Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer review — three brothers investigate their father’s secret life

There isn’t exactly a shortage of documentaries about the Nazis’ persecution and mass murder of Jewish people. This is as it should be.

The world should never be allowed to forget what happened, especially at a point in history when fascism is on the rise again across the world and studies show that two-thirds of adults aged between 18 and 39 in America — a country in serious danger of sleepwalking into dictatorship — are shockingly ignorant about the scale and even the time period of the Holocaust.

And yet, there has been far too little emphasis on the many Jews who engaged in armed resistance against the dark forces of Hitler and his Third Reich.

The most prominent treatment of the subject we’ve seen so far is Quentin Tarantino’s abysmal Inglourious Basterds, an idiotic alt-history Jewish revenge fantasy made by a Gentile filmmaker (although he subsequently married a Jewish woman) who seems incapable of growing out of a prolonged adolescence.

Danny Ben-Moshe’s documentary Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer (BBC4, Tuesday, January 23, 10pm) shines more serious light on an overlooked chapter of history through the story of one man, the late Boris Green, possibly a secret Nazi hunter.

Boris’s life before and during World War II is unambiguous. Born in Lithuania, he fled his home city of Vilnius in 1941 and joined a group of Jewish partisans attached to the Russian army.

Bori’s brother Fima also joined the partisans and, as research during filming revealed, was a noted explosives expert who specialised in blowing up Nazi transport trains.

Boris fought Germans, but also collaborators from Ukraine and his own country, in the forests of Belarus, sniping from the branches of snow-covered trees.

Boris’s partisan group was called ‘Nekoma’, the Yiddish and Hebrew word for ‘revenge’.

In the years after the war, Boris and Fima settled in Melbourne, where Boris opened a jewellery and camera shop.

He made a new, quiet life for himself, marrying and raising three sons, Jon, Sam and Jack, the youngest, born when Boris was 53.

Boris seemed every inch the contented citizen, who considered his new home country a kind of paradise (who wouldn’t when they’ve lost most of their family to the gas chambers or guns of the Nazis?) and was devoted to his wife and sons.

As is often the case with the youngest in a family, Jack, a doctor, grew up with the mellower version of his father.

He’d always regarded Boris as a calm man. Home videos of him at family weddings, bar mitzvahs and Holocaust memorials seem to bear out this image.

But Jon, a rabbi, and Sam knew a little different. There was a boiling anger inside Boris, which the eldest and middle brothers had sensed from picking up snatches of whispered conversations their father had with Fima and their old friends.

“There was a war going on after the war,” said Sam, who worked with Boris in the jewellery shop as youth.

The enemy was the same as before, even if they no longer wore Nazi uniforms and armbands.

In 1948, Britain and America, the joint leaders of the Allied forces that defeated Hitler, decided they would no longer pursue Nazi war criminals. Apart from Israel, Australia in the 1950s was the country with the highest per capita number of Holocaust survivors.

It also had an unusually large number of unrepentant Nazis, who’d flooded there in the late 1940s and early 50s.

The Australian authorities were fully aware of who and what these men were, yet chose to do nothing about them. But some people were determined to see justice done, by whatever means.

There had long been suspicions that Boris was the man who’d orchestrated the mysterious deaths of a number of Lithuanian Nazis in Sydney in the 1950s.

The documentary follows the brothers towards a moral reckoning with the possibility that their father was a killer, albeit one with the most righteous of motives.

It’s also a cracking detective story as John Garvey, a private eye they hire, burrows his way to the truth about Boris. A riveting 90 minutes.

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