Film Review: Love It Was Not

It always cheers me up to learn about someone ordered to do evil who does good instead.

But a Nazi SS officer at Auschwitz? Who would even believe that?

But “Love It Was Not” is a true story, a documentary about Franz Wunsch, a Nazi officer ordered to make sure the stream of prisoners to the crematorium at Birkenau never lacks for victims. 

It’s Wunsch’s birthday, and he’s just returned from herding the latest group from the train. But he wants someone to sing for him, so he asks and a young Slovakian prisoner named Helena Citron volunteers. She is not only beautiful, but has a lovely voice.

He’s no slouch in the looks department either, and there is as much of a spark between them as either can afford to betray. But he does his job, willingly beating male prisoners and visibly making life miserable for all while assigning Helena to the “cushier” job of working at Kanada, the storeroom for personal effects of the prisoners, rather than physical labor.

Of Helena’s family, only Helena and her younger sister survived the camp and lived to be freed, and that only because Wunsch intervened to save the sister while she was lined up for the ride to the crematorium.

The story is told through interviews with survivors, including Wunsch’s wife, who wrote Helena before Franz’s testimony at the Nuremberg trials, asking her to exonerate her husband. He was, in fact, the last Nazi to be tried there.

It’s a story of horror and kindness, unspeakable evil and unexpected good, during an awful time in human history. “Love It Was Not” should be seen by all – whether they are old enough to remember, or just seeing as history – so that perhaps the horror will never happen again.