2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

This film focuses on the family of a Nazi perpetrator sixty years after the end of the Second World War. Although the truth about the father′s role in the war has long been put on record, his widow, children and children′s children argue about the family history as if it were a secret that cannot be aired.

Hanns Elard Ludin – the filmmaker′s father – found fame as a young officer during the Weimar Republic after having conspired on Hitler′s behalf in the German army, or Reichswehr, as it was known at the time. When Hitler came to power, Ludin quickly rose to become a Nazi stormtrooper Obergruppenführer and, by the time he was twenty-eight, he had an army of no less than 300,000 stormtroopers under his command. Ludin enjoyed all the privileges of the Third Reich. In 1941, Hitler sent him as emissary to the Nazi′s vassal state, Slovakia. As "Plenipotentiary Minister of the German Reich", his mission was to push Berlin′s interests. Alongside the economic exploitation of this country as well as military cooperation, these interests included, in particular, the implementation of the Final Solution.

After the war, Hanns Ludin was handed over to the Czechoslovakian authorities by the Americans; he was sentenced to death by hanging and executed. Among other things, he was charged with having played a central role in the extermination of Slovakia′s Jewish population. Hanns Ludin′s youngest son, filmmaker Malte Ludin, takes these facts as a starting point for a documentary debate with the three generations of his large family, who now live all over the world. A highly emotional status report from the heart of a German family that is both personal and yet, at the same time, exemplary.

Source: 55. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)