:25 | 1:09:29 | |
IN UKRAINIAN | 1:09:53 | 1:09:56 | |
WOMAN TRANSLATING IN ENGLISH | 1:10:03 | 1:10:05 | |
So am I right in thinking the historical role of the division | 1:10:10 | 1:10:13 | |
remains important today in modern Ukraine? | 1:10:13 | 1:10:17 | |
We hear Putin say that Ukraine is full of the fascists and Nazis. | 1:10:30 | 1:10:36 | |
Why are you wearing this swastika? | 1:10:46 | 1:10:48 | |
WOMAN TRANSLATING IN ENGLISH | 1:10:50 | 1:10:51 | |
-Now? -Now, yes, he used this. | 1:11:19 | 1:11:22 | |
19th of February. | 1:11:25 | 1:11:28 | |
19th of February. | 1:11:28 | 1:11:29 | |
-Yes. -You don't feel if you have... wear this helmet, | 1:11:29 | 1:11:33 | |
you don't feel like a German soldier in the memory of the SS? | 1:11:33 | 1:11:37 | |
You don't feel ashamed knowing exactly what happened under the swastika? | 1:11:37 | 1:11:43 | |
IN UKRAINIAN | 1:11:43 | 1:11:46 | |
Did he ever see Otto von Wachter speak? | 1:12:15 | 1:12:19 | |
IN UKRAINIAN | 1:12:19 | 1:12:21 | |
If he was to meet the son of Wachter, | 1:12:26 | 1:12:28 | |
what would he say to the son of Wachter? | 1:12:28 | 1:12:30 | |
WOMAN TRANSLATING IN UKRAINIAN | 1:12:30 | 1:12:33 | |
So can I present him to the son of... | 1:12:48 | 1:12:51 | |
Horst von Wachter. | 1:12:54 | 1:12:56 | |
Well, I must say this day was the best day for me | 1:12:57 | 1:13:01 | |
because so many people wanted to shake my hands | 1:13:01 | 1:13:05 | |
because of my father, | 1:13:05 | 1:13:08 | |
and saying he was a decent man | 1:13:08 | 1:13:10 | |
and that's all what I want, nothing else. | 1:13:10 | 1:13:15 | |
How you would like to introduce yourself beyond your name? | 1:13:20 | 1:13:23 | |
For sure he is an apologist for the actions of his father. | 1:13:35 | 1:13:38 | |
What still have in mind, maybe also in his heart | 1:13:39 | 1:13:45 | |
is a picture of a wonderful man | 1:13:45 | 1:13:48 | |
who tried the best for the Ukrainians, | 1:13:48 | 1:13:52 | |
and it's just a lie. | 1:13:52 | 1:13:54 | |
He is not accepting that his father | 1:13:57 | 1:14:01 | |
was involved in mass murder. | 1:14:01 | 1:14:06 | |
He should know better. | 1:14:06 | 1:14:08 | |
I really despise him like my father. | 1:14:08 | 1:14:11 | |
In my opinion, Horst will become a new Nazi in the end. | 1:14:14 | 1:14:19 | |
That is serious. | 1:14:19 | 1:14:21 | |
Not so serious because he's an old man like me, | 1:14:21 | 1:14:25 | |
so he can't do... | 1:14:25 | 1:14:28 | |
only some damage around with his friends and so... | 1:14:28 | 1:14:32 | |
But not in the... Really not in the public, | 1:14:32 | 1:14:35 | |
but I don't know exactly if they started also in Austria | 1:14:35 | 1:14:39 | |
to invite him for public events, | 1:14:39 | 1:14:42 | |
delivering a speech, showing the pictures. | 1:14:42 | 1:14:45 | |
This, the Austrians really would like. | 1:14:45 | 1:14:48 | |
How far does Horst have to go | 1:14:48 | 1:14:51 | |
for you to say I can no longer have a relationship with this man? | 1:14:51 | 1:14:56 | |
I think it's nothing left, | 1:14:58 | 1:15:00 | |
just my decision and I give him a last... | 1:15:00 | 1:15:05 | |
email to say that's not... | 1:15:05 | 1:15:08 | |
For me, not endurable any more. | 1:15:08 | 1:15:11 | |
Do you... Do you think Horst is a Nazi? | 1:15:11 | 1:15:15 | |
Yes. | 1:15:15 | 1:15:16 | |
Now I would admit he is really a Nazi. | 1:15:16 | 1:15:20 | |
Well, I think that Nik... is an egotistic maniac. | 1:15:20 | 1:15:26 | |
He's just focused on his father, you know, | 1:15:26 | 1:15:29 | |
and he makes his father most criminal being on Earth and so on. | 1:15:29 | 1:15:35 | |
