Can You Still Love Your Father If He Was a High-Ranking Nazi?

Niklas Frank can only remember one instance of affection from his father, Hans Frank, when he was a small boy and his father dabbed a bit of shaving cream on his nose. The rest of his childhood memories are of the war, his parents' wrecked marriage, and his father's demanding career as Hitler's personal lawyer and governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland.

Horst von Wächter's father, Otto von Wächter, was also a high-ranking Nazi politician. He had been one of Hans Frank's deputies, governor of Krakow and then Galicia under Nazi rule. But when Horst remembers his childhood, he thinks of time spent in their Austrian lakehouse and a father who he admired. It's not that Horst is a Nazi sympathizer, or Holocaust denier—he just refuses to see his father as a man who had a hand in mass murder. To him, Otto von Wächter was a decent man. A "good Nazi."

Decades later, their stories converge in a new documentary,What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy. They're brought together by Philippe Sands, an international lawyer who met Horst and Niklas while researching a book on international criminal law, and who has his own Holocaust legacy: His grandfather, a Ukrainian Jew, was the only one of his 80-person family to survive. Together, the three of them travel through Europe to confront their pasts.

This month marks the 70-year anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which gave an impartial judgment of the Nazi's war crimes during World War II. Hans Frank was tried and executed during the tribunal; Otto von Wächter sought refuge in the Vatican, where he later died.

The film calls into question how we can impartially judge those who are close to us and how our memories and our view of justice can be clouded by the complications of flesh and blood. We spoke to the film's director David Evans about how the film came together, the unexpected emotions that arose from it, and the way two men are dealing with their fathers' horrible pasts.

VICE: You've mostly directed television dramas. Why make a film like this?
David Evans: The truth is, my path into this film was an entirely personal one. Philippe had a relationship with Niklas and Horst a long time before he ever mentioned them to me. When he did mention them to me, he was literally saying, "I really can't believe the stories these guys have to say about their parents." I think he told me the thing about Nik keeping the photograph of the hanged body of his father in his pocket. He just was so obsessed with Niklas, who he knew better than Horst at that time.

Essentially, he said, "I really think we should film these guys," basically meaning for posterity. Like, someone needs to have on record what these men say about their fathers. And they're not young men, so we should do it now. It could've easily been something we picked up and put down in conversation, but it didn't happen that way. When we started filming, about two years ago, it really was just me and two other guys in a van getting out by the side of the lake in Bavaria, and Nik, Horst, and Philippe getting out of a car on the other end, and we met in the middle and started filming. We had no idea what was going to happen.

It seems clear why Niklas would want to participate in the film—he's disavowed his Nazi heritage. But why Horst?
We knew that there was a difference between Niklas and Horst. We knew that Niklas really, to an enormous extreme, trashed his father's name, in public. In 1987, he published his book [In the Shadow of the Reich], which is really one long diatribe against his father. So that was well-known, and it was also well-known that Niklas was the only member of that generation of children of Nazis to be so extreme, so violent in his hatred of his parents. Some of the other children had gone on the record—there's a very good film by an Israeli director called Hitler's Children, which has other members of the same generation, including Nik. So we knew Nick's position pretty clearly.

Horst, like most people whose families were heavily involved in the Nazi regime, had chosen to stay silent. Horst never sought a public platform to make the kind of statement that he ends up making in our film; he was ushered onto the public stage, by me and Philippe. So there was a genuine moment of discovery for Horst when he was challenged to make the same kind of statements about his father that Niklas makes, and Horst found that he was unable—or unwilling—to do it.

Did you know the extent to which Horst would defend his father?
That question implies that Horst knew his own mind to a greater degree than I think he did. As we continued making the film over a period of about 18 months, Horst became much more resolute and much more entrenched in his position. He became so indignant, so resolute in defending his father's name. So not only did we not know that there would end up being such a belligerent confrontation between the two men, but I'm certain that Niklas and Philippe didn't know either, and I'm certain that Horst didn't expect the relationship to take that turn either.

There's a scene where Philippe is moderating a public debate between Niklas and Horst—they're debating the way they view their fathers—and it's clear that this is the first time Horst has been directly confronted about his father's violent past. It's pretty agonizing.
Did you feel sorry for Horst?

Maybe a little. It was definitely painful to watch.
Horst is so… he's so empathic. Horst has that air of vulnerability about him that you see in the film. So before you know it, your feelings start getting very confused about where your sympathies actually lie between these two men.

When he's challenged [in the debate], Horst says something like, "I don't really care what you think. The reason I'm on this stage is I feel it's my duty as a son to defend my father's reputation." That's the beginning of seeing that he's incredibly flinty. We always imagined that the film we were making might have its climax at that point. We thought something would happen where Nik would shout at Horst, and Philippe would present him calmly with lots of documented evidence, and Horst would crumble and weep and say, "You're right. It's terrible. I feel so guilty." We were wrong. That's just not the way Horst's character works. He's not an apologist to the Nazis or a Holocaust denier, but he's still saying it was possible that there were good men who were senior Nazis.

Did you intend for it to play like a character study, rather than a film about history or even really about Nazis?
There was no point in trying to make this a film that was mostly about the Holocaust, because the films that have already been made have been so authoritative and there's nothing we could really do to add to them. It's perfectly legitimate to assume that nobody who's coming to this film is going to be ignorant of what the Holocaust is. So that was a big decision. Is it a character study? I'm not sure. What the film is for me is about the relationship between memory, justice, and love. The way that when you think about the people you love—or think you should love—suddenly you can't have the impartiality that advocates strive for in a courtroom. There you see Philippe, a highly professional international lawyer, incapable of maintaining his legalistic disinterest. He can't help but throw himself in there and care. As soon as you start to care, you can't really look to justice in quite the same way.

As well as being this rather agonizing journey of self-examination, it's also the story of a Jewish lawyer who's also trying to capture memories and find a meaningful relationship with a lost generation that he only had this one slender connection with via his grandfather, with whom he never discussed this. So for me, is it a character study? Yeah, but it feels like a character study like Hamlet is a character study. I hope the strength of the film is to make you think about the way one's own judgment is clouded, how easy it is to judge the wrongdoings of people the further the distance is from your own circumstances.

Philippe's own family history also plays very heavily into the film in some parts.
Yes, it does. Whenever I watch screenings of the film, I'm still struck by what, in drama terms, we'd call the "blocking"—the way the men move around each other in a space. When they're at the gravesite, it really feels to me like Horst and Niklas are magnetized to Philippe in some way, as if this man can help them find some sort of way of dealing with a shadow that otherwise eludes them. That only works because Philippe is right in there with him. As soon as you have that dispassionate voice in the calm of the dubbing studio—rather than Philippe standing there, shouting at Horst because he won't listen to him when Philippe's presenting him with these damning documents—that's where the movie lies. It's a three-way relationship. Philippe shouldn't be out of the film, telling you what to think; there are only relative values here.

What do you want viewers to take away from this film?
There is no message. My own learning process about making the documentary was really realizing that watching a film, and engaging with a film fully, is about imagination. Empathy, putting yourself in the place of other people, and feeling scenarios that, god-willing, you'll never experience. I mean, how utterly terrible to have people like these as your parents. Here, you can go along a sympathetic path to try to work out why these guys are the way they are, and that's really what a film should be.

What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy will be released in select theaters November 6.

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