Like many other descendants of Holocaust victims, Philippe Sands wanted to find out more about the circumstances of their deaths. The lawyer and academic, author of Lawless World and Torture Team, travelled to the Ukrainian city of Lviv in 2010, where his grandfather was born in 1904. “He never wanted to talk about it,” Sands told me, referring to the deaths of 80 members of his family. “I went back wanting to fill the gaps.” While he was there, he heard about Hans Frank, a senior Nazi in Ukraine found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946. Sands met Frank’s son Niklas, a journalist who wrote a “remarkable book” in 1987 excoriating his own father’s actions. Niklas introduced him to Horst von Wächter, whose father was a Nazi who had worked with Hans Frank. Horst, however, had a more forgiving attitude towards his father.

Read the article “My Nazi Legacy: A Film about Guilt and Memory” on prospectmagazine.co.uk.