The Humanity of the Nazis.

By Anthony D’Ambrosio

I couldn’t understand him.

One of the things I’ve been reflecting on when we filmed in Poland has been the humanity of the Nazis.

When I wrote this script, I didn’t understand Karl Fritzsch, the man who condemned Kolbe and the other ten men to die in a starvation chamber, and the man who invented Auschwitz’s gas chamber. All I knew was that he had a family - three children and a wife. And that within a year of his time there, he had lost his family through divorce.

These were hints that didn’t come together for me until the first day we met the actor who was playing him.

First Hand Experience

In a little historically preserved polish cottage in the countryside, all ten prisoners and the actor playing Karl Fritzsch came together and met for the first time for a table reading. The reading was so powerful that it ended with these ten strangers hysterical weeping together for a long while, and Chris (Karl) sitting silently in the corner.

A profound method actor, he was finding something in his character even then. When someone asked him what he was feeling, after a long pause, he said he felt envy of the dying men who were able to experience such a powerful belonging… the sadness in him was palpable.

While filming his scenes the following day I realized, as with everyone, how much his own personal relationships were at the heart of his decisions. The thing he couldn’t allow himself to be vulnerable to was the thing he wanted the most—Love.

Family Life

We filmed a tender scene between him and his son, where after doing some boxing training with him, he teaches his son to be strong—playing chess together and saluting each other. It became so clear to me this shared humanity we all have can lead any of us to a hell of our own making. His ideology of power and resentment and invulnerability leads him to kill and inflict unimaginable horror; but it also leads him to hurt his own children and to fail as a father… ultimately dooming his own family and home.

Kolbe’s vulnerability leads him to forge a new family and a new brotherhood in that cell. Even in death and suffering, he embraced and was embraced by others who had once been strangers. Fritzsch’s ideology turned family into strangers—and in the end, he died alone.

Triumph of the Heart Coming To Theaters
In September 2025

Forgiveness

I meditated with the crew on forgiveness that day, and on how our resentments could lead us to become perpetrators. It’s the act of loving our enemies that turns them into friends.

I want to follow Kolbe in his extremes of love, and view the Nazis with compassionate forgiveness, knowing how easily I could be twisted into their bent fate if I were to let my own resentments curdle inside of me.