To all intents and purposes, it was a morality-free zone

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Films of 2021

=#17 : Getting Away With Murder(s)

David Nicholas Wilkinson’s epic investigation into the Nazis who escaped a postwar reckoning is a powerful call for Holocaust justice, but lays out the difficulty of prosecuting a technocratic atrocity.

10/06/22
Another one I can't find - and this one is so well hidden, I couldn't even find somewhere where I could pay to watch it.  Which I might have been tempted to do - so I'll keep my eye out for it and hopefully come back to this at a later date.

02/02/23
Well - I wasn't expecting this to happen!  I was randomly watching Travel Man (which I find educational and amusing - a fine combination) and whilst fast forwarding through the adverts, I stopped just before it restarted to catch the announcer saying (in an oddly jaunty voice) "starting tonight on Channel 4, Getting Away With Murder(s)!".  The Travel Man episode was several weeks old, but fortunately All4 came to my rescue (there's a LOAD of stuff on there), so I got to fill in one of my blanks!

I wasn't expecting it to be a massive bundle of laughs, but any film that starts with drone shots of Auschwitz really isn't pulling any punches.  And it tells us that 8,000 people worked there, which immediately brings home, as The Guardian puts it "the difficulty of prosecuting a technocratic atrocity".  The first 15 minutes goes over the Auschwitz procedures, which are as horrific as ever, but they're (hopefully) reasonably well known by people these days so there is a sense of retreading old ground.  

We then move on to the Nuremberg trials, which I knew less about and it was fascinating to hear from Benjamin Ferencz, who was a lawyer at the trials and is remarkably sprightly considering he's approaching 103 (although he was probably only 101 when the interview took place) - it's also interesting to see the original footage of him from 1946/7.  Apparently one of his cross-examination sessions went as follows

"Did you order the killing of 90,000 Jews?"
"No"
"But did you do sign this document saying you did?"
"Yes"
"So why did you answer No?"
"Some of the numbers are wrong - it was closer to 60 or 70,000"

And basically, we spend the rest of the film following David Wilkinson as he travels around various sites of either historical or contemporary relevance to his argument.  He does an awful lot of travelling throughout the documentary and wherever he ends up, he goes on a very slow walk - it's definitely his trademark.

There is a somewhat unfortunate section where someone who has done an awful lot of research identifying potential suspects who escaped to the UK travels around the country explaining where these people lived and what they were suspected of doing - and in every case, he ends the section with "and now, he's dead".

There was also a very dark twisted tale about a gay Austrian (where homosexuality was illegal at the time) who was outed, tried, found guilty and sent to Auschwitz.  He survived long enough to see the end of the war when he was liberated by the Allies and returned home to Austria.  Where the judge who had previously sentenced him arrested him again because he hadn't served out his sentence and so back into prison he went.

It is a very thorough film (he spent three years making it), but essentially it boils down to "lots of bad things happened and most of the people involved saw no repercussions". It gives plenty of examples, offers various reasons why it happened and makes several arguments for more trials (of varying validity) but unfortunately the killer argument seems to be "it's just too hard and costly, particularly given the numbers involved".  And, unfortunately, nothing the documentary presents really manages to counter that argument because it really is very tricky, expensive and there were so many people involved, most of whom are now dead.

At nearly three hours long, it's not a casual watch and the length is to be commended for the amount of research undertaken - but I can't help but feel it would scare off some potential viewers.  David Wilkinson is a serious presenter, which is what something like this needs, but I'd struggle to say he's overly engaging.  Which is also unfortunately true for the film as a whole,  There are a lot of interesting (and horrific) points within but as a whole there's a lot of repetition - yes, there's an argument that the film is being thorough and presenting all the evidence, but basically it comes down to the fact that Nazis were not nice people and a lot of them got away with it.  And yes, I wasn't quite aware of the scale of the latter, but I must say the former wasn't exactly news to me.  All in all, it's an admirable film, but only interesting in places - and it really could have done with quite a bit of pruning.

And, having now got to the end of the list for 2021, I've no idea why this was =#17 or why the "best 50" list had 51 entries on it.  Seems like a bit of an odd thing for The Guardian to do, but you think I'd have seen enough oddness from them to be used to it by now.

At the time of writing (for the second time), it's available to watch on All4, but I suspect it won't be there for long.  I can't say I'd wholeheartedly recommend it - those people who would be interested in it will probably know most of it already and it's a bit of a slog for the rest of us.

#18 - A great film featuring incredible footage
=#17 - A good looking film, but not much else