Director: Vanessa Lapa (2015)

This tightly-focused documentary portrait of high-ranking Nazi Heinrich Himmler is all the more gripping for being told in his own mundane words.

It is based on documents belonging to Himmler, his wife Margarete, daughter Gudrun and mistress Hedwig. Their diaries and letters were controversially not handed over to the post-war military authorities but kept hidden for years.

Actors to bring a voice to their words while personal photographs and home-movies provide visual insight.

Tracing Himmler’s life from birth, we’re taken through Himmler’s comfortable middle-class upbringing to his high-ranking Nazi career and eventual capture and suicide at the end of the Second World War.

He was a sickly child and a ‘B’ grade school pupil. His casual anti-semitism and support for a militarised Germany were evident at an early age.

Between the wars at university in Munich, he joins an exclusive Apollo fraternity. They discuss degeneracy in society, the dangers posed by homosexuality and the ‘Jewish question’. He reads Oscar Wilde which puts him in a terrible mood.

An unprepossessing, balding man in round glasses, he is a natural, accomplished bureaucrat and quickly rises in the burgeoning Nazi party.

As Germany goes to war, he rises to the head of the SS and we’re provided with a contrast between the careerists comfortable life and the deadly consequences of his work.

He is supported and encouraged by Margarete and he describes her anti-semitism as charming. She takes great pride in his success and both enjoy the material benefits of his labour.

Beginning as flirtatious love-letters, the focus of their writing changes to the dull routines of his work and her domestic organisation. Their very ordinary concerns and casual bigotry puts the horror of his actions into sharp relief.

In the summer of 1942 he instigates the Final Solution, the systematic extermination of all Jews in German territory. As he father’s a child with his mistress Hedwig, he’s also exploring ways of sterilising all Jewish women.

The director (a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors) manipulates the material to create a well-paced and intelligent work with a strong narrative thread.

The film assumes an audience’s basic knowledge of twentieth century German history and politics. We see footage of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 but we’re not told the significance of the event or even have described to us what we’re seeing.

Aeroplanes fly in swastika formation and there are book burning rallies. Hitler lurks mostly off-stage and is referred to as ‘the boss’.

As we hear Himmler’s thoughts on homosexuality, we treated to images of squads of healthy semi-naked german beefcakes exercising in the open air. It’s a small touch of humour and possibly the film’s last before it covers the war years. The tacit suggestion is perhaps Himmler protests too much.

There is horrific footage of the concentration camps with naked cadavers thrown into trucks by survivors. With no remorse from Margarete or Gudrun, the postscript is as eye-opening as anything else we witness.

★★★★☆