In his essay film Shadow of a Doubt, Rolf Orthel – who married into a Jewish family, his mother-in-law survived the camps – probes what this means to him, as he goes in search of the past. “I tried to imagine how it was for those people, both prisoners and guards," he said in a 1975 interview with the NRC Handelsblad newspaper. To comprehend how on earth someone could participate in unprecedented mass murder, Orthel enters into candid discussions with SS veterans who were in Auschwitz during the war. These are not the top-level war criminals, but ‘ordinary’ men who often ended up there, rather than choosing this path.

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