But it's because it's his father. | 1:15:35 | 1:15:38 | |
It's only because it's his father, | 1:15:38 | 1:15:41 | |
otherwise he wouldn't do this, you know. | 1:15:41 | 1:15:43 | |
For me, his life is practically annihilated by his father. | 1:15:43 | 1:15:49 | |
When my father fled in 1945, | 1:15:56 | 1:16:01 | |
he went with the last members of his government, | 1:16:01 | 1:16:04 | |
his adjutant and his secretary and the cook to this house. | 1:16:04 | 1:16:10 | |
There he was arrested, | 1:16:11 | 1:16:13 | |
the last room on the right-hand side was his so called Andachtsraum. | 1:16:13 | 1:16:21 | |
His religious room or something like this, | 1:16:21 | 1:16:23 | |
and there he had hanged all the paintings, | 1:16:23 | 1:16:26 | |
this Leonardo Da Vinci, | 1:16:26 | 1:16:28 | |
two Rembrandts, one Raphael, | 1:16:28 | 1:16:30 | |
they are the most famous four. | 1:16:30 | 1:16:32 | |
I found it all my life, I found it very crazy | 1:16:33 | 1:16:37 | |
that my father was sitting in this small house in the end waiting | 1:16:37 | 1:16:41 | |
to be arrested from the Americans, and there were American soldiers | 1:16:41 | 1:16:47 | |
who some days before had liberated camp of the... | 1:16:47 | 1:16:51 | |
Dachau concentration camp outside, | 1:16:51 | 1:16:54 | |
have seen all the corpses | 1:16:54 | 1:16:56 | |
and they have heard | 1:16:56 | 1:17:02 | |
that the Butcher of Poland, which was his nickname all his life... | 1:17:02 | 1:17:05 | |
The butcher? | 1:17:05 | 1:17:06 | |
The Butcher of Poland... | 1:17:06 | 1:17:08 | |
was arriving and they have beaten him up heavily | 1:17:08 | 1:17:13 | |
so he tried twice to commit suicide, | 1:17:13 | 1:17:16 | |
but he didn't succeed. | 1:17:16 | 1:17:18 | |
He was brought to a hospital and then prison and then it was over. | 1:17:18 | 1:17:25 | |
He wrote in a letter... | 1:17:25 | 1:17:28 | |
to us, whenever we came, we should go over to this little chapel | 1:17:28 | 1:17:33 | |
to pray for him. | 1:17:33 | 1:17:35 | |
I never did it. | 1:17:37 | 1:17:39 | |
Does it ever make you want to cry though | 1:17:41 | 1:17:43 | |
when you come back to a place like this? | 1:17:43 | 1:17:45 | |
No, never. | 1:17:45 | 1:17:47 | |
-You've never cried about him? -No. | 1:17:47 | 1:17:50 | |
Does that not seem... Does that not seem strange, he was your father? | 1:17:50 | 1:17:55 | |
He wasn't my father. | 1:17:55 | 1:17:57 | |
He was your father. | 1:17:57 | 1:17:58 | |
Biologically, but not... | 1:17:58 | 1:18:01 | |
So in the real trial, like it was in Nuremberg, | 1:18:13 | 1:18:17 | |
I don't think that my father would have been condemned... | 1:18:17 | 1:18:21 | |
I don't think so because... | 1:18:24 | 1:18:28 | |
who would have speak... Spoken up against him? | 1:18:28 | 1:18:32 | |
Maybe it would only be...Jews, | 1:18:32 | 1:18:37 | |
because of the Holocaust, | 1:18:37 | 1:18:39 | |
but the SS took all things which concerning Jews on their side. | 1:18:39 | 1:18:45 | |
Horst's father Otto von Wachter was indicted for mass murder | 1:18:47 | 1:18:50 | |
but died in 1949 under the protection of the Vatican. | 1:18:50 | 1:18:53 | |
He was never tried and that allows Horst to take refuge | 1:18:53 | 1:18:58 | |
in his own long view of history. | 1:18:58 | 1:19:00 | |
This is my grandfather, | 1:19:00 | 1:19:02 | |
Joseph von Wachter, | 1:19:02 | 1:19:04 | |
General of the Imperial Army in the first war. | 1:19:04 | 1:19:09 | |
Two times he prevented the Russian Army | 1:19:09 | 1:19:13 | |
to break through the Austrian lines in Galicia | 1:19:13 | 1:19:16 | |
where we've been around Zolkiew. | 1:19:16 | 1:19:19 | |
