THE elderly German who opened the door of the ''Hansel and Gretel'' house in picturesque Heidelberg looked innocuous.

''A really tall guy with an abnormally sized head,'' recalls Australian documentary filmmaker Philippe Mora. ''And a St Bernard dog, complete with that little rum barrel round its neck.''

War stories... Phillipe Mora, left, in 1973 and with Marcel Marceau, centre, who worked alongside Mora's father in the French Resistance.

Yet this innocent-looking man was a Nazi war criminal - Adolf Hitler's architect and armaments minister Albert Speer, sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment at the Nuremberg war trials.

''I was taken aback when he opened the door himself,'' the acclaimed French-born Melbourne director and painter explains on the phone from his home in Los Angeles.