Those Who Come After by Stephen Frosh

Author:Stephen Frosh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030148539
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Solidarity

The question of Nazi fatherhood mentioned by Bohleber recurs in Philippe Sands’ (2015) film, called in the UK My Nazi Legacy and in America What Our Fathers Did, which contrasts two different responses, refracted through a third ‘witness’ who himself has a great deal to say. The film is concerned with two Nazi war criminals: Hans Frank, who as Governor-General of Poland was directly responsible for the destruction of the Jews there, and Otto von Wächter, from January 1942 to July 1944 Governor of Galicia and Frank’s deputy. Frank was hanged at Nuremberg; von Wächter, protected by the Vatican, slipped away to Rome where he died in July 1949. Or rather, the film is concerned with the sons of these two men, both of whom were born in 1939 and so were too young to be implicated in their father’s crimes, yet each of them, in different ways, caught up in them. Frank’s son Niklas, a well-known German journalist, is renowned for his condemnation of his father, a standpoint that came to very public notice with the publication in 1987 of his book, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A Settling of Accounts – translated into English in 1991 as In the Shadow of the Reich). Von Wächter’s son Horst, on the other hand, wriggles out of this: he is troubled, it is clear, he sees what was done, but his own father, he thinks, was fundamentally a good man who had no real choice; one has to understand, resistance to the Nazi decrees was not easy, even for a Nazi.

In an interview I had with Sands in July 2015, Sands described what he thinks happened to him during the making of the film. In the first half, which takes us up to a public staging of a conversation between Sands, Niklas and Horst at the Purcell Room in London in December 2013, Sands stood back, avoiding consciously taking sides between the two men. But at the end of this discussion, Sands told me, ‘Horst suddenly said, “my father is venerated in the Ukraine.”’ That, for Sands, was the moment things changed, a ‘very crucial moment.’ It resulted in a trip to the Ukraine for Sands and the two men to observe the annual celebration of the Waffen-SS Galicia Division and to visit Lviv (Lemberg) together. In a powerful scene, the three men are filmed in the old Jan Kazimierz University. Sands takes them back to a meeting held there in August 1942 involving both their fathers, at which Hans Frank gave a speech announcing the implementation of the ‘final solution’ in Galicia. Unexpectedly, and unscripted, Niklas mounts the rostrum, takes out of his pocket a translation of his father’s speech, and reads from it. He notes that Frank had addressed Horst’s father approvingly and joked about how he was making the Jews disappear. ‘And you are still pretending that you didn’t find anything which would accuse your father of being involved in this,’ Niklas says to Horst. ‘Something happened

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