The BBC' Kevin Hay reported today that a short film almost 70 years old may have proved the guilt of a suspected Nazi. The film was found at the Cullompton Baptist Church back in 2006, and turned out to be a home movie featuring senior SS officers.

Dr Harry Bennett, associate professor of modern history at Plymouth University, has identified the main figure in the film as SS officer Walter Gieseke, a Nazi in charge of building a 1,000-mile road across Ukraine that cost tens of thousands of slave labourers their lives.

Dr Bennett says that the film made in 1943 shows the building of a road which became known as The Street of the SS. "Death rates were high amongst the Russian and Ukrainian workers, but almost all of the Jews were murdered. They were worked to the point of exhaustion, forced to dig pits by the side of the road, and then they were machine-gunned to death. This was an extermination programme." said Dr. Bennett. One man who was forced to work on the road was a Jewish artist named Arnold Daghani. He managed to escape, carrying with him sketches and paintings he had made, which he hoped would serve as testimony to the atrocities he had witnessed. Daghani fought for a long time to bring Gieseke to justice.
He escaped artist died in 1985 with the accused Nazi, a self proclaimed "pen pusher", never being proven guilty. This film could be the much needed evidence as well as the proof that once in a while film can stop evil as well as bring meaning to the life of a tortured man.