Suddenly there are other images, like they were wrongly copied over from the making-of.
They break with the usual style and show the child actors who mimic concentration camp prisoners in the docudrama "Nazi Hunter" for a moment in their everyday clothes while inspecting the film set or with the make-up artist who shaves their hair for their roles.
The simple cut knocks you out. The emotional protective cloak that we tried to put on as viewers of the film no longer fits. "The children are getting closer to us, could be our children, could be the ones who are being taken away from us, who are being mistreated, destroyed." This is how director Raymond Ley, who wrote "Nazijäger. Journey into Darkness" together with his wife Hannah also edited the script by Dirk Eisfeld.
The story of the twenty Jewish children who were abused for human experiments in the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg and murdered on April 20, 1945 is ghastly enough without the effect.
In the film, it is mainly told from the point of view of the British "War Crimes Investigation Unit", which started work after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 and consists mainly of Jewish emigrants such as Hanns Alexander (Robin Sondermann), Fred Pelican (Konstantin Lindhorst ), Vera Atkins (Hannah Ley) and Anton Walter Freud (Franz Hartwig), a grandson of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund.
"It's not a crime to follow orders"
A group visibly agitated and disgusted by the experience. She finds the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß, who is hiding as a farm worker and can be identified by his wedding ring. She arrested the entrepreneur Bruno Tesch, who supplied Auschwitz with the Zyklon B pesticide. And the camp commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer, is also being interrogated one day, where he tries to excuse himself, just as poorly as the other two: "It's not a crime to follow orders." On this tour. The statements of the interrogated, which are based on sources such as the interrogation reports of the British or the memories of Atkins, are reproduced in detail by "Nazijäger", and that is certainly a balancing act. As a suitable counterbalance, there are the reactions of the investigators,historical evidence (e.g. the corpses from Bergen-Belsen), reports from survivors or a camera that follows a group of visitors from today into one of the gas chambers of Auschwitz: walls full of scratch marks.
With the interrogation of the commandant of Neuengamme, Max Pauly, the plot arrives at the actual subject of the film, previously only hinted at in the intro: the medical experiments that were carried out on twenty Jewish children in Neuengamme. We get to know little Sergio de Simone from Naples (Emil Denev), who has to say goodbye to his cousins Andra and Tatiana Bucci (Mila Denev, Ava Skuratowski) in Auschwitz: "Who of you wants to go to your mom?" The train is leaving not to mom. He takes the seven-year-old with other children to Neuengamme, where he is infected by mildly smiling doctors with tuberculosis bacteria and finally murdered on April 20, 1945 in a former school building on Bullenhuser Damm in Hamburg.
"Nazi Hunters" also describes the interrogation of the perpetrators by stunned investigators like Anton Walter Freud. But as concrete as the suffering of the victims becomes through the film, not least their murder, in which the children were hung “on hooks in the wall like pictures” – the production remains as vague when it comes to the question of how the end of the perpetrators was. Some were brought before a military court, which can be seen briefly. But it could at least have been superimposed: The commandant of Neuengamme, Max Pauly, the garrison doctor Alfred Trzebinski and the deputy camp commander in Bullenhuser Damm, Johann Frahm, were sentenced to death by the British and hanged in October 1946. The doctor responsible for the experiments, Kurt Heissmeyer (this is the strangely uncommented scene with the document box from the beginning) lived in the GDR until 1963.He was not sentenced to life imprisonment until 1966 and died a year later.
The docudrama "Nazi Hunters" is well worth seeing, which wants to focus on the victims and therefore ends in a scene in which the child actors meet the two Auschwitz survivors Andra and Tatiana Bucci, the women who share their memories with us throughout the film would have made such hints even better.
Nazi hunter. Journey into Darkness
runs this Sunday at 9:45 p.m. on the first.
The ARD media library has a longer three-part version.