Final Account And The Notion Of The Common Man

The opening line of Final Account is a quote from Primo Levy’s book If This is A Man: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” The notion of the common man is explored throughout Final Account, as it is he who allowed the atrocities of the Holocaust to occur. Millions of Jews were systematically murdered by members of the SS, and the common German citizen who was willing to act on or sympathize and agree with Nazi genocidal ideologies. It is essential for the understanding of the Holocaust to analyze stories from those who were alive during the Holocaust via first-hand accounts of perpetrators in the Final

Final Account fits that narrative perfectly, since in order to prevent something like this from happening ever again, it must first be understood why the people of Germany were complicit in the crimes of the Holocaust. This film is also more relevant than ever due to a rise of extremist movements across the world. As Producer John Battsek explains, “The film’s transcendent power is that it speaks just as much to our generation.” The message being that it is important to understand why the Holocaust was possible and to bring that understanding of human nature to actively denounce the rhetoric of future extremist movements to avoid complicity. It was important to make this film according to Luke Holland, who created it, because there are a lot of myths and a lack of understanding of the role of the ordinary German during the Holocaust. There is this misunderstanding that the German public didn’t know what was going on during the Holocaust, which isn’t the case. As we see in the Final Account it was nearly impossible for people not to comprehend the violence that was perpetrated towards the Jews. The film’s intimate quality allows the viewer to sympathize with the interviewee and begin to somewhat understand why they did what they did. What one must understand is that the people involved were not monsters but human beings, and that they are human beings afterwards as well. That is probably the most terrifying truth that is revealed in the Final