The Decent One Review

Perhaps no historical event has been as often cinematically documented as World War II.  Each year, new narrative features and documentaries release with new points of view, new stories, and new horrors.  Though many decades have passed, there are still new tragedies to unearth, new truths to be told, and new voices to hear.  With The Decent One, Vanessa Lapa allows us to hear from a source most of us would shudder to listen to: SS head Heinrich Himmler.

The Decent One is a stunning historical document, derived from a private collection of Himmler's letters and diaries that were recovered from a safe after the war.  Thus, as we hear the words read aloud (beautifully delivered by a cast of fine actors), we become intimate with a monstrous man, and though the film's title suggests there may be a glimmer of compassion within him, quite the opposite proves true.  Here is a man who puts his devotion to his nation above all else; the Fatherland calls for his time, his passion, his attention, and as a result, he all but vanishes from family life.  Himmler believes in his calling, in the work that the Nazis were doing, despite a knowledge that history would be kind to them.  He only hopes they are remembered as having committed their acts in a decent way.

The letters are a bounty of historical insight.  Rather than merely taking us behind enemy lines, The Decent One takes us behind the enemy's mind.  Writing to loved ones with no intention of ever allowing the letters to be more widely read, Himmler has no filter, dispensing with fervent nationalism, boiling hate, and violent homophobia, and all with an air of moral superiority.  When his parents request help in aiding wrongfully criminalized friends and neighbors, Himmler responds that justice must be upheld.  Even his love letters, some of the most fascinating to hear, are tinged with a love that is greater than any romance, or lust: a complete sacrifice of self for the good of the country.

The horrors of war, and the irony - even hypocrisy - of the Nazi agenda are cast in sharp relief.  The Decent One is an impressive collection of historical footage, with an era-appropriate soundtrack created to accompany the varied images.  Himmler's homophobic rants are juxtaposed with supremely homoerotic footage of soldiers training in skimpy clothing, their perfect bodies both the Aryan ideal and a mark of homosexual desire.  Himmler's desire to be remembered as a decent man is read over images of the aftermath of the concentration camps: corpses being removed and survivors' emaciated bodies.  It becomes clear, from his own boyhood journals (during the first World War) and his observations of youth during World War II, that war of any kind is a war on childhood, as innocence is either lost or criticized for remaining intact.  The yearning to go to war as a child surely reveals some twisted aspect of Himmler's psyche, the desire manifesting in unimaginable horrors in his military career.

What makes The Decent One carve our its own place in the broad pantheon of World War II films is that it's showing a rarely-used perspective - that of the perpetrator - and it's allowing that party to speak for itself.  Most of these films are tales of suffering and survival, heroic acts in the face of immense terror.  Victims and survivors and rescuers are the subjects we naturally gravitate to, wanting to champion them, to mourn them, to feel for them, to boil in anger at the atrocities committed against them.

To hear Himmler's thoughts, his desires, his anger, casts the events in a disturbing light.  Here is a man who was evil to the core, whose humanity was tainted by prejudice and hate - qualities which, one could argue, are defining characteristics of being human.  The Decent One is practically an autobiography, but one that Himmler didn't mean for us to read.  We the audience become voyeurs of evil, reading over the shoulder of a historical villain.  But even as we hear his words and pierce his mind, we are never sympathetic, nor do we ever understand him, not in the deep, keen way other character-driven documentaries allow.

For Lapa mindfully pairs the images and words, creating an even greater since of disgust, beyond what merely reading the letters might stir up.  By clearly seeing Himmler's black soul, we are reminded that there is goodness in the world, because we cannot relate. We can only gasp at the depths of his crime and remember those he wronged.