Boris Kurbanov, Special to The Jewish Sound
Chilling and utterly compelling, Vanessa Lapa’s new documentary “The Decent One” uses narrated excerpts from a cache of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler’s letters and diaries — including those of his wife, Marga, his parents, mistress and even daughter Gudrun — to illustrate Himmler’s ascent from a lonely, lower middle-class childhood to a power-wielding Nazi lieutenant who mercilessly ran Adolf Hitler’s SS and became the architect of the Nazi extermination policy and death camps.
After reading Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf,” Himmler became a fervent follower and joined the growing Nazi Party in 1923. Ten years later, after coming to power, Hitler asked the “Faithful Heinrich” to draw up the blueprint for Dachau, one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazis.
The story begins on May 6, 1945, when U.S. troops took control of Himmler’s home in the Bavarian Alps and confiscated a collection of writings, photographs and other material belonging to his family. Ignoring orders, they did not hand the material over to the U.S. government.
The Israeli director Lapa, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, jumped on the opportunity when Himmler’s letters resurfaced in Israel in early 2014. (The letters’ existence was no secret; the collection originally surfaced in Israel in the early 1980s, but failed to gain much public attention.) Lapa’s father purchased them with the intention of having Lapa tell a story visually. And she did, though in unusual form, choosing to forgo narration, eyewitness accounts or interviews with historians and talking heads. Instead, she decided to create a film that is both a Himmler biography and a history of Nazism, weaving snippets of Weimar Germany through World War I and through Hitler’s rise to power, and offset by archival photos and newsreel footage with actors reading the letters. Lapa took home the Best Israeli Documentary Award at this summer’s Jerusalem Film Festival.
The letters depict a man whose jovial mood is often at odds with one of humanity’s worst crimes, which he helped orchestrate. Himmler ranges from the mundane — remarking on everyday expenditures and vacation plans — to downright chilling, waxing about “undesirables” and “subhumans” in Europe. “Poor sweetie, has to tussle with those wretched Jews over money,” he wrote to his Marga in April 1928.
Himmler, who killed himself while in British custody in 1945 by swallowing a cyanide pill, was a nationalist through and through and saw himself as the “strong, silent type,” writing in 1928 that he was “toughened up through 10 years of battle.” Marga stood by her man as he climbed the Nazi ladder, even as he spent more and more time away during the war. She desperately wanted to be done with “this Jew business” and just “enjoy our lives,” describing her husband as “an evil man with a tough and rough heart,” but also writing, “I am so lucky to have such an evil good man, who loves his evil wife as much as she loves him.”
While punctuated with bigotry and anti-Semitism, not one of the nearly 700 back-and-forth letters makes any reference to the Holocaust, though Himmler does conclude some with sign-offs such as “I am traveling to Auschwitz. Kisses, your Heini.” Though he will stop at nothing to make “uncle Adolf” happy, Himmler repeats he wants to be seen as the decent sort throughout much of the film, which inspired Lapa’s title.
Himmler is anything but “decent” — his moral obliviousness leads Lapa to dissect and use his own words and rants through a decade’s worth of anti-Semitic letters to establish both his knowledge and responsibility in masterminding the Holocaust. But while Lapa does a great job underscoring the disconnect between Himmler’s simple domestic life and his supervision of the death camp that saw more than 1.2 million people slaughtered, the story fails to generate many “ah ha” moments.
Was Himmler remorseful for his actions at all, or was it simply convenient for him to sweep that he was a knowing accomplice to systematic murder under the rug? Lapa makes no such speculations, unfortunately. Himmler seems less than banal. He doesn’t come across as a crazy war criminal who will stop at nothing to achieve the Final Solution; instead, he seems almost trivial.
If anything, Lapa moves Himmler up the evil scale. By focusing on his frequent use of “decent,” if becomes clear that Himmler just wants to be seen as decent with the backdrop of the mass slayings.
“To call the movie ‘The Decent One’ is reflecting the complete perversion and twisted morality of this man,” Lapa told NPR. “Because, for him, to kill in a decent way is a decent act.”
“The Decent One” is not an easy film to watch. But like most works of this genre, Lapa helps dismiss Himmler’s terrifying prediction he made in 1943: That the systematic murder of Jews was “a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.”