Working with virgin material taken from the diaries and letters of Himmler and his family, Lapa tells the story of the SS-Reichsführer and Holocaust architect “in his own words”. Merging original photos and texts with contemporary found footage, Lapa deliberately (and sometimes confusingly) blurs the essentially factual with fictional structures, creating a portrait of a fond family man utterly unaware of his vicious inhumanity – whose daughter describes a 1941 (pre-Final Solution) outing to Dachau as a “wonderful trip to a large enterprise”.
The Decent One (Der Anständige) | Directed by Vanessa Lapa (Israel, Germany 2014) documentary.
Originally published in issue #130, September 2014.