CONFESSIONS OF A GERMAN SOLDIER

From man of the cloth to man of war, this film traces the life history of Dietrich Karsten, a rebellious anti-Nazi priest, hounded by the Gestapo in the 1930s, who curiously went on to fight in the German Army. Along with his granddaughter Lena and British historian Gabriel Fawcett we follow in Karsten's footsteps across Europe to Russia where he died in 1942 in order to gain some understanding of the motivations behind Karsten's transformation from priest to soldier. Prompted by Lena's discovery of a bundle of personal letters from Karsten to his family, the film tells of his struggles as a pastor in the subversive 'confessional church' and his later engagement in a morally questionable war. We learn of his faith in god and his seemingly incongruous urge to fight alongside his fellow soldiers. While Karsten's story is told largely in his own words through the letters he wrote, his granddaughter's perspective links it directly to the present day as we are prompted to question once again why people in the Third Reich were prepared to lay down their lives.

"My grandfather was dutiful, dynamic and brave. These virtues made him a tenacious Christian, but when his government blocked that, these same qualities made him a good soldier for Hitler's forces of annihilation. It is part of Dietrich's story that his virtues helped him along the path to destruction rather than salvation. I am left wondering. Are men like my grandfather not more guilty, those moral figures in German society who completely failed to act beyond their orders? Or am I to think if Hitler could have made even people with so much moral courage and clear-sightedness complicit in his genocide, how frighteningly easy it all was." – Lena Karsten