Cornered at a public event and forced to answer for their conduct during the Holocaust, elderly German veterans of World War II frankly discuss their shocking experiences of murder, rape and abuse in the powerfully visceral documentary East of War. When Director Ruth Beckermann unexpectedly shows up to interview the former rank and file of Hitler’s army at a museum exhibit on war crimes, she explores their shame and opportunism, discovering a complicated legacy of guilt, denial and lingering fanaticism.

“It’s so dreadful, when somebody lies… when someone says he never heard anything,” laments a German infantry veteran. “People’s powers of repression are of course so great.”

The ground infantry forces for the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht played a part in most of Germany’s military campaigns during WWII. And while their culpability in the atrocities carried out against occupied populations during this period has often been overshadowed by the higher-profile and overtly-genocidal operations of the SS, East of War refuses to leave this stone unturned.

At worst, the Wehrmacht soldiers used to be seen as “just following orders” from the more bloodthirsty SS commanders. Many decades after the Holocaust, though, a traveling exhibit titled “War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941-44,” opened in Vienna – serving as an indictment of this group once perceived in post-war Germany and Austria as relatively “clean” of blame for Jewish liquidations, POW executions, and other war crimes.

Documentarian Beckerman seized this opportunity to stake out the exhibition with a camera for more than a month to capture the candid reactions of Reich veterans who came to view the accusations leveled against them.

Unencumbered by the stock footage or expert analysis typical of historical documentaries, the resulting film unspools as a powerfully direct series of emotionally unguarded interviews with the Wehrmacht veterans. Their often-contradictory remembrances of the war result in confrontations between one another that have the potent edge of direct cinema. To watch these arguments unfold is to bear witness to the long-buried truths of a generation still wrestling with the most destructive war in world history.

Dodging direct blame for the crimes against humanity involved in that war is a recurring theme among those interviewed in the film. One after another, these grandfathers and grandmothers plead to either not being present for the worst offenses (liquidating Kracow’s Jews), or denying knowledge of them altogether (summarily executing POWs).

By simply letting them prattle on with their variety of excuses without interruption, Beckermann subtly, but devastatingly, shows the effect that self-delusion can have upon perceptions of truth.

This is never more evident than when an elderly woman pines for the “idealistic” days of the Nazi regime and the “sense of family” it instilled in Germans who bought into it. Convinced that the war with Russia was one of differing political ideologies, and where Jews were equal to enemy Bolsheviks, she prides herself on a long life spent raising her children with “proper ideas.”

One woman from that younger post-war generation, who grew up hearing all these excuses and distortions, finally can take no more and wearily holds forth on her frustrations.

“Naturally, nobody will admit they were involved, but that’s the real crime. To repress it all and transmit to the younger generation only what you want to know about yourself. And the rest is never talked about. The younger generation has a right to know what happened.”

The Wehrmacht exhibit provokes heated debates among the veterans. When one extols his belief that not only was the German invasion of Russia a preemptive strike to avoid a Communist sneak attack, but that any atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht were only revenge for those done unto them, he is harshly taken to task by fellow vets.

“If you still support it today,” rages one of them, “you must have been a criminal then!”

“Look, it’s like this,” says another. “The war was a war of aggression on Hitler’s part. A war of extermination.”

If nothing else East of War provides us with a fascinating range of often-disturbing voices and divisive views from a quickly disappearing generation. Just how much truth we choose to glean from these views is left to each one of us to decide for ourselves.