Debt of Love

The reality the conscientious objector Roman is confrontend with at an old-age home is something he has previously been spared: suffering, frailty, death. He has to take care of "General" Kulat, an old Wehrmacht officer, a fanatic militarist. Their confrontation becomes war.

When the busses left, the nurse said to the children, 'Today you have to pray a lot, because today you go up the chimney and meet the good Lord.' The children of the area knew these vehicles and said, 'Look, there is another one of these killer busses.' And they said to one another, ' You are not very clever, you, too, are going to end up in the oven in Hartheim, you, too, will be hung up in the chimney.' Hartheim Castle near Linz was one of several places of destruction of 'unworthy life' within the framework of the euthanasia program of National Socialism. Over 30,000 mentally or physically handicapped, psychiatric patients and inmates of concentration camps were gassed in Hartheim between 1940 and 1945. Today Hartheim Castle is rented and inhabited. In a place where 40 years ago thousands if lives were destroyed by industrial methods, today life asserts itself in the trite daily function of living. The documentation is about Hartheim Castle, in the past and in the present.

Based on the testimonies of 4 survivors, a powerful documentary on the treatment inflicted on Soviet war prisoners, suspected of betrayal by the Stalinist regime. An exceptional word that pays homage to hundred of thousands of forgotten victims.

When Johanna's blind grandmother Ruth tells her the secret about their Jewish past, the “sleeping dogs” of the family history awake.