Everybody´s Friend

A photograph, a toy locomotive, a press clipping. These are the fragments that launch one man's decades-long attempt to understand a figure who once seemed, to a child's eyes, entirely ordinary.

Auke Bert Pattist was a Dutch Waffen SS officer responsible for acts of persecution, torture, and murder in occupied Netherlands. Condemned to life imprisonment in 1948, he escaped within six months and made his way to Spain, settling in Oviedo, where he built a new life with remarkable ease. He became a businessman, a community figure, a man people liked. Polyglot, sociable, apparently open, he integrated into Asturian life so thoroughly that when his true past surfaced in 1978, many who knew him struggled to reconcile the person they had met with the man history recorded as the Executioner of Drenthe.

The Netherlands sought his extradition. Spain refused, twice, across two different political systems.

Directed by José Antonio Quirós, this Spanish documentary reconstructs Pattist's life through journalists, historians, and people who knew him personally, alongside archival documents and legal records. The result is a portrait built from contradictions, of a man who concealed everything and hid nothing, and of the political silence that allowed him to die unpunished in 2001.