Death Is My Trade

Though the fundamental sincerity of Death Is My Trade is unchallengeable, one gags on it nevertheless. With explicative chapter headings and a visual texture so grainily sepia as to make the film look as if it's being projected on sandpaper, Kotulla traces the gradual transformation of an earnest young World War I hero into the commandant at Auschwitz, mulling over plans to step up the 'output' in the crematoria and finally confessing to his baffled American captor that he is 'physically incapable' of disobeying an order. But that arresting admission only exposes the film's inadequacy: the intimate contingency of the holocaust on an individual (or national) psyche is cited rather than dramatised, and we are confronted yet again with the obscene aping of concentration camp victims by bony old extras in striped pyjamas.