A Holocaust survivor whose biopic documentary has led to an investigation into an elderly woman alleged to be a member of the SS has revealed that his intention was only to reach out and reconcile with the woman who guarded him in Belsen concentration camp.

Tomi Reichental’s story Close to Evil has prompted German federal prosecutors to question 93-year-old Hilde Michnia about her alleged role as an SS guard at Belsen. She is also suspected of forcing prisoners on an evacuation/death march in 1945 on which 1,400 women perished.

But Reichental, who lives in Dublin, told the Guardian this week that he took part in the Irish documentary directed by Gerry Gregg principally to seek out some sign of atonement from Michnia. Reichental said he even wanted to shake the hand of his jailer in the Nazi camp if they ever met.

In the film Reichental, Gregg and a German television producer contact Michnia at her home near Hamburg but she declines to meet the former Jewish child prisoner who was sent to Belsen at the age of nine.

93-year-old German woman suspected of being Belsen SS guard Read more

“In my film Close to Evil I reached out to reconcile with one of my jailers in Bergen-Belsen. I started out being open to the idea that the SS guard Hilde Lisiewitz (later Michnia) must be a different person to the young woman that was convicted of war crimes in 1945.

“I was prepared to meet Hilde, who had been a perpetrator and who I thought had seen the light and changed her values. I was prepared to reconcile with her and shake her hand, because in my naive thinking she was also a victim of her own time.

“That I did not meet Hilde was not the big letdown but rather the fact that Hilde is still stuck in the 1940s, this is what disappointed me.”

He continued: “As Jews we have a tradition of atonement, it is a rich and noble concept. I am not a rabbi, nor am I a very observant Jew. But I am a product of my background and for me I understand atonement as a person’s effort to acquire a new heart and a new spirit.

“Atonement as I see it is about repentance and reparation. Hilde had no interest in any of this. By her action of not meeting, in denying the murder of inmates in Bergen-Belsen, she has chosen to justify and distort her own role during the Third Reich.”

Hamburg social worker Hans-Jürgen Brennecke confirmed that he had filed charges through the federal prosecutor after seeing the RTÉ documentary in the German city of Luneberg in January this year. He approached Gregg at the screening of the film in a local cinema as part of events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

“After the screening, Hans-Jürgen Brennecke, a man whose father was also a Nazi criminal and who speaks about him honestly in our film, sent a letter to the German state prosecutors outlining why Hilde Michnia still has a case to answer. That letter has now had a response and Michnia is being investigated,” Gregg said.

A Slovakian Jew, Tomi Reichental lost 35 members of his wider family circle in Nazi concentration camps. He was one of the minority of Slovak Jews to survive the Shoah: 80% of the country’s Jewish population was murdered during the second world war.

However, while filming across Germany and Slovakia relatives of senior SS officers – including those of Hans Ludin, one of Hitler’s inner circle and a convicted war criminal – contacted Reichental. Ludin signed off the deportations of Slovakia’s Jews, including Reichental’s family.

As the documentary progressed last year Reichental developed a warm friendship with Ludin’s granddaughter Alexandra Senfft. She belongs to a group in Germany of descendants of SS and senior Nazi functionaries who are seeking to come to terms with the wartime sins of their fathers and grandfathers. They had learned in the German media in 2014 that Reichental was travelling across Europe filming about his life’s journey from Belsen to the leafy suburbs of south Dublin.

“Embracing Alexandra Senfft, the granddaughter of the Nazi war criminal Hans Ludin who was implicated in sending 35 members of my family to death in the gas chambers, was not an act of forgiveness. Instead it was an embrace of a ‘kindred spirit’. Alexandra sought me out in order to demonstrate our common humanity. She wants to proclaim the truth and urge people not to forget. My mission is the same, we must remember. She now has also met my brother, she is now a good friend and a new member of our larger family.”

In the film there is a poignant scene where Reichental agrees to go with Senftt to the spot in Bratislava where her grandfather was buried after being hanged for war crimes in December 1947.

The full documentary can be seen at Close to Evil.