Heike Geschonneck

In Our Nazi, we are plunged into a situation we barely, and only slowly, understand: the filming of Thomas Harlan’s experimental feature Wundkanal (1984), in which true-life ex-SS officer Alfred Filbert, now very old, is ‘put on trial’ for the camera, without him suspecting what is to come or why he is really there. Kramer’s confronting film is an essay about the sticky complicity of everyone present at this event, each bringing their own history, their own political ideology, their own desires to take revenge, to seek redemption or compassion, or just to put their heads down and ‘get the job done’ professionally, or (in the case of Filbert) to be a star, a part of the magnificent, magical, seductive world of cinema, even if it kills him.

An old man is kidnapped. His interrogation uncovers the biography of a mass murderer: The 80 years old man was a SS leader and responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Russia. He also "invented" an evil technique of eliminating political prisoners: the manipulated suicide. Thomas Harlan reconstructs the history of a bureaucratic murderer, he also develops a direct connection between the Nationalsocialism and the treatment of prisoners of the RAF terrorists in the Stuttgart isolation prison. Robert Kramer filmed the shooting of Harlan's Wundkanal: Notre Nazi documents a social experiment in which the children of Nazis and of victims meet a real culprit. The reality seems to be stronger that the fiction in Harlan's film. (Edition Filmmuseum)