Making the rounds of having possibly too much World War 2 features, this particular program focuses on a relatively recent trial of Oskar Gröning, who served, as the title suggests, as a book-keeper in the famous German death camp in Poland with the SS.

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The trial took place a few years ago when a then 93-year old Oskar finally had war crimes charges brought against him. Unlike previous trials, Oskar did not deny being involved and was quite straight-forward in his testimony, even at the expense of sounding cruel and guilty by saying things such as "The children, they're not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood inside them." Keep in mind that this was a statement made about the Nazi ideology in the 40's, and was not a reflection of his current feeling. However, it was probably not a great thing to say and can easily be used against a person.

I have one big problem with this special that in my mind make it very skippable. They don't really have much of a story here and that is evidenced in the fact that nearly 1/3 of the entire 1 hour special is dedicated to the story of John Demjanjuk, who was another SS operative that stood trial for warcrimes in Israel and later Germany. This person has nothing to do with Oscar. They never met - it is filler - nothing more. They also focus really heavily on the opinions of random people who were not necessarily tied to the case.

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_{a photo of 23-year old Oskar Gröning}

The special raises a couple of interesting questions about involvement in military operations and there are no good answers unfortunately.

• At what point does a person who is following orders and is in no way the architect of the objectives of said operations become guilty of war crimes?
• If you were to refuse the orders of your superiors, what would happen to you? While there are no records of SS soldiers being severely punished (or executed) for refusing to obey orders this is either because no solider ever refused orders or because (and I feel this is more likely) these actions were hidden by the Nazis and the "dissidents" were not severely punished in order to prevent a sympathetic backlash among fellow soldiers.
• Should a person who was at minimum complicit in murder be severely punished 70 years after the events took place?

After watching this special I'm afraid there doesn't seem to be any real conclusion, especially when people are calling for a life sentence for a 93-year old man.

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I watch these things because I am a bit of a World War 2 history buff, but to be honest, this is one of the least watchable specials that Netflix has on the topic (and I feel as though they have been releasing entirely too many of these.)

As the library of "good stuff to watch on Netflix" seems to dwindle as time goes by, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to add this to the stack of stuff that I wish I hadn't bothered to see. Basically, the end result is that Oscar was convicted of some relatively minor stuff and never saw a single day on the inside of a jail cell. Sorry for the spoiler, but this is one hour that i think you could spend on really anything else and it would be a better use of your time. This is especially true if you have already seen The Devil Next Door in which case you have already watched 20 minutes of this documentary.

My overall rating?