On October 1, 75 years ago, the historic International Military Tribunal, in Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg, reached its conclusion. Originally there were 24 senior Nazis indicted on charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Only 21 appeared in court, however, as one committed suicide and another was excluded on grounds of infirmity. A third defendent, Martin Bormann, was tried in absentia.
When the judges delivered their verdict, they convicted 19 of the accused and acquitted three.
There was a thirst for justice, and 12 Allied successor trials — of doctors, teachers, death squad leaders — followed in a bid to show how a civilised nation had allowed itself to descend into barbarism by tolerating, accepting, and supporting unimaginable atrocities.
By the end of the 1950s, everyone serving time for convictions in these dozen trials had been released and allowed to melt back into society. Even before this injustice, the Nuremberg trials, and other trials that had taken place immediately after the end of the war, had merely scratched the surface of the crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. Despite an avowed determination to re-establish the rule of law and lead the world to a future where leaders feared the consequences of their actions, most Holocaust perpetrators were never even questioned, let alone convicted.
According to Mary Fulbrook, professor of German history at University College London, of the three-quarters to one million people involved in murdering Jewish civilians, 99 per cent were never brought to court at all. The number that were was “pretty pathetic”, she says in a major new documentary released today, Getting Away With Murder(s).
The film’s director and indefatigable driving force for 18 years, David Wilkinson, was troubled by the way that the quest for justice for the Jews petered out after Nuremberg, and worried that the message it sent helped to pave the way for other genocides, in the same way that inaction over the Armenian genocide had emboldened Hitler.
“I’ve always had this very strong sense of justice,” he says. “From very young, it’s the way I was brought up. So, I just began to wonder more and more about it.”
Wilkinson, who is married to the award-winning costume designer for The Crown, Amy Roberts, isn’t Jewish but grew up in Leeds where there was a strong and successful Jewish presence that had been fueled in part by people fleeing violence in Eastern Europe.
“My grandfather pressed trousers for Montague Burton [who came to Britain in 1900 to escape the pogroms in Russia] for 40 years. And Burton was born in Kaunas, which comes into my film because it [became] one of the Nazis’ killing fields.”
He says he didn’t see any antisemitism in his youth, but did witness racism through the daily experiences of his late brother, who was black. “I suppose I never thought antisemitism existed in the UK,” he tells me honestly in an email before our interview. He does now. In an incident which spurred him on to get Getting Away with Murder(s) done, Wilkinson became the victim of antisemitic abuse (he believes because of his beard, hat, and long black winter coat) when he was “attacked on a bus for what I was doing in Palestine”.
“It was just extraordinary to suffer that,” he says. What shocked him most was that no one intervened. “Nobody said anything. I always thought [people in] this country would do that. It’s something that we grew up to believe, that we stood up.”
In the documentary, as Wilkinson and Fulbrook look at some Stolpersteines outside a house - engraved brass cobblestones used to memorialise victims of the Holocaust — the latter wonders what people living nearby were doing as their innocent neighbours were seized. I don’t discuss the scene with the filmmaker, but there, on the bus, was arguably the answer: they looked away.
In a sense it reflects much of his experience with Getting Away With Murder(s). His late friend, the Jewish playwright Ronald Harwood, encouraged Wilkinson to make the film, but warned him that even when The Pianist, which he’d written, was made, there were people who had said, “‘Oh, not another Holocaust film.’ He said it changed with the Oscar nominations.”
While trying to raise money for the documentary, and more recently when he has been working on it as the distributor, Wilkinson has faced two recurring questions, he says. “One of them has been, ‘Do we really need another Holocaust film?’ As one TV executive put it to me, in a rather unfortunate use of words, ‘I really do think it has been done to death.’ The other one is rather sinister and it’s something that I’ve never been able to come to terms with, and it is those people who go, ‘David, do you really want to make this at this time, given what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians?’ That is extraordinary. You wouldn’t say it about any other group in the world. That’s only been a recent thing though, not the whole 18 years.”
He candidly reveals that some Jewish people he knows, including two directors, were “angry with me [for making the film] because I’m not Jewish, and I don’t have a vested interest in it.” He had already been filming “for quite a long time” when one of them confronted him at a social function, and asked, “Why are you doing this? You have no right.” Wilkinson claims his inquisitor named other Jewish directors and said, “We should be doing this.” He sighs. “All I could think of to say was I had thought of it and nobody else had done it. If they had, I wouldn’t have made it.”
He wanted to fund the film without any money from Jewish backers in order not to be accused of being part of the so-called “Spielberg lie” conspiracy that he’d stumbled on when he accidentally found himself on Holocaust denial websites while doing research, and hoped that not being Jewish would shield him from that. However, it wasn’t possible to raise the funds needed without it, and much came out of his and his wife’s pockets (“Thank goodness for The Crown”).
There is no doubting his sincerity, integrity or the effort he has put into Getting Away with Murder(s). With a running time of almost three hours, it is a wide-ranging, densely researched, hugely informative work, with a thick seam of righteous anger running through it.
Beginning in Auschwitz and ending with the image of a lone Star of David that fades to black — with excursions in between to killing sites in Lithuania, where writer-broadcaster Robin Lustig recalls the murder of his grandmother, who’d been refused asylum in the UK because, at 42, she was considered too old, and Latvia; UK towns where Nazi hunter Stephen Ankier had found war criminals living; Courtroom 600; memorials; Florida, for an interview with the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz; and other places — the film explores the reasons why so many Nazis got off scot free, enjoying long lives despite cutting so many short.
We’re told that before its closure in 1999, the Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit, at its height, was actively investigating 400 alleged Nazi war criminals residing in the UK. When it shut, the case files were stored away and sealed. Only one former Nazi, Anthony Sawoniuk, was ever prosecuted.
“I’d love to know what’s in those boxes,” he says. “People said to me, ‘Oh, David, you’re being unfair against the British government and the police.’ And I went, ‘If they had found that all these men they’d investigated were innocent, why would they seal the boxes? Why would finding all these people innocent and saying Britain wasn’t a haven for war criminals have to be a secret?’
“I like living in this country. I criticise it all the time because we, as a nation, we’re evolving all the time. But this was something that we could have done so much better, so much more honourably.” Wilkinson was still working on the film when the first lockdown happened. As the “figures were going up frighteningly”, he thought about his visit to Auschwitz and told himself, “No matter what happens to me, nothing is ever going to be as bad as it was for those people. This seems perverse, but for me it put everything into perspective.”
“I think anything you can ever know about mankind you can learn from the Holocaust. It’s all there. The people who saved people . . . that’s how we all want to be. But the worry is that all of us could quite easily become those SS officers. And I think that the Holocaust should make people realise what we’ve got and how good life can be. And we’ve just all got to get on together. And there’s not that much difference between us all.”
Getting away with Murder (s) is on at JW3 on October 3, and at selected cinemas from today
