GERMANY:PAUL HAFNER declaims proudly that he has never been sick a day in his life. His morning exercise routine of stretching and then swimming has kept his immune system strong and left the 84-year-old looking fit and trim.
But it soon becomes clear that Hafner is a very sick man indeed, when he raises his hand in the Hitler salute and terms the Holocaust "Allied propaganda".
Hafner is a former pig-breeder, an inventor and a playboy. But he is most proud of the four years he served as a member of the feared Waffen-SS.
He is the subject of a fascinating new documentary film, Hafner's Paradise, by Austrian director Günter Schwaiger.
The documentary, a sober attempt to examine why an old man remains an unapologetic Nazi, is doing the rounds of German film festivals and will be shown next week in the Bundestag in Berlin.
But it has come under attack from critics who call it a dangerous film apologia that gives a platform to a disturbed extremist.
From the beginning, it is clear that the director has a very fine line to tread with a subject who is clearly enjoying the attention.
The film follows Hafner through his daily routine: doing the stretching exercises in his underwear; dressing in front of a mirror singing Deutschland Über Alles; playing afternoon chess games with friends in a retirement home.
"I'm proud to be a German, a Super-German," he says, flicking through his yellowing copy of Mein Kampf. "I consider Adolf Hitler to be the most important figure in the history of mankind. No one was ever so reasonable."
Austrian-born Hafner was 20 when he joined the SS in February 1941. A photograph from the time shows a young man with smirking eyes and sneering lips sporting the SS uniform with the distinctive collar.
In the last months of the war, he experienced first-hand the death camp at Dachau, although Allied footage of gaunt inmates and piles of lifeless corpses has little apparent effect on him.
"I saw none of this," he says airily. "They were treated quite well, as I remember."
That facade remains firm even after meeting Dachau survivor Hans Landauer.
"I was starved for four years in Dachau," says Landauer, sitting with distaste on the edge of Hafner's sofa.
"But you're still alive at 85. What are you complaining about?" retorts Hafner with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Hafner fled Germany in the 1950s, escaping the deNazification process for Franco's Spain, where many former Nazis enjoyed respect and admiration until the dictator's death in 1975.
Critics in Austria have attacked the director for not making a greater effort to challenge Hafner's remarks.
Even Hafner, at one point, expresses amazement that the director allows him to say things that would result in his arrest at home.
But Schwaiger defends his decision to allow Hafner room to talk. For him, that decision is an act of rebellion against the reflex in Germany and Austria to present Nazis as caricatures.
"I assume that our society knows that the Nazis stand for terror and murder. If I had to be afraid of the population falling for the words of a Nazi, then that would mean the anti-fascist work of the last six decades had failed," he says.
Only a handful of authors have attempted to analyse the psychology of Nazi perpetrators, and they nearly always choose apparently repentant subjects - like Gitta Sereny's book on Albert Speer.
Schwaiger says his film is an attempt to fill a gap in the post-war narrative by attempting to analyse the mindset of the unrepentant Nazi.
For him, Hafner's reflective moments towards the end of the film represent a breakthrough.
The Austrian director is clearly continuing where the recent Hitler film Downfall left off. But unlike that fictional, conjectural film based on real-life past events, Hafner's Paradise is real and now.
It is disconcerting to see the smartly dressed pensioner strutting through his Madrid neighbourhood spouting Nazi maxims about honour and fatherland.
But it is even more startling when, after that, Hafner drops into his neighbourhood McDonald's, enjoying an apple pie as its contents trickle down his chin.
Schwaiger isn't the only director exploring the murky avenues of Austria's Nazi past.
The End of the Neubauer Project by Marcus Carney, a director born in the US but raised in Vienna, confronts the legacy of the director's grand-uncle Hermann Neubacher, the high-ranking Nazi mayor of Vienna from 1938 to 1940.
The two films provide a welcome antidote to the mind-numbing Nazi infotainment that usually fills television schedules, populated with sterile, one-dimensional bogeymen.
"Without wanting to excuse the Nazis," says Schwaiger, "I think Hafner shows how many were tragic figures too, completely gone astray in emotional and moral cul-de-sacs."
