Actor David Thewlis prepared to play a concentration camp commander in his latest movie by reading the memoirs of a real life Nazi.
The Harry Potter actor struggled to understand how his character in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas could be so evil, until he immersed himself in the writings of Rudolf Hoffs, who ruled at Poland's notorious Auschwitz camp, where as many as 1.1 million Jews were murdered.
Thewlis reveals, "(I prepared) by believing such a man could exist, which I arrived at through reading the memoirs of Rudolf Hoffs, a commander at Auschwitz, who was ordered to write his autobiography in between his trial and execution. It's an amazing insight into the mind of a man such as I'm playing."