I always seem to tire of documentaries about the Second World War, no matter how often I see the same grainy, black and white footage. It's not that I expect to learn a lot: I suspect I already know about as much about everything from the blitzkrieg to the Holocaust and Hiroshima as I am ever likely to need.
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Rather, it's the further away it all gets, the more personal it increasingly becomes. My father, who died a while ago, was in the navy throughout the war; my mother, now 88, was a Wren. These events were/are not history to them; they were/are the formative events that shaped and scarred their lives. And therefore indirectly mine. To understand their experience is to make sense of my own and keep us close.
In Germany that process is infinitely more fraught; especially if your parents or grandparents were Nazi war criminals. Hitler's Children (BBC2) told the story of five of them – Bettina Goering, Niklas Frank, Rainer Hoess, Monika Goeth and Katrin Himmler – in a quite exceptional hour of film-making that kept delivering emotional impact to the very end. How do you live with the knowledge that your own flesh and blood were responsible for some of the worst war crimes of the 20th century? Our five did so with a lot of guilt and shame; but quite remarkable dignity and a total absence of self-pity.
For Bettina, the solution has been to hide away in the New Mexico desert for the past 35 years, and for she and her brother to have themselves sterilized. "It's right that the bloodline should end with us," she said. Rainer was fixated by photographs of his father playing as a child in the idyllic walled garden next to Auschwitz, where his grandfather was commandant of the death camp. It was the wrought-iron gate that disturbed him most: "What had my father seen through it?" he wondered. Monika had spent years thinking about just how many people her father had killed. Katrin's desire to publicly acknowledge her feelings of guilt had cost her the intimacy of her surviving relatives, who wanted to forget about the war.