My father expressly wrote that he wants to continue | 1:19:19 | 1:19:23 | |
what my grandfather did there | 1:19:23 | 1:19:26 | |
and he chose at the moment he... | 1:19:26 | 1:19:28 | |
He knew that he was going to Galicia, | 1:19:28 | 1:19:31 | |
my father chose his coat of arm as a crusade order, | 1:19:31 | 1:19:36 | |
so this fighting crusade mentality is somewhere in the family. | 1:19:36 | 1:19:41 | |
The man who built this castle was a crusader | 1:19:45 | 1:19:48 | |
connected with the Templars. | 1:19:48 | 1:19:50 | |
And the ground plan corresponds to the temple in Jerusalem. | 1:19:53 | 1:19:59 | |
I feel like a descendant of Aaron. | 1:19:59 | 1:20:03 | |
I read the definition of a Jew - | 1:20:03 | 1:20:06 | |
a Jew is somebody who makes service in the temple. | 1:20:06 | 1:20:10 | |
And then I said I would be a real Jew here. | 1:20:12 | 1:20:16 | |
There's an image from the Krakow ghetto footage | 1:20:24 | 1:20:26 | |
that I can't get out of my mind. | 1:20:26 | 1:20:28 | |
You see a little girl, she's wearing a beautiful red dress | 1:20:50 | 1:20:53 | |
and I look at that girl and I think of my own children. | 1:20:53 | 1:20:56 | |
I think of my own family, I think of my grandfather's family | 1:20:56 | 1:20:59 | |
and I imagine if he had been in that ghetto he wouldn't have left | 1:20:59 | 1:21:03 | |
and I wouldn't be here today. | 1:21:03 | 1:21:04 | |
We're all prone to feelings of group loyalty, | 1:21:11 | 1:21:13 | |
a sort of tribal instinct that lumps people together. | 1:21:13 | 1:21:16 | |
We tend to see people as victim or perpetrator, as us or them. | 1:21:16 | 1:21:21 | |
I understand that tribal instinct and indeed I feel it myself | 1:21:25 | 1:21:29 | |
when I see that girl in the red dress. | 1:21:29 | 1:21:31 | |
But as a lawyer I've learnt to mistrust being swayed by such feelings, | 1:21:33 | 1:21:38 | |
to try to avoid a tribal instinct when it comes to dealing with issues of justice. | 1:21:38 | 1:21:42 | |
That's one of the reasons we have courts. | 1:21:42 | 1:21:45 | |
That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury | 1:21:47 | 1:21:52 | |
stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies | 1:21:52 | 1:21:57 | |
to the judgment of the law | 1:21:57 | 1:21:59 | |
is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason. | 1:21:59 | 1:22:04 | |
IN GERMAN | 1:22:05 | 1:22:08 | |
But it is also true that Frank was a willing | 1:22:32 | 1:22:36 | |
and knowing participant in the use of terrorism in Poland | 1:22:36 | 1:22:41 | |
which led to the death by starvation | 1:22:41 | 1:22:43 | |
of over a million Poles | 1:22:43 | 1:22:45 | |
and in a programme involving the murder of at least three million Jews. | 1:22:45 | 1:22:51 | |
Frank didn't kill anybody personally, | 1:22:53 | 1:22:55 | |
yet the Nuremberg judgment was unequivocal | 1:22:55 | 1:22:58 | |
in finding him guilty of the murder of four million individuals. | 1:22:58 | 1:23:01 | |
It's called command responsibility. | 1:23:01 | 1:23:03 | |
I don't think that Horst is a Nazi, | 1:23:05 | 1:23:07 | |
but he's completely wrong about his father | 1:23:07 | 1:23:09 | |
who was a senior Nazi leader. | 1:23:09 | 1:23:12 | |
And if he'd been apprehended and tried, | 1:23:12 | 1:23:15 | |
he would certainly have suffered the same fate as Hans Frank. | 1:23:15 | 1:23:18 | |
Otto von Wachter's name is on the order authorising the construction | 1:23:19 | 1:23:23 | |
of the Krakow ghetto, game over. | 1:23:23 | 1:23:26 | |
Intention, having a decent character, as Horst puts it, | 1:23:26 | 1:23:29 | |
are totally irrelevant. | 1:23:29 | 1:23:31 | |
Nuremberg was the first time that the political leaders of a state | 1:23:31 | 1:23:35 | |
were hauled up in front of an international court of law. | 1:23:35 | 1:23:38 | |
Churchill wanted them to be lined up and shot, | 1:23:38 | 1:23:41 | |
but President Roosevelt preferred that a court should dispense justice | 1:23:41 | 1:23:45 | |
and justice is what Hans Frank got. | 1:23:45 | 1:23:47 | |
It's the only room in the world | 1:24:15 | 1:24:17 | |
where I'm a little bit nearer to my father. | 1:24:17 | 1:24:21 | |
Sitting here... | 1:24:22 | 1:24:24 | |
..and thinking of being him. | 1:24:26 | 1:24:30 | |
For about a year to be in here, | 1:24:32 | 1:24:36 | |
coming from a big castle, driving a big Mercedes. | 1:24:36 | 1:24:41 | |
Having a lot of uniforms and suddenly he's sitting here. | 1:24:42 | 1:24:47 | |
There's an open toilet with a small table. | 1:24:47 | 1:24:50 | |
With a small bed, nothing else. | 1:24:51 | 1:24:55 | |
There is right now in me a little kind of pity. | 1:24:59 | 1:25:04 | |
Yeah, here he sits. | 1:25:05 | 1:25:07 | |
Maybe it's the same place to us. | 1:25:08 | 1:25:11 | |
So it's a momentary feeling of pity, | 1:25:11 | 1:25:15 | |
is it amplified today, the anniversary of his execution? | 1:25:15 | 1:25:20 | |
No, it's not a special day of the 16th. | 1:25:21 | 1:25:24 | |
Around this time he was already dead. | 1:25:25 | 1:25:29 | |
In a lot of hours, shortly after 1:00 in the morning | 1:25:30 | 1:25:33 | |
they got him and... | 1:25:33 | 1:25:37 | |
the funny thing about when they caught... | 1:25:37 | 1:25:43 | |
Took my father to the gallows, | 1:25:43 | 1:25:45 | |
when they opened the door, | 1:25:45 | 1:25:48 | |
my father was kneeling like this. | 1:25:48 | 1:25:52 | |
And he said to the priest, | 1:25:54 | 1:25:56 | |
"Father, my mother... When I was a boy, my mother used to | 1:25:56 | 1:26:02 | |
"give me the cross every morning when I was leaving for school. | 1:26:02 | 1:26:06 | |
"Please do this also now." | 1:26:06 | 1:26:10 | |
And I think this catholic priest was very, very much enjoyed | 1:26:11 | 1:26:15 | |
and he did it. From behind, you have all these people | 1:26:15 | 1:26:19 | |
and he was kneeling here | 1:26:19 | 1:26:20 | |
and I used to say that's a ham actor's exercise. | 1:26:20 | 1:26:26 | |
Jesus Christ personally has shown himself to my father... | 1:26:36 | 1:26:41 | |
..and so maybe... | 1:26:43 | 1:26:45 | |
Maybe he... And it wasn't a ham actor's... | 1:26:46 | 1:26:51 | |
decision to do this, maybe it's really in those moments | 1:26:51 | 1:26:54 | |
very near to the gallows, very near to the death... | 1:26:54 | 1:26:58 | |
I am now about 30 years older than him so he was very young, | 1:26:58 | 1:27:02 | |
he was 46 years, and you know | 1:27:02 | 1:27:05 | |
you will not survive the 16th of October, | 1:27:05 | 1:27:09 | |
and maybe it was really an honest... | 1:27:09 | 1:27:16 | |
the only and last honest thing he did. | 1:27:16 | 1:27:19 | |
He wanted to go back to being an innocent child again. | 1:27:19 | 1:27:24 | |
What he was when his mother | 1:27:25 | 1:27:28 | |
makes the sign of God on his brain. | 1:27:28 | 1:27:31 | |
Maybe, the first time I think about it, | 1:27:31 | 1:27:34 | |
I think he wanted to be a little boy again | 1:27:34 | 1:27:38 | |
and having done nothing of all those crimes. | 1:27:38 | 1:27:42 | |
What a last stand. | 1:28:21 | 1:28:23 | |
Ah, it's a happy room for me, and for the world, I would say. | 1:28:35 | 1:28:39 | |
And then he's sitting here doing this and that and he starts like... | 1:28:48 | 1:28:52 | |
Maybe he was thinking, why I didn't stop it. | 1:28:56 | 1:29:02 | |
Why? | 1:29:02 | 1:29:04